Versioned Seeds is not maintained anymore. Take a look at seedbank or seed_migration instead ;)

Versioned Seeds is an alternative to Rails seeds. It allows to store your seeds in several files and prevent from re-seeding.

Rails seeds are great when you create a project but what about new ones when the project is already running ? When you have to import some data from a CSV file ?

Versioned Seeds provides a simple, conventions based, way to do that.

Add this line to your Gemfile :

gem 'versioned_seeds'

If you're using Git, as you should, be sure to call this in your shell :

$ echo ".versionned_seeds" >> .gitignore

You can get the last imported seeds version :

$ rake vs:status
Last seeds: 0

VersionedSeeds can be configured using an initializer:

VersionedSeeds.configuration do |config|
  # Path where are stored seed files
  # VersionedSeeds will look for [root_path]/db/seeds/*.rb
  # Defaults to Rails.root
  config.root_path = '...'

  # Path of the .versioned_seeds file where the list of
  # already loaded seed files is stored
  config.list_path = '...' #
end

The generator will simply generate a timestamped file where you can put anything you want :

$ rails g versioned_seeds:seed_file some_seeding_script
      create  db/seeds/20111205155806_some_seeding_script.rb

Given two seeds files :

# db/seeds/20111205155801_create_users.rb
User.create!(:username => 'admin', :password => 'password', :admin => true)
User.create!(:username => 'user1', :password => 'password')

# db/seeds/20111205155802_import_articles.rb
require 'csv'

CSV.foreach('/some/file.csv') do |line|
  # ...
end

You can import only the first one by using the vs:next task :

$ rake vs:next
Loading: 20111205155801_create_users.rb

$ rake vs:status
Last seeds: 20111205155801

Or load all files using the vs:all task :

$ rake vs:all
Loading: 20111205155801_create_users.rb
Loading: 20111205155802_import_articles.rb

$ rake vs:status
Last seeds: 20111205155802

Every script imported once will never be loaded again.