How do you delete an ActiveRecord object?

Question

How do you delete an ActiveRecord object?

I looked at Active Record Querying and it does not have anything on deleting that I can see.

1. Delete by id,

2. Delete the current object like: user.remove,

3. Can you delete based on a where clause?

Answer 1

It's destroy and destroy_all methods, like

user.destroy User.find(15).destroy User.destroy(15) User.where(age: 20).destroy_all User.destroy_all(age: 20) 

Alternatively you can use delete and delete_all which won't enforce :before_destroy and :after_destroy callbacks or any dependent association options.

User.delete_all(condition: 'value') will allow you to delete records without a primary key

Note: from @hammady's comment, user.destroy won't work if User model has no primary key.

Note 2: From @pavel-chuchuva's comment, destroy_all with conditions and delete_all with conditions has been deprecated in Rails 5.1 - see guides.rubyonrails.org/5_1_release_notes.html

Answer 2

There is delete, delete_all, destroy, and destroy_all.

The docs are: older docs and Rails 3.0.0 docs

delete doesn't instantiate the objects, while destroy does. In general, delete is faster than destroy.