Ruby On Rails: way to create different seeds file for environments

Question

How can one make the task rake db:seed to use different seeds.rb file on production and development?

edit: any better strategy will be welcome

Answer 1

You can have a rake task behave differently based on the current environment, and you can change the environment a task runs in by passing RAILS_ENV=production to the command. Using these two together you could produce something like so:

Create the following files with your environment specific seeds:

db/seeds/development.rb
db/seeds/test.rb
db/seeds/production.rb

Place this line in your base seeds file to run the desired file

load(Rails.root.join( 'db', 'seeds', "#{Rails.env.downcase}.rb"))

Call the seeds task:

rake db:seed RAILS_ENV=production 

Answer 2

I like to implement all seeds inside one seed.rb file and then just separate the environments inside.

if Rails.env.production? 
  State.create(state: "California", state_abbr: "CA")
  State.create(state: "North Dakota", state_abbr: "ND")
end

if Rails.env.development?
  for 1..25
    Orders.create(order_num: Faker::Number:number(8), order_date: Faker::Business.credit_card_expiry_date)
  end
end

That way you do not need to cast the RAILS_ENV property on your rake task, or manage multiple files. You also can include Rails.env.test?, but I personally let RSPEC take care of the testing data.