Nonula

Mongoose data seeding with following feature supported.

1. named _id.
2. dynamic generated data.
3. json static data.
4. easy to use with just one command line command.
5. programmable and hookable into unit tests.
6. born for agile development.
7. easy to sync data between developers.
8. play nicely with data faking tools like faker.
9. supports in package.json config
10. supports both configuration file and command line arguments

Design Concept

The mongoDB and mongoose ecosystem, and node.js development, lacks high quality data seeding tools and fixture loading tools with id references support. Even myself is shocked by this. This kind of tools exist for years in Ruby on Rails community. It's the base fundation feature for data seeding and unit test fixturing. On our node.js community, every team and developer has their own time consuming and low quality solutions to seed data. A tool is urgently needed to save our precious time and improve data seeding experience.

Without nonula, say you have following data

// authors.json
{
  "name": "Chris Berg",
  "posts": ["84bd43d8a0ffcde34567abcd", "84bd43d8a0ffcde34567abce", "84bd43d8a0ffcde34567abcf"]
}
// posts.json
[
  {
    "_id": "84bd43d8a0ffcde34567abce",
    "title": "Heal the world",
    "content": "Heal the world, make it a better place."
  },
  {
    "_id": "84bd43d8a0ffcde34567abcd",
    "title": "I have a dream",
    "content": "I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream."
  },  
]
 

It's obscure and not descriptive. A lot of patient and time are consumed just to make sure data hooks. Things get even worse when project goes larger and larger and the obscure seed data become larger and larger, hard to read, hard to modify.

This is where nonula comes in, with nonula, we can rewrite these data like this

// authors.json
{
  "name": "Chris Berg",
  "posts": ["i have a dream", "heal the world", "a didsummer night's dream"]
}
// posts.json
[
  {
    "_id": "heal the world",
    "title": "Heal the world",
    "content": "Heal the world, make it a better place."
  },
  {
    "_id": "i have a dream",
    "title": "I have a dream",
    "content": "I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream."
  },  
]
 

Nonula recursively goes through the model schema, and trying to find out what you are referencing and set the relationships for you. In this way, you can define the identity of a model in any way you like. It's not restricted to strings, actually number or even boolean value is also fine if it make sense.

You can also write dynamics data, nonula recognizes it and handle it correctly for you.

const map = require('lodash/map');
const times = require('lodash/times');
const flatten = require('lodash/flatten');
const faker = require('faker');
 
module.exports = flatten(map(["jack", "queen", "king"], (a) => times(3, (i) => ({
  "_id": `${a} post ${i + 1}`,
  "author": a,
  "title": faker.random.word(),
  "content": faker.lorem.paragraphs()
}))));

Usage

Name your seed data files by database collection names and separate them into two different directories. For example, if you have a model file named User, then you should name data file users.json or users.js. We follow the convensions over configuration best practice, save configuration time and automatically get the mapping.

Create a nonula configuration file

// .nonularc
// nonula.config.js
module.exports = {
  models: 'your-models-dir',
  data: 'your-seeding-data-dir',
  mongourl: 'mongodb://localhost:27017/your-database'
};

Or add these to your package.json

{
  "nonula": {
    "models": "your-models-dir",
    "data": "your-seeding-data-dir",
    "mongourl": "mongodb://localhost:27017/your-database"
  }
}

To seed data into database, run this:

nonula seed

To drop database, run this:

nonula drop

Installation

Install nonula in your project.

npm install nonula --save-dev

Install it globally.

npm install nonula -g

Roadmap

Nonula aims to be the ultimate mongoose and mongoDB data seeding tool. A lot of features and tests are required on the way to version 1.0.