Add support for seeding a database

I am opening this ticket as a place for discussion around possible ways to implement command line seed support (ala rails db:seed) This need is coming up in a few tickets #58 #48.

So to start, in my situation I was porting an older small app of mine that was backed by mongo. I have a command line node tool to pump in seed data when I stood up new instances. During my port to nodal, which I was doing as a public example of a nodal app, I really wanted a single db cli command (see #50) to prepare, migrate and seed the sample data so that someone could fork the repo and use the built in deploy to heroku button and have a running app with real data

So my first thought is do we have a large json doc that can be used to seed models (like schema.json) or do we actually generate a real module that can be required and run to allow for model validations, model relations etc (ala rails)

so for a quick and dirty comparison of the thoughts (excuse errors, thinking as a I go here)

a seed.json (which has to have proper ordering)

{
  "user": {
    "id": 1,
    "username": "mark",
    "email": "[e-mail]"
  },
  "tweet": {
    "id": 1,
    "body": "Hey There",
    "user_id": 1
  }
}

or in js (remember, just a rough idea)

  'use strict';

  const Nodal = require('nodal');
  const User = Nodal.require('app/models/user.js');
  const Tweet = Nodal.require('app/models/user.js');

  let markUser;
  User.create({ username: "mark", email: "[e-mail]"}, (err, model) => {
    markUser = model;
  });

  Tweet.create({ body: "Hey There", user_id: markUser.id}, (err, model) => {

  });

or even

  'use strict';

  const Nodal = require('nodal');
  const User = Nodal.require('app/models/user.js');
  const Tweet = Nodal.require('app/models/user.js');

  User.create({ username: "mark", email: "[e-mail]"}, (err, model) => {

      Tweet.create({ body: "Hey There", user_id: model.id}, (err, model) => {
      });

  });

Okay seed (no pun intended) laid, thoughts?

[intabulas]

Was thinking in the shower it would be good to either have the seed.json support env’s (like db.json)

{
  "development": {
    "User": [
    ]
  },
  "production": {
    "User": [
    ]
  }
}

or if we want to be crazy, make the seed a js file so that we can do nutty stuff like generating fake test data

"use strict";

let faker = require('faker');

module.exports = {
  development: {
  },
  production: {  
  },

  test: { 
    "User": function() {
      let data = []
      for(let i = 0, i < 30, i++) {
        data.push({ name: faker.name.findName()});
      }
      return data;  

    }
  }
};

obviously that js example could be way better, but it illustrates…

[keithwhor]

Added in:

https://github.com/keithwhor/nodal/commit/b4eb007de6d9d71185d2477953a0167fa66bfcbe

😃