Ruby on Rails: loading seed data from a YAML file

Question

How do I use a YAML file instead of seeds.rb to load the initial data into a database?

Answer 1

I used the answer @Zaz answered. It works very well.

But in the meanwhile if something went wrong with your seed data(For example you have a very large seed yaml file), you would like to know which part of your yaml went wrong. At that time you can add a block after create! for debug like this:

seed_file = Rails.root.join('db', 'seeds', 'categories.yml')
config = YAML::load_file(seed_file)
counter = 0
Category.create!(config) do |c|
  puts "Create category #{counter += 1} with name: #{c.name}"
end