Hi NamesAreAPain!
You are right: Seeding initial data usually doesn’t belong into migrations. I yet don’t get the exact scenario and parameters of your project, so my anwsers really boil down to the very default options. Based on the scenario, that you or some other technologically educated person will be in charge for setting up the application on their machine.
Basically what be to your interest is the term “seeding data”. You can find a pretty much interesting section on that here Seeding Data – Phoenix v1.3.0-rc.1
If this still doesn’t match your scenario’s requirements and your would like to generate some custom seeds, you could have a look into how to write mix tasks in general: Custom Mix Tasks · Elixir School – I put mine into $project/lib/mix/tasks which should be pretty much de default folder as i recall right. In there you can to whatever you want and also access contexts and models from your phoenix project of course.
Where the to be seeded data originates from (local json/xml, hardcoded structs, http remote, database replication, git clone) is completely up to you and your case.
Just my 2 cents.
