faker VS dotenv

While we’re at it, let's add a couple of other gems we’ll need for our test environment: factory_bot_rails is a fixtures replacement and generates test model instances. faker is handy for generating fake strings of data to be used in tests. Add those gems to the development and test group of your Gemfile:

Next up, we'll combine a few of the techniques we've reviewed to implement snappy typeahead searching. Before we do that, though, let's generate more sample data. I will use the popular faker gem to do that:

Faker was originally written in Perl and is also available as a library for Ruby, Java, and Python.

Faker

rspec-rails factory_bot_rails faker

Ah, so the data is just a giant .yml file of potential options, that I compiled, and then faker grabs a random one based on that data. There's no "database" or anything akin to that.

It's with the Faker library. I was able to reproduce it by spinning up a new rails up, specifying the faker gem , yours, and running the command gives the same error.

To begin using faker, you need to install the gem, which is simply done by running "gem install faker". After you do that, you should add "gem "faker"" to your gem file to ensure correct usage, otherwise you may get an error. Once thats done you can head over to the seeding file and add require "faker" the page. In the seeding file is where you would start to "fake" your data and we use the faker library to pick out random dummy data. In the seeding, your gonna start implementing the data which should look like this,

This is the second part of my Test Driving a Rails API series. In Part 1 we set up our development environment, generated a Rails API-only application, installed dotenv to easily store configuration values in the environment, and installed and configured PostgreSQL version 16 as our database.

Storing environment variables for a Rails app can be problematic. The dotenv gem will automatically, when Rails boots, load environment variables from .env files into the Rails ENV. This is a great way to store private information that varies per developer or deployment environment, such as your development database configuration. Rails Encrypted Credentials is a great way to store private information, like API keys, etc, but I wouldn’t use it for storing my local development environment’s database information. The Encrypted Credentials file is checked into the git repository and would, therefore, be shared by all developers on the project. dotenv allows each developer or deployment environment to store their own information in .env files that are ignored by git.

dotenv

Install the dotenv gem.

dotenv-rails

Yeah, now that I think of it, it does require a gem. I have used this in most projects https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv