How to seed your rails database with faker
Tags: rails, database, faker, seed
Published: 2020-06-13 13:58:25

I built a Customer Support System a few days ago and started to think of a way to seed my rails database with random data for testing without having to manually type in the data. This may not be the best way to do it, but it works and allows you to test your application.

We want a way to generate users that have tickets and also have comments without having to manually type in a value for each field.
Let's start with the basic schema of the DB.

![Schema for rails database](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*76sNBEWn6VXQb9w60tcfzw.png)

Our Database, schema and migrations have already been generated and the main focus here will be on seeding the database.

First, install the [faker gem](https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker) by adding it to your list of gems in your gemfile.

```gem 'faker'```

then run `bundle install`

Once done, head into your seeds.rb file inside the db directory. In here, require the faker gem at the beginning using

```require 'faker'```

Next, let's create *Users* using fake data from the `faker gem`.

```
# generate 20 users
(1..20).each do |id|
    User.create!(
# each user is assigned an id from 1-20
        id: id, 
        name: Faker::Name.name,
        email: Faker::Internet.email,
# issue each user the same password
        password: "password", 
        password_confirmation: "password",
# a user can have only one of these roles
        role: %w[customer admin agent].sample 
    )
end
```
The Faker attributes you can use are all available from the [faker GitHub page](https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker).

```role: %w[customer admin agent].sample```
The line above may look a little strange - we've designed our model to only accept one of the values in ["customer", "admin", "agent"] as the values assigned to role for users. 

Calling `.sample` on the array(a neat ruby method) causes the code to select one of the three possible values.

I've added some comments using the *#* symbol lines.

Next, let's create *Tickets*. Remember that each *ticket* belongs to a *User*. As such, we'll need to find a way to assign tickets to users randomly.

```
# create 10 tickets in DB
(1..10).each do |id|
    Ticket.create!(
        id: id,
# we have userIds between 1 and 20. Assign a ticket to a user 
# randomly
        user_id: rand(1..20), 
        title: Faker::University.name, 
        status: %w[opened in_progress completed].sample,
# generate a fake paragraph
        request: Faker::Lorem.paragraphs 
    )
end
```

```user_id: rand(1..20)```

The line above is used to generate a random number between 1 and 20. Recall that our users were assigned Id's between 1 and 20.
Finally, let's generate comments that belong to a User and is tied to a ticket.

```
# create comments in DB. Comments belong to tickets
(1..10).each do |id|
    Comment.create!(
        id: id,
        user_id: rand(1..20),
        comment: Faker::Lorem.sentence(word_count: 3),
        user_name: User.find(rand(1..20)).name,
        ticket_id: rand(1..10),
        user_role: %w[customer admin agent].sample
    )
end
```
Once done, simply run

```rails db:seed```

You can check that everything went well by checking your data within the rails console.