Seed your Rails app using a csv files.

If you are building a webapp with Ruby on Rails, you will maybe have the need to load data, so here is a good way to insert data in the database, using a csv file and couple lines of code.

Open the project/db/seed.rd file of your project and adding this few lines.

require 'csv'

CSV.foreach(Rails.root.join('path/to/file.csv'), headers: true) do |row|
    # code...
end

CSV This class provides a complete interface to CSV files and data. It offers tools to enable you to read and write to and from Strings or IO objects, as needed. Source.

Where Rails.root.join represents a pathname which locates a file in a filesystem, headers: true we are specifying that the source file have header, will ignore the first row, in case we don’t have header just turn to false the option.

Then lets indicate the corresponding field of our table where will insert with.

Model.create! do |model|
    model.file1 = row[0]
    model.file2 = row[1]
    model.file3 = row[2]
    model.file4 = row[3]
end

For complete with the seed, run in the terminal $ bundle exec rake db:seed

The final code should look like:

require 'csv'

CSV.foreach(Rails.root.join('path/to/file.csv'), headers: true) do |row|
  Model.create! do |model|
    mode.fiel1 = row[0]
    mode.fiel2 = row[1]
    mode.fiel3 = row[2]
    mode.fiel4 = row[3]
  end
end