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Seeds

database seeds test data seed files development data data population

When developing locally, it is very useful to work with a known set of data as it can simplify testing and development, especially when working in larger teams with multiple developers.

With the CLI, it is easy to extract data from an existing environment and generate a “seed” that can be shared and used to pre-populate any development environment as it initializes.

As mentioned before, you can create a seed from any environment. In this guide, we will assume that we have already started a local development with a table called “animals”. At this point, we can add some data ourselves as usual. Once we are satisfied and have the data we want, we can run the following command to create a seed:

$ nhost dev hasura seed create some-initial-data \
    --endpoint https://local.hasura.local.nhost.run \
    --admin-secret nhost-admin-secret \
    --database-name default \
    --from-table animals


INFO created seed file successfully                file=/app/seeds/default/1685692310174_some-initial-data.sql

We can now inspect the file and see its contents:

$ cat nhost/seeds/default/1685692310174_some-initial-data.sql
SET check_function_bodies = false;
INSERT INTO public.animals (id, created_at, updated_at, name) VALUES ('d50ff2e8-ec2a-496b-a2e6-a50eecccdb16', '2023-05-16 14:01:59.072576+00', '2023-05-16 14:01:59.072576+00', 'dog');
INSERT INTO public.animals (id, created_at, updated_at, name) VALUES ('8224ec02-6fed-48ff-8c06-6c36298d0fd0', '2023-05-16 14:02:06.300074+00', '2023-05-16 14:02:06.300074+00', 'cat');

Now, when you start a new development environment you can pass the --apply-seeds argument to pre-populate your environment with the seeds:

$ nhost up --apply-seeds
Setting up Nhost development environment...
Starting Nhost development environment...


(...) omitted for brevity


Applying migrations...
INFO migrations applied on database: default
Applying metadata...
INFO Metadata applied
Applying seeds...
INFO Seed data planted for database: default


(...) omitted for brevity

Or you could also apply the seeds yourself after starting nhost:

$ nhost up
Setting up Nhost development environment...
Starting Nhost development environment...


(...) omitted for brevity


Applying migrations...
INFO migrations applied on database: default
Applying metadata...
INFO Metadata applied


(...) omitted for brevity


$ nhost dev hasura seed apply \
    --endpoint https://local.hasura.local.nhost.run \
    --admin-secret nhost-admin-secret \
    --database-name default
INFO Help us improve Hasura! The cli collects anonymized usage stats which
allow us to keep improving Hasura at warp speed. To opt-out or read more,
visit https://hasura.io/docs/latest/graphql/core/guides/telemetry.html
INFO Seeds planted