Seeder in Craft core

[acalvino4]

Background

The processes of automated testing, db version control, and site bootstrapping are greatly aided by Migration and Seeder systems/utilities. Laravel (and most MVC frameworks, I believe) have this functionality baked it, and while it doesn't appear (from my cursory search) that yii has this in the core, there is an extension for it.

Migrations are very effectively handled through project-config, which is just one of the many things that make Craft so awesome to work with. As far as I can tell though, there is no system or utility for Seeding in Craft. There was a plugin (no idea how good it was) that is now abandoned.

Feature description

• Standardized file format & location for specifying seed data for Entries/Users/Categories/etc. ideally more toward the yaml end of things than php; that is, config-like rather than code-like
• Control panel interface for exporting created entries/users/etc. to config files that can be committed ("seeder sets")
• craft seed command for applying these changes (probably a way in the cp as well)
• Bonus ask: a faker library integration for generating dummy data

Use Cases

• Provide an easy, standardized way of seeding the db with records for tests
• Provide way for Entries/Users/etc. to be part of a site's boilerplate - i.e. if an org finds themselves repeatedly creating certain records for every new site
• Export entries for copying prod to staging, or vice versa.

[timkelty]

Related discussion: #9179

[acalvino4]

Related discussion: #8953