Simple way of turning off observers during rake task?

Question

I'm using restful_authentication in my app. I'm creating a set of default users using a rake task, but every time I run the task an activation email is sent out because of the observer associated with my user model. I'm setting the activation fields when I create the users, so no activation is necessary.

Anyone know of an easy way to bypass observers while running a rake task so that no emails get sent out when I save the user?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Rails 3.1 finally comes with API for this: http://api.rubyonrails.org/v3.1.0/classes/ActiveModel/ObserverArray.html#method-i-disable

ORM.observers.disable :user_observer
  # => disables the UserObserver

User.observers.disable AuditTrail
  # => disables the AuditTrail observer for User notifications.
  #    Other models will still notify the AuditTrail observer.

ORM.observers.disable :observer_1, :observer_2
  # => disables Observer1 and Observer2 for all models.

ORM.observers.disable :all
  # => disables all observers for all models.

User.observers.disable :all do
  # all user observers are disabled for
  # just the duration of the block
end

Where ORM could for example be ActiveRecord::Base

Answer 2

You could add an accessor to your user model, something like "skip_activation" that wouldn't need to be saved, but would persist through the session, and then check the flag in the observer. Something like

class User
  attr_accessor :skip_activation
  #whatever
end

Then, in the observer:

def after_save(user)
  return if user.skip_activation
  #rest of stuff to send email
end