One of the first ruby gems I used was the Faker Gem, a nice little ruby gem that ...wait for it... Fakes Data!
Usage is simple; first grab the gem using your gem program:
$sudo gem install faker
Now you can use it in your favorite ruby program or script. For now let's fire up irb and see what we can fake.
require 'rubygems'
require 'faker'
#Let's see if we can make a fake person...
person_name = Faker::Name.name
person_email = Faker::Internet.email
person_company = Faker::Company.name
person_company_slogan = Faker::Company.bs
person_phone = Faker::PhoneNumber.phone_number
person_address = Faker::Address.street_address
person_city = Faker::Address.city
person_state = Faker::Address.us_state
person_zip = Faker::Address.zip_code
# Wowee-wow-wow. Now let's print him off some business cards
puts "#{person_name}
#{person_company}
'#{person_company_slogan.capitalize}'
#{person_address}
#{person_city}, #{person_state} #{person_zip}
Call me at : #{person_phone}
Email me at: #{person_email}
It's a pleasure doing business."
# Awesome, now we can go into business and
# get back our money from that Nigerian prince fellow...
As you can see Faker is pretty easy to use; you can build some powerful test bases using it inside a loop:
require 'rubygems'
require 'faker'
require 'activerecord'
1000.times do
# make a person
# save person
end
For more information see the Faker Docs: http://faker.rubyforge.org/rdoc/
In my next post I will show you how you can use all this fake data you're generating to test anything you need data for.
--Alex