How to Configure Ruby on Rails with Paranoia Gem

Updated Feb 28, 2023 • 6 min read

Paranoia is a gem that allows you to hide records instead of destroying them.

You can recover them later if you want. It’s a very simple reimplementation of ActsAsParanoid (one file with about 300 lines of code).

I assume you have a Rails app with User, Conversation and Message models created with basic views added to conversations showing authors and messages.

What You Will Use

paranoia

Pros:

very simple gem,
easy to debug (only one file),
it does what it sets out to do,
actively maintained,
nice documentation.

Cons:

sometimes unintuitive,
in some cases, it’s probably better to implement your own solution.

Step 1

Add paranoia gem to your Gemfile:

gem 'paranoia', git: 'git@github.com:rubysherpas/paranoia.git', branch: 'core'

You add it like that because the newest release doesn’t include some features that will be used in this tutorial.

Step 2

Now, let’s say that you want to delete a user, but his messages should still be displayed with his name as an author (in your view you’ll have something like message.user.name). If you removed that user, you would get an error when trying to display his messages:

undefined method `name` for nil:NilClass

In order to avoid that, instead of destroying records, you should mark them as deleted. It’s called soft deleting and it’s what paranoia gem is all about.

To enable this behaviour for User model, add this line to it:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid
  [...]

You also need to generate and run this migration:

rails generate migration AddDeletedAtToUsers deleted_at:datetime:index
rake db:migrate

From now on, calling destroy on any user will set deleted_at to a current date instead of actually destroying the record.

Step 3

But, if you try to softly delete a user and display his messages, you’ll still get the same error as before. That’s because paranoia gem changes the default_scope of a model, so every query will treat softly deleted records as if they weren’t there (WHERE "users"."deleted_at" IS NULL will be added to queries). Of course, if you love your default_scope and you don’t ever want it to change, you can achieve that:

# not available in the newest release, you have to add paranoia gem as in step 1
acts_as_paranoid without_default_scope: true

You can also access your softly deleted user record in other ways:

by overriding user method in Message model:
```
def user
  User.unscoped { super }
end
```

by modifying belongs_to relation in Message model:
```
belongs_to :user, -> { with_deleted }
```

If you need to include or ignore softly deleted records in other places, there are several ways to do that in addition to the methods above:

User.with_deleted, User.without_deleted and User.only_deleted scopes
you can check if a record is softly deleted by using user.paranoia_destroyed? or user.deleted? methods

Note that if you want your indexes to ignore softly deleted records, you have to modify them as follows:

add_index :users, :some_column, where: "deleted_at IS NULL"

Step 4

If you want to restore a user, use this code:

User.restore(message.user.id)

Message.user.restore

Step 5

What if you want to softly delete a user and all of his messages? You can do that simply by implementing acts_as_paranoid for the Message model (as in step 2, you also need to add a migration) and then using dependent: :destroy

class User < ActiveRecord::Base 
  acts_as_paranoid 
  has_many :messages, dependent: :destroy 
  [...]

Note that if you didn’t implement acts_as_paranoid for Message model, the messages would be destroyed normally and you wouldn’t be able to restore them. Also, restoring the user doesn’t restore all of his messages unless you use:

User.restore(user_id, recursive: true)

user.restore(recursive: true)

Summary

Paranoia is a really simple gem that makes soft deleting easier. If you need such a simple functionality and you don’t need a better control that comes with implementing your own solution, choosing paranoia should work very well.