How to use seed.rb to selectively populate development and/or production databases?

Question

I am using seed.rb to populate both my development and production database. I usually populate the first with dummy data and the latter with the real minimal data that my app ne

Answer 1

another approach, quite similar to @fabro's answer: add a folder seeds to db/ with the environment names and another named common.rb, so you get something like:

db/seeds/common.rb
db/seeds/development.rb
db/seeds/staging.rb
db/seeds/production.rb

than, in your seed.rb:

ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
  ['common', Rails.env].each do |seedfile|
    seed_file = "#{Rails.root}/db/seeds/#{seedfile}.rb"
    if File.exists?(seed_file)
      puts "- - Seeding data from file: #{seedfile}"
      require seed_file
    end
  end
end

I perfer running the seed in one transaction