How (and whether) to populate rails application with initial data

Question

I\'ve got a rails application where users have to log in. Therefore in order for the application to be usable, there must be one initial user in the system for the first pe

Answer 1

Some of the answers are outdated. Since Rails 2.3.4, there is a simple feature called Seed available in db/seed.rb :

#db/seed.rb
User.create( :name => 'default', :password => 'password' )
Comment.create( :title => 'Title', :body => 'First post!' )

It provides a new rake task that you can use after your migrations to load data :

rake db:seed

Seed.rb is a classic Ruby file, feel free to use any classic datastructure (array, hashes, etc.) and iterators to add your data :

["bryan", "bill", "tom"].each do |name|
  User.create(:name => name, :password => "password")
end

If you want to add data with UTF-8 characters (very common in French, Spanish, German, etc.), don't forget to add at the beginning of the file :

# ruby encoding: utf-8

This Railscast is a good introduction : http://railscasts.com/episodes/179-seed-data