Seedex

Seedex is a library for Ecto to easily populate your DB with seed data. It is useful, for example, if you have some master data you need to insert in your database.

This is not meant to generate data for your tests, if this is what you need, checkout ecto_fixtures or ex_machina instead.

Add seedex to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [{:seedex, "~> 0.4.0"}]
end

First, you need to configure seedex to use your repository:

config :seedex,
  repo: YourApp.Repo,
  seeds_path: "priv/repo/seeds" # not required, but can be used to customize seeds path

Then, you just need to add files under the seeds_path, which defaults to priv/repo/seeds. All files matching seeds_path/*.exs and seeds_path/MIX_ENV/*.exs if it exists will be read. To insert the data, you need to run

mix seedex.seed

Files are loaded in alphabetic order, independently of the directory they are in. However, the files are really just plain Elixir with nothing special, so you could just use mix run priv/repo/seeds/my_seed.exs, if you needed to.

Here is what a seed file looks like:

import Seedex

seed_once Group, fn group ->
  group
  |> Map.put(:id, 1)
  |> Map.put(:name, "admin")
end

seed Group, fn group ->
  %{group | id: 2, name: "user"}
end

seed User, [:name], [
  %{name: "Daniel", age: 26, group_id: 1},
  %{name: "Ai", age: 24, group_id: 2},
]

Checkout the documentation for more info.

Seedex 0.4 requires Elixir 1.15 or newer and Ecto 3.13 or newer. The .tool-versions file pins the current Elixir 1.20 / Erlang 29 toolchain. Tests require PostgreSQL and default to postgres on localhost, with the seedex_test database. Set PGHOST and PGPORT to use another server.

mise install
mise exec -- mix deps.get
mise exec -- mix test

Version 0.4 also raises on failed seed inserts instead of silently ignoring errors.