How to run seeds.exs for Elixir/Phoenix App?

Questions / Help Build debugging
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#1

Hi Fellow Frequent Flyers! :wave:

We are trying to deploy a Phoenix app to Fly.io that requires some data to be initialised in the PostgreSQL DB.

We followed the Elixir getting started guide: Deploy an Elixir Phoenix Application and have done a bunch of googling/debugging and come to the conclusion that the /priv/repo/seeds.exs file is not available during the mix release … :man_shrugging:

So my/our question is: has anyone else faced this issue and how can we seed data into a freshly deployed Phoenix App? (or is there a generic approach to seeding data in any programming language/framework that we can adapt…?) :question:

Thanks! :pray:

#2

Hello!

Yes, the seeds aren’t auto-run. That’s a general situation with Elixir releases. Typically, you only want them run once. I like to write my seeds so they can be run multiple times (ie idempotent). However, it’s unique to each project and that means the solution is as well.

What I do is put the seeds into a regular module like MyApp.GlobalSetup. Then define a function like seed/0 or populate_pick_list_options or whatever.

Then SSH into an instance and run it in an IEx shell. Ex: MyApp.GlobalSetup.seed.

I hope that helps!

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#4

@brainlid that’s very helpful/insightful. thanks very much. Will try and implement this tonight. :+1:

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