Anonymous

Anonymous is a light-weight gem that makes anonymizing ActiveRecord models easy! Remember, friends don't let friends use production data in staging/development.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'anonymous'

And then execute:

$ bundle

To use this gem in your ActiveRecord models you need to do two things.

1. Include the Anonymous::ActiveRecord module in your model
2. Define a private method anonymization_definitions with the anonymization definitions inside it.

class User < ApplicationRecord
  include Anonymous::ActiveRecord

  private

  def anonymization_definitions
    {
      name: ["Bob Dylan", "Tony Blair"].sample,
      email: -> (user_email) { "fake_#{user_email}" },
      phone_number: -> (phone) { phone[0..-4] + 3.times.map{rand(10)}.join },
    }
  end
end

The return value of anonymization_definitions should be a Hash where the keys are the names of the attribute to be anonymized and the values are either a Proc object or the value to be filled in for the anonymized attribute.

If you use a proc or lambda as the argument then the attribute value will be provided to you in the proc's first argument. This is useful when you want your anonymized value to be a transformation of the original.

It is recommended that you use this gem in conjunction with a fake data generation library like faker.

  def anonymization_definitions
    {
      first_name: Faker::Name.first_name,
      email: Faker::Internet.unique.email,
    }
  end

Then when you have set up the gem correctly you can call anonymize and anonymize! on the model.

user = User.create(
  name: "John Smith",
  email: "john.smith@example.com",
  phone_number: "+447875477389"
)
user.anonymize! # or user.anonymize
user.reload
user.email
=> "fake_john.smith@example.com"
user.name
=> "Bob Dylan"
user.phone_number
=> "+447875477412"

The only difference between anonymize! and anonymize is that the former calls update_attributes! and the latter calls update_attributes.

You can configure the gem to alter the anonymisation behaviour.

# config/initializers/anonymous.rb

Anonymous.configure do |config|
  config.max_anonymize_retries = 0
end

1. max_anonymize_retries Under some situations (like if an RecordNotUnique error is raised when updating) the gem will retry the anonymization process. By default it will only do this once.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run bundle exec rake appraisal spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install.

To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, then run bundle install and bundle exec appraisal install, and finally run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/jamesstonehill/anonymous.

Some ideas for feature contributions:

• Support for ORMs other than ActiveRecord.
• More comprehensive retry functionality in Anonymous::ActiveRecord. A the moment we only retry if we get an ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique unique error. I didn't want to blindly rescue all errors, but it seems like that there are other times we would want to retry.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.