Populator

Populate an Active Record database with mass insert.

You can find the rdocs at populator.rubyforge.org.

Special thanks to Zach Dennis for his ar-extensions gem which some of this code is loosely based on.

Install

Install the gem:

  gem install populator

And then load it in your project:

  require 'populator'

Usage

This gem adds a "populate" method to all Active Record models. Pass the number of records you want to create along with a block. In the block you can set the column values for each record.

  Person.populate(3000) do |person|
    person.first_name = "John"
    person.last_name = "Smith"
  end

This will do a mass insert into the database so it is very fast. The person object contains the "id" so you can set up associations.

  Person.populate(3000) do |person|
    person.first_name = "John"
    person.last_name = "Smith"
    Project.populate(30) do |project|
      project.person_id = person.id
    end
  end

That will create 30 projects for each person.

Passing a range or array of values will randomly select one.

  Person.populate(1000..5000) do |person|
    person.gender = ['male', 'female']
    person.annual_income = 10000..200000
  end

This will create 1000 to 5000 men or women with the annual income between 10,000 and 200,000.

You can pass a :per_query option to limit how many records are saved per query. This defaults to 1000.

  Person.populate(2000, :per_query => 100)

If you need to generate fake data, there are a few methods to do this.

  Populator.words(3) # generates 3 random words separated by spaces
  Populator.words(10..20) # generates between 10 and 20 random words
  Populator.sentences(5) # generates 5 sentences
  Populator.paragraphs(3) # generates 3 paragraphs

For fancier data generation, try the Faker gem.

faker.rubyforge.org

Important

For performance reasons, this gem does not use actual instances of the model. This means validations and callbacks are bypassed. It is up to you to ensure you’re adding valid data.

Development

See spec/README for instructions on running specs.

This project can be found on github at the following URL.

github.com/ryanb/populator

If you find a bug, please send me a message on GitHub.

If you would like to contribute to this project, please fork the repository and send me a pull request.