<p>Fixtures are used to easily insert values into your database. The most common use for a fixture is to insert example record into your database</p> <p>You fixtures the same way you run migrate:</p> cake fixtures help <p>If you wanted to create a fixture for your users table, it would be in the file <code>app/config/fixtures/users.php</code> and it would look like this:</p> <pre><code>--- - user: id: 1 name: My user!! description: foo bar created: 2008-11-13 21:03:40 modified: 2008-11-13 21:03:40 - contests: id: 2 name: Lorem description: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur created: 2008-11-13 21:21:39 modified: 2008-11-13 21:21:39</code></pre> <p>If you have to reset your database or need to reinsert data for any reason, you can &#8220;dump&#8221; all your current data to fixtures like so:</p> cake fixtures g fromdb -force <p>(The -force option overwrites any existing files in <code>app/config/fixtures</code>)</p> <p>Then you can load them back into the database simply by calling:</p> cake fixtures 2009-11-23T00:00:52-08:00 80856 using-fixtures 70751 2008-11-13T22:13:20-08:00 32290