SeedTracker 🌱

SeedTracker transforms your db/seeds.rb from a silent script into a clear, structured, and self-reporting process.

If you are tired of writing repetitive puts statements to figure out what your db/seeds.rb file actually did (what was created, updated, or left unchanged), SeedTracker provides a clean DSL and a beautiful summary output out-of-the-box.

Why SeedTracker?

Rails seeds are often:

• Silent
• Hard to debug
• Difficult to audit
• Unclear about what actually changed

SeedTracker solves this by turning your seeding process into a predictable and observable workflow.

Features

• 🚀 Lightweight: No runtime dependencies beyond Rails.
• 📊 Automated Summaries: Get a final report with counts of created, updated, and unchanged records per category.
• 🔍 Smart Diffing: It leverages ActiveRecord dirty tracking to detect exactly which attributes changed before saving.
• 💅 Visual Sections: Group your seed logs into readable, elegant blocks.

Compatibility

• Ruby >= 3.0
• Rails >= 6.0

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'seed_tracker'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install seed_tracker

---

Usage

Instead of relying on find_or_create_by! (which may silently create records without visibility into what changed), SeedTracker works best with find_or_initialize_by.

Here is how you can use it in your db/seeds.rb:

# 1. Initialize the tracker
tracker = SeedTracker::Base.new

puts "Running Seeds..."

# 2. Group your seeds using 'section'
tracker.section("PACKAGES") do

  # 3. Use 'track' to process your records
  # track(category_symbol, initialized_record, human_readable_label)
  tracker.track(:packages, Package.find_or_initialize_by(category: :basic), 'Basic Package') do |p|
    p.name = 'Basic'
    p.price = 9.99
  end

  tracker.track(:packages, Package.find_or_initialize_by(category: :premium), 'Premium Package') do |p|
    p.name = 'Premium'
    p.price = 19.99
  end

end

tracker.section("PLANS") do
  # You can also assign the returned record to a variable to use it in associations
  basic_package = Package.find_by(category: :basic)

  tracker.track(:plans, Plan.find_or_initialize_by(period: :monthly, package: basic_package), 'Basic Monthly Plan') do |p|
    p.name = 'Monthly'
    p.active = true
  end
end

# 4. Print the final summary dashboard at the end of the file
tracker.print_summary

🖥️ Example Output

When you run rails db:seed, you will get a beautiful, detailed output in your terminal:

Running Seeds...

PACKAGES

      CREATED: Basic Package
      UPDATED: Premium Package (Fields: price)

PLANS

      UNCHANGED: Basic Monthly Plan

================================================================================
SEEDING SUMMARY
================================================================================

PACKAGES:
   Created: 1
   Updated: 1
   Unchanged: 0
   Total: 2

PLANS:
   Created: 0
   Updated: 0
   Unchanged: 1
   Total: 1

================================================================================
✅ Seeding completed successfully!
================================================================================

---

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/pablosxz/seed_tracker. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.