What is the best way to seed a database in Rails?

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Updating since these answers are slightly outdated (although some still apply).

Simple feature added in rails 2.3.4, db/seeds.rb

Provides a new rake task

rake db:seed

Good for populating common static records like states, countries, etc…

http://railscasts.com/episodes/179-seed-data

*Note that you can use fixtures if you had already created them to also populate with the db:seed task by putting the following in your seeds.rb file (from the railscast episode):

require 'active_record/fixtures'
Fixtures.create_fixtures("#{Rails.root}/test/fixtures", "operating_systems")

For Rails 3.x use ‘ActiveRecord::Fixtures’ instead of ‘Fixtures’ constant

require 'active_record/fixtures'
ActiveRecord::Fixtures.create_fixtures("#{Rails.root}/test/fixtures", "fixtures_file_name")

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