Rails: Update guidance on development environment seed data.

[stevepolitodesign]

Relates to this proposal for Suspenders.

We have relied on dev:prime for loading data necessary for users
to view most of the features of the app in development.

However, there were a few areas of improvement.

First, rename dev namespace to development, and rename
prime task to seed for improved clarity.

The, introduces development:seed:replant take to create parity with
the existing db:seed:replant task.

We're already doing this in ChatBot.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/chat_bot/pull/52

[JoelQ]

Does this rename blur what seeds actually are? I guess everyone is already confused about the distinction between dev data and seeds. Maybe this is an "if you can't beat them, join them" solution?

[stevepolitodesign]

Does this rename blur what seeds actually are? I guess everyone is already confused about the distinction between dev data and seeds. Maybe this is an "if you can't beat them, join them" solution?

I personally think it's more clear than dev:prime. And, if we use the suggestion made by @vburzynski, it will read development:db:seed which I think is even more clear than my proposal.

I just can't think of the better name for what we're doing other than "seed".

[vburzynski]

I think it's fine to use seed here. In general "seeding" a database is just populating it with some set of data. The conventions for the specific Ruby on Rails db:seed task are to use it for seeding the database with data needed for the application to run in any environment. Which suggests that the are other sets of seed data that may be required for applications to run in specific environments or even in specific contexts. They're all still an act of seeding, just not the primary db:seed

I could also see other variants working as well:

• db:seed:development
  • db is the primary object we're acting upon
  • seed is the action
  • development is a targeting modifier in this naming scheme
• development:db:seed
  • development here is used a prepended namespace or context
  • db is once again the primary object we're acting upon
  • seed is the action
  • this might make sense if there were additional rake tasks scoped to and specific to the development environment
• db:development:seed
  • I don't know if I like this one, but included it for completeness. 🙃
• or even db:seed:with_development
  • this would stray from the current implementation but takes a cue from data-migrate which extends db:migrate with the option db:migrate:with_data
  • it's even more clear that this is a modifier; but in this case one that extends the original. I'd expect this to run both the normal seed and the seed data specific to development.

[emilford]

@stevepolitodesign what are your thoughts on @vburzynski's suggestions?

[stevepolitodesign]

@emilford thank you for bumping this. I just addressed this, and wanted to highlight that we're doing this in ChatBot.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/chat_bot/pull/52