Rails recommended way to add sample data

Question

I have a Rake script similar to below,but I am wondering if there is a more efficient way to do this, without having to drop the database, run all the migrations, reseed the

Answer 1

I would suggest making rake db:seed self sufficient. By which I mean, you should be able to run it multiple times without it doing any damage, while ensuring that whatever sample data you need loaded gets loaded.

So, for your researches, the db:seed task should do something like this:

User.destroy_all
10.times do
  researcher = User.new
  researcher.email = Faker::Internet.email
  researcher.save!
end

You can run this over and over and over and are ensured you will always end up with 10 random users.

I see this is for development. In that case, I wouldn't put it in db:seed as that might get run in production. But you can put it in a similar rake task that you can re-run as often as needed.