Whenever your web application is going to offer user management, you might want to install at least a default admin user when creating your database. I searched the web for ideas to implement this and most of them come up with adding fixtures to your migrations. That's a really good one, of course, but I bet there is no way to dynamically hash your password using a fixture. I am using restful_authentication right now and this plugin does not only hash your password using SHA1, but adds a salt too. So a fixture is not what I wanted.

Instead I included the model itself in my migration, so the hashing and validation methods are used automatically. Hope this snippet is going to help others who are seeking for the same stuff. Let me know if it came in handy for you :-)

require 'app/models/user.rb'class LoadDefaultUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration  def self.up    say "Trying to insert default user(s)..."    user = User.create( :login => 'admin', :password => 'password', :password_confirmation => 'password', :email => 'admin@site.com' )    unless user.errors.empty?      say "Could not create admin user, see errors below:"      user.errors.each do |e|        say e      end    else      say "Admin user created"    end  end  def self.down    User.delete_all  endend