Using db:populate causing nil exception

Question

I'm using db:populate to preload some sample data into my rails project. For instance, I am using the following code to populate the db:

require 'faker'
namespace :db do
  task :populate => :environment do
    Rake::Task['db:reset'].invoke
    100.times do |u|
      User.create!(
        :name => Faker::Name.name,
        :email => Faker::Internet.email
      )
    end
    puts "The count of user(s) is #{User.all.count}"
    User.all.each do |u|
      # Add some more info based for each user
    end
  end
end

However, what I get is an error when I run "rake db:populate". I get:

rake aborted!
You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.each

I get this error on the call to puts where I print out the count of users. If I reduce the 100.times down to about 10.times, the populate works correctly and the call to User.all.count responds with the correct value of 10. The best that I can guess is that the call to "faker" gets overloaded and has not yet returned a value which causes the nil object. Maybe however, the populate is trying to run this as a single database transaction and is overloading some buffer.

Is there a way to "flush" the insert into the database so that each transaction is written to the database or pause while "faker" responds so I can create a larger data set to work with?

Thanks
Steve Woolley
[email protected]

Cognition.Mind · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-18 04:26:47Z

1

I had the same problem

just running rake db:seed on a few console type expressions, after doing a trace it says: ** Invoke environment (first_time) ** Execute environment

Now I don't have an environment 'first_time' I looked at what I changed and it turns out I was calling by default a different environment in the initializer when attempting to connect to the db.

Take a look at your database.yml or application.rb files there might be a conflict

Cheers

answered Dec 18, 2010 at 4:26

Cognition.Mind

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1 Comment

Steve Woolley Over a year ago

Thanks for the response. I checked and there is no conflict. But I would think that if there was a conflict, I would not even be able to run this even 1 time. As it stands, I can run this 10 times, but not much larger sets.

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