What is the best way to seed a database in Rails?
Updating since these answers are slightly outdated (although some still apply). Simple feature added in rails 2.3.4, db/seeds.rb Provides a new rake task rake db:seed Good for populating common static records like states, countries, etc… http://railscasts.com/episodes/179-seed-data *Note that you can use fixtures if you had already created them to also populate with the db:seed task … Read more