CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsdatabaseactiverecord
kdt
kdt

Reputation: 28499

Where do the created_at and updated_at columns come from?

All the tables in the database created by a rails application seem to have created_at and updated_at columns. What creates these? Are they optional, or does something internal rely on them?

Upvotes: 18

Views: 25301

Answers (3)

cristian
cristian

Reputation: 8744

In your database migration for every table you have something like t.timestamps. Remove this from your migration and your database columns created_at and updated_at won't be created.

Edit:

In case you need to create a new migration to remove those columns you can use remove_timestamps or remove_column

remove_timestamps definition shows how you can use remove_column if you want to.

def remove_timestamps(table_name, **options)
  remove_column table_name, :updated_at
  remove_column table_name, :created_at
end

Upvotes: 4

John Topley
John Topley

Reputation: 115372

They are created by default when you run the ActiveRecord migration for a model. ActiveRecord automatically populates/updates them when you create or update a model instance (and thus the underlying database table row) respectively.

You can remove the columns by removing the t.timestamps line from within the model migration file.

Upvotes: 27

Kishore Yekkanti
Kishore Yekkanti

Reputation: 991

Adding to what Octopus said, they are optional and are used to track the record creation and updating date time in the corresponding tables.

Upvotes: 1

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