Strapless

Inspired by the ar_fixtures plugin and the fixture loading in Rick Olson's mephisto. Most of this was developed while working on Mateme with Baobab Health and Partners in Health.

Overview

Think of this as a better way to seed your data based on things that you already have in your development database. It allows you to quickly load and dump the records in your database to YAML.

Usage

Add strapless to your Gemfile then:

$ bundle install

Now you should have the tasks:

$ rake -T bootstrap
(in /path/to/your/rails/project)
rake db:bootstrap:dump[table]  # Create a set of fixtures from the current database
rake db:bootstrap:load[table]  # Load initial fixtures (from db/data/*.yml) into the current database

If you already have data then you can dump it to the db/data folder:

$ rake db:bootstrap:dump[all]

This will load all of your ActiveRecord::Base models (in your app/models) and generate fixtures for them. Strapless will attempt to use your to_param so that the names are pretty. You can override the fixture_name instance method in your model if you want something custom.

Adding these fixtures to your repository makes a lot of sense, unless you have crazy amounts of data.

When you get ready to load the data in, Strapless will take all of the fixture YAML files in your db/data folder and try to read it in.

Warning: when loading the data from a fixture, any existing data will be deleted from the related table.

$ rake db:bootstrap:load[all]

Now you have some data!

You can also specify individual table names, or a list of names, as the arg to load and dump:

$ rake db:bootstrap:load[pages,users,auths,animals]

Installation

If you are not using bundler just:

RubyGems

$ gem install strapless

The tasks should automatically appear in Rails 3. If you are using Rails 2, then you will need to load the tasks manually. In your Rakefile add

require 'strapless/tasks'

Oh no! You forgot to add it to your Gemfile and you want to use it on your already running server?

Well that was silly wasn't it. Luckily you can get around it (though this breaks all the rules). First install the gem on your server:

gem install strapless

Then find the path to the gem, for example:

~/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/strapless-0.2.0/lib

Then from your Rails folder (current) run:

bundle exec rake --libdir . --libdir "/path/to/strapless/lib/folder" --require 'config/environment' --require 'strapless' --require db:bootstrap:dump[all]

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Nick Plante for prodding me to make this a gem and for helping through some simplifications and Eunji Choi for the name "Strapless."

Contributing

Once you've made your great commits:

  1. [Fork][fk] Strapless.
  2. Create a topic branch - git checkout -b my_branch
  3. Push to your branch - git push origin my_branch
  4. Create an [Issue][is] with a link to your branch
  5. That's it!

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