RailsAuditLog

A modern, Zeitwerk-native Rails engine for auditing ActiveRecord changes. Tracks create, update, and destroy events with JSON-first storage, whodunnit actor context, and a clean query API.

Installation

Add to your Gemfile:

gem "rails_audit_log"

Run the install generator to create the migration:

bin/rails generate rails_audit_log:install
bin/rails db:migrate

Usage

Tracking a model

Include RailsAuditLog::Auditable in any ActiveRecord model:

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  include RailsAuditLog::Auditable
end

Every create, update, and destroy is now recorded automatically:

article = Article.create!(title: "Hello")
article.audit_log_entries.count      # => 1
article.audit_log_entries.first.event # => "create"

article.update!(title: "World")
article.audit_log_entries.last.object_changes
# => { "title" => ["Hello", "World"] }

Recording who made the change

Include RailsAuditLog::Controller in your ApplicationController and declare the actor source once:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include RailsAuditLog::Controller
  audit_log_actor { current_user }
end

The actor is captured automatically on every request and stored on each entry:

entry = article.audit_log_entries.last
entry.actor       # => #<User id: 42, name: "Alice">
entry.actor_type  # => "User"
entry.actor_id    # => 42

Actor context outside of controllers

Use RailsAuditLog.with_actor in background jobs, rake tasks, or seeds:

RailsAuditLog.with_actor(current_user) do
  article.update!(status: "published")
end

Requirements

• Ruby >= 3.3
• Rails >= 7.2

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

License

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