Working from a production database dump can often be helpful for debugging strange errors and edge cases, but having potentially sensitive user data on a development machine is a dangerous liability.

Obfuscator provides a clean, friendly API for obfuscating sensitive columns in your Ruby on Rails application's models.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'obfuscator'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install obfuscator

As a Ruby program:

# Without a format, Obfuscator will fill all of the given columns
# with dummy data based on the column's SQL type
Obfuscator.scrub! "Message" do
  overwrite :title, :body, :created_at
end

# Currently any format from Faker::Internet
# (https://github.com/stympy/faker/blob/master/lib/faker/internet.rb)
# should work for when the generated data needs to be in a specific format
Obfuscator.scrub! "User" do
  overwrite :login do
    format :user_name
  end

  overwrite :email_address do
    format :email
  end
end

Or as a Rake task:

rake obfuscator:scrub[User] COLUMNS=login,email

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

• Reflect on model validations to ensure generated data is valid
• Make DSL more flexible about taking both arrays and hashes of columns with options
• Move away from iterating through batches of records and calling update_attributes by constructing an update_all