Remove sensitive data from development copies of production database (is there a gem for this?)

Question

I make nightly backups of my database using the excellent backup gem. We also need to make copies of our production data for installation on staging, test and development databases.

But since the production database has sensitive information (emails, names, encrypted passwords, etc.) we want to sanitize the database before it leave the secured world of our production servers.

At some level, in our case, this could be as simple as replacing emails with user+id@example.com and replacing encrypted passwords and so on -- simple replacement of a few columns of data. At this point, we could dump the database to a file that developers could use to have a realistic, working, but not real copy of the database.

This seems like something we should all be doing. And while it's not terribly hard technically, I hate doing things someone else has already done better :-) Does anyone know of a gem that does this?

Answer 1

Looks like this will do what you're looking for:

http://sunitparekh.github.io/data-anonymization/