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Discussion on: How do you populate your development databases?

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Marak • Edited

I like to use the faker.js library to populate my development databases. It's easy to use and simple to integrate into test suites or custom bootstrapping scripts.

It has a wide API that is well documented and covers almost anything you need. It supports many localities ( i18n ) which can be useful for seeding certain types of applications. Faker.js has been in development for seven years and currently has 124 contributors and 11k stars on Github.

It's a very nifty piece of software. We never use production data in testing or development environments. Everything is always generated with faker bootstrapping scripts customized to the application. Works very well. The localization part can also help with testing UTF-8 encodings.

Disclaimer: I am the author of faker.js