Active Audit - Inspect models changes

Active Audit is an ORM extension for Ruby on Rails to track model changes. It also supports keeping record of who made the changes and why.

Getting started

You can add it to your Gemfile like this:

gem 'active-audit'

then run bundle install to install it.

Next, you need to run the generator:

$ rails generate active_audit:install

Usage

It can be used to track changes to ActiveRecord, Mongoid, elasticsearch-persistance.

Auditing a model is as simple as including the ActiveAudit::Base module to you model like this:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  include ActiveAudit::Base
end

You can define options for you model auditing using the audit function. It takes as arguments the attributes you want to track their changes and it can take one or more of the following options:

type: string/symbol that represents the type of the item being audited (by default its the class name in underscore style).
except: a list of model attributes not to audit changes (if it was defined with only the audited attributes will be the difference between the two but that is not recommended as it's not clear).
unless: a lambda function returns a boolean and the auditing will be cancled if it evalutaes to true or a symbol represents a name of an instance function of your model.

Tracking Active Record association changes

one to many (belongs_to) assocation changes can be audited by auditing the foreign key itself.
many to many (belongs_to) assocation changes can be audited by adding the option association to the audit function.

Here is our model with a bunch of auditing options:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  include ActiveAudit::Base
  audit :price, :availability, :free_shipping, :num_items, type: :cool_product, associations: [:stores ], unless: lambda { |product| product.availabilty === :discontinued }
end

Configuraton

Active Audit is extremely simple to configure. Just check the config/initializers/auditing.rb file. By default it will be like this:

ActiveAudit.configure do |config|
  config.storage_adapter = :test
  #config.current_user_method = :current_user
  #config.ignored_attributes = %w(created_at updated_at)
  #config.delayed_auditing = false
  #config.job_queue = :audits
  #config.default_user = { id: 1 }
  #config.extract_user_profile = lambda { |user| { id: user.id } }
end

The configurations are commented out but they are active since these are the default configuration.

The available options are described in the table bellow:

Option	Description
`current_user_method`	The name of a function exists in your base controller that returns current user object (default `:current_user`).
`ignored_attributes`	A list of attribute names that will be ignored from auditing in all audited models (default `%w(created_at updated_at)`).
`delayed_auditing`	Whether to use ActiveJob delayed jobs or not (default `false`).
`job_queue`	The name of the queue to push jobs into in case `delayed_auditing` is set to `true`.
`default_user`	A hash containing the information of the user that will be used in case that `current_user_method` returned `nil`.
`extract_user_profile`	a lambda function used to extract a user profile from the user object returned by `current_user_method`.

Production Use

Storage Adapters

Active Audit implements the repository pattern to save and retrieve model audits. By default it will use its TestAdapter to do the job which is no more than logging the audits using Rails logger. Of course that is not the behaviour you want to have on production. You can use one of the available Active Audit storage adapters: :mongo, :active_record, :elasticsearch.

active-audit