6.4. Database Seeding

The automatically created file db/seeds.rb is a default location for creating seed data for your database. It was introduced in order to stop the practice of inserting seed data in individual migration files, if you accept the premise that migrations should never be used for seeding example or base data required by your application. It is executed with the rake db:seed task (or created alongside the database when you run rake db:setup).

At its simplest, the contents of seed.rb is simply a series of create! statements that generate baseline data for your application, whether it’s default or related to configuration. For example, let’s add an admin user and some billing codes to our time and expenses app: