Waldit

Waldit is a Ruby gem that provides a simple and extensible way to audit changes to your ActiveRecord models. It leverages PostgreSQL's logical replication capabilities to capture changes directly from your database with 100% consistency.

• Automatic Auditing: Automatically track create, update, and delete operations on your models.
• Contextual Auditing: Add custom context to your audit records to understand who made the change and why.
• Flexible Configuration: Configure which tables and columns to watch, and how to store audit information.
• High Performance: Built on top of wal, which uses PostgreSQL's logical replication for minimal overhead.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "waldit"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install waldit

1. Configure your database adapter:

   First step is to configure in your config/database.yml and change your adapter to postgresqlwaldit, which is a special adapter that allows injecting waldit contextual information on your transactions:

   default: &default
     adapter: postgresqlwaldit
     # ...

2. Create an audit table:

   Generate a migration to create the waldit table:

   rails generate migration create_waldit

   And then add the following to your migration file:

   class CreateWalditTable < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
     def change
       create_table :waldit do |t|
         t.bigint :transaction_id, null: false
         t.bigint :lsn, null: false
         t.string :action, null: false
         t.jsonb :context, default: {}
         t.string :table_name, null: false
         t.string :primary_key, null: false
         t.jsonb :old, default: {}
         t.jsonb :new, default: {}
         t.timestamp :commited_at
   
         t.index [:table_name, :primary_key, :transaction_id], unique: true
       end
     end
   end

3. Configure Waldit:

   Create an initializer file at config/initializers/waldit.rb:

   Waldit.configure do |config|
     # A callback that returns true if a table should be watched.
     config.watched_tables = ->(table) { table != "waldit" }
   
     # A callback that returns an array of columns to ignore for a given table.
     config.ignored_columns = ->(table) { %w[created_at updated_at] }
   end

4. Add context to your changes:

   Use the with_context method to add context to your database operations:

   Waldit.with_context(user_id: 1, reason: "User updated their profile") do
     user.update(name: "New Name")
   end

5. Start the watcher:

   To process the events, you need to start a WAL watcher. The recommended way is to have a config/waldit.yml

   slots:
     audit:
       publications: [waldit_publication]
       watcher: Waldit::Watcher

   And then run:

   bundle exec wal start config/waldit.yml

Waldit uses a custom PostgreSQL adapter to set the waldit_context session variable before each transaction. This context is then captured by the logical replication slot and stored in the waldit table by the Waldit::Watcher.

The Waldit::Watcher is a streaming watcher that listens for changes in the logical replication slot and creates audit records in the waldit table. It processes events in batches to minimize the number of database transactions.