Quickstart

This guide walks through the core workflow: introspect a database, generate test data, and customize the output.

Prerequisites

go install github.com/tomiwa-a/seedling/cmd/seedling@latest

Or use Docker:

docker build -t seedling https://github.com/tomiwa-a/seedling.git

Point Seedling at your database to produce a schema file:

seedling introspect --db postgres://localhost:5432/mydb --output schema.yaml

This queries information_schema and writes a YAML file containing all tables, columns, types, foreign keys, and constraints. For MySQL:

seedling introspect --db mysql://user:pass@localhost:3306/mydb --output schema.yaml

Generate 100 rows per root table:

seedling generate --schema schema.yaml --count 100 --output seed.sql

This produces a SQL file with INSERT INTO statements respecting FK dependencies, unique constraints, and column types.

# Count INSERT statements
grep -c "^INSERT" seed.sql

# Load into your test database
psql -d mytestdb -f seed.sql

Use a fixed seed for reproducible output:

seedling generate --count 1000 --seed 42 --output seed.sql

Run it again — the output is byte-identical.