Seeds.rb needs to be seeded with random string

Question

I would like to seed my seeds.rb file with a set of random strings.

I currently have a "name" category a "about_me" category such as:

  Name: John, Jim, Joe, Jamie, Kim, Monica, Erica, Nicole
  About_me: "I am blonde", "I am a brunette", "I have red hair", "I work at the museum"

I would like to seed 200 users with random sets of names & about_me's. How would i get around doing this? Can someone point me in the right direction?

I currently have:

 200.times do |i|
   User.create(rand(name: i, about_me: i))

That is not even close to working for me, so I was wondering how i can tackle this problem. Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

If you want the name and about_me to be completely random (i.e. make no sense at all), you can just generate random strings as shown in How to generate a random string in Ruby. However, if you want your information make some sense, you can create a list of possible names and about me strings and choose from random.

Answer 2

How about something like not:

200.times do |i|
  User.create(:name => SecureRandom.hex(12), :about_me => SecureRandom.hex(12))

If you don't care about the generated strings making sense at all. If you do need the strings to be "valid" then you will need to build a file or an array of names and pick random elements from it.

You can also look into the Faker gem which is used to generate fake data:

https://github.com/stympy/faker