Paranoia is a re-implementation of acts_as_paranoid for Rails 3, using much, much, much less code.

You would use either plugin / gem if you wished that when you called destroy on an Active Record object that it didn't actually destroy it, but just "hid" the record. Paranoia does this by setting a deleted_at field to the current time when you destroy a record, and hides it by scoping all queries on your model to only include records which do not have a deleted_at field.

If you wish to actually destroy an object you may call destroy! on it or simply call destroy twice on the same object.

For Rails 3, please use version 1 of Paranoia:

gem 'paranoia', '~> 1.0'

For Rails 4, please use version 2 of Paranoia:

gem 'paranoia', '~> 2.0'

Of course you can install this from GitHub as well:

gem 'paranoia', :github => 'radar/paranoia', :branch => 'master'
# or
gem 'paranoia', :github => 'radar/paranoia', :branch => 'rails4'

Then run:

bundle install

Updating is as simple as bundle update paranoia.

Run:

rails generate migration AddDeletedAtToClients deleted_at:datetime

and now you have a migration

class AddDeletedAtToClients < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_column :clients, :deleted_at, :datetime
  end
end

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid

  ...
end

Hey presto, it's there!

If you want a method to be called on destroy, simply provide a before_destroy callback:

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid

  before_destroy :some_method

  def some_method
    # do stuff
  end

  ...
end

You can replace the older acts_as_paranoid methods as follows:

This gem is released under the MIT license.