Partially copying the production database into the test environment

Problem

I'm currently using Selenium for full-stack testing. Right now I'm using factory girl to populate my database, which, as the application grows, is a bit tidies. Is there a way to create a small copy of the production database with minimal effort? I don't want the entire db in my test suit as it's over 10GB. But instead only a few records of each model.

I can write a script by hand that does this, but I was hoping that a gem or similar already exists that does this for me.

How would it work?

I as a tester defines the minimum amount of records for each model. The associations for each model is also copied.

Here's an example

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :answers
end

class Answer < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :question
end

class Question < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :options
end

class Option < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :question
end

Example configuration of how the script might look like

{
  User: 5,
  Option: 1
}

This would copy 5 users with all of its associations, except for the Option model which we only includes one of.

Environment

• Postgresql
• Rails 4

Notes

Please note that my application consists of over 400 models with complex relations. Manually trying to keep the testing database in sync with the production database using fixtures/factories (for these type of tests) would be a hazel.

Also note that I'm using fixtures for unit testing, which works very well, but in this case I need a prepopulated database for the higher level tests.