Loading Fixtures in a Migration

I love migrations. I think they are one of the best things about rails. I love that I can count on any changes I've done in the database to be consistent across all other databases that I use. Love it.

Sometimes I find that I want pre-load my database with some data, like categories that I have. For testing purposes, I have already created this data in my fixture; now I just want to load that fixture into my database from a migration call.

I know that there is a rake task for this, so I looked into that code and came up with a little something.

require 'active_record/fixtures'

class CreateCategories < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :categories do |t|
      t.column :name, :string
    end

    Fixtures.create_fixtures('test/fixtures', File.basename("categories.yml", '.*'))
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :categories
  end
end

First I had to require active_record/fixtures. This allows me to call the Fixtures#create_fixtures method, which load my data. Now I can guarantee that my fixture data will be loaded for any environment.