Is there a way to export an ActiveRecord object to seeds.rb?

Question

Is it possible to export data from a database, or run something like Person.find(1).to_seed and copy the output from console into the seeds.rb file?

Answer 1

Yes.

Here's a gem – https://github.com/rroblak/seed_dump — that does exactly that.

Answer 2

Try using seed-fu. You can give SeedFu::Writer a CSV file which will be used to generate a file in the seeds.rb "format". Of course using some database tool you would need to export the database table into a CSV file.