Sample Users

In this section, we’ll give our lonely sample user some company. Of course, to create enough users to make a decent user index, we could use our web browser to visit the signup page and make the new users one by one, but far a better solution is to use Ruby (and Rake) to make the users for us.

       First, we’ll add the Faker gem to the Gemfile, which will allow us to make sample users with semi-realistic names and email addresses (Listing 9.29).

Then install as usual:

Next, we’ll add a Rake task to create sample users. Rake tasks live in the lib/tasks directory, and are defined using namespaces (in this case, :db), as seen in Listing 9.30. (This is a bit advanced, so don’t worry too much about the details.)