acts_as_audited¶ ↑

acts_as_audited is an ActiveRecord extension that logs all changes to your models in an audits table, with optional revision comments.

Installation¶ ↑

In environment.rb:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  ...
  config.gem 'acts_as_audited'
  ...
end

At your application root, run:

$ rake gems:install

Generate the migration:

• If installing without a previous version of acts_as_audited or you do not mind overwriting your audits table:

  $ script/generate audited_migration add_audits_table

• If upgrading from a version of acts_as_audited that does not contain comment functionality:

  $ script/generate audited_migration_update update_audits_table

• After running one of the generators:

  $ rake db:migrate

Usage¶ ↑

Declare acts_as_audited on your models:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_audited :except => [:password, :mistress]
end

Within a web request, will automatically record the user that made the change if your controller has a current_user method. Comments can be added to an audit by setting model.audit_comments before create/update/destroy. If the :comment_required option is given to acts_as_audited, the save/update/destroy action will fail with add an error on model.audit_comment and triggering a transaction rollback if model.audit_comment is nil.

To record a user in the audits outside of a web request, you can use as_user:

Audit.as_user(user) do
  # Perform changes on audited models
end

Changes by Michael Siebert¶ ↑

To include some extra data in the audit model itself (IP address, subdomains in multi-tenancy-apps, etc.), add the needed fields to the audits table and provide a controller instance method additional_audit_attributes which returns a Hash with all the extra attributes.

Caveats¶ ↑

If your model declares attr_accessible after acts_as_audited, you need to set :protect to false. acts_as_audited uses attr_protected internally to prevent malicious users from unassociating your audits, and Rails does not allow both attr_protected and attr_accessible. It will default to false if attr_accessible is called before acts_as_audited, but needs to be explicitly set if it is called after.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_audited :protect => false
  attr_accessible :name
end

Another caveat is documented in issue 26, where an audit created on the first request to the server does not have a user. Please review the Github issue for more details on how to fix this. It does not appear to affect Rails 3.

Compatability¶ ↑

acts_as_audited works with Rails 2.1 or later.

Getting Help¶ ↑

Join the mailing list for getting help or offering suggestions:

http://groups.google.com/group/acts_as_audited

Contributing¶ ↑

Contributions are always welcome. Checkout the latest code on GitHub:

http://github.com/collectiveidea/acts_as_audited

Please include tests with your patches. There are a few gems required to run the tests:

$ gem install multi_rails
$ gem install thoughtbot-shoulda jnunemaker-matchy --source http://gems.github.com

Make sure the tests pass against all versions of Rails since 2.1:

$ rake test:multi_rails:all

Please report bugs or feature suggestions on GitHub:

http://github.com/collectiveidea/acts_as_audited/issues