Be Readonly for ActiveRecord 3.x/4.x/5.x and Rails 3.x/4.x/5.x

Makes any ActiveRecord model become read-only in Rails with:

be_readonly

There are other gems that provide similar behavior, but from what I saw, they did either too much or too little. This one is just right, and be_readonly couldn't be much shorter to type and read without just being "readonly", but readonly would be too easily confused with related instance methods in ActiveRecord.

What it does

Adding this gem to you bundle will add a class method called be_readonly on each model when Rails loads via a railtie.

If be_readonly is called on the class, it defines the class methods: delete and delete_all and the instance methods: before_create, before_save, before_destroy, update_all, and delete to all raise a ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord error. It also defines the instance method readonly? to return true, which disables a lot that tries to create and update in ActiveRecord.

Setup

In your ActiveRecord/Rails 3.0+ project, add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'activerecord-be_readonly'

For the development version:

gem 'activerecord-be_readonly', :git => 'git://github.com/garysweaver/activerecord-be_readonly.git'

Then run:

bundle install

Usage

In your model just include this, preferably somewhere noticeable like at the top:

be_readonly

Using without Rails

Or if you are off-rails, but use ActiveRecord, just do this in the model class:

include BeReadonly::Now

Configuration

You can create an initializer (/config/initializers/activerecord-be_readonly.rb) with the following options:

To turn off read-only application-wide, set the enabled setting to false (useful if you'd like to turn off read-only only for tests, etc.)

BeReadonly.enabled = false    # Default: true

To disable read-only for record creation application-wide, set the create_allowed setting to true

BeReadonly.create_allowed = true    # Default: false

Contributors

Thanks to:

• vkhater
• Gabriel Naiman
• Gary Weaver
• Kevin Zych

License

Copyright (c) 2012 Gary S. Weaver, released under the MIT license.