Rails 5 makes belongs_to association required by default

In Rails 5, whenever we define a belongs_to association, it is required to have the associated record present by default after this change.

It triggers validation error if associated record is not present.

1
2class User < ApplicationRecord
3end
4
5class Post < ApplicationRecord
6  belongs_to :user
7end
8
9post = Post.create(title: 'Hi')
10=> <Post id: nil, title: "Hi", user_id: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>
11
12post.errors.full_messages.to_sentence
13=> "User must exist"
14
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As we can see, we can't create any post record without having an associated user record.

How to achieve this behavior before Rails 5

In Rails 4.x world To add validation on belongs_to association, we need to add option required: true .

1
2class User < ApplicationRecord
3end
4
5class Post < ApplicationRecord
6  belongs_to :user, required: true
7end
8
9post = Post.create(title: 'Hi')
10=> <Post id: nil, title: "Hi", user_id: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>
11
12post.errors.full_messages.to_sentence
13=> "User must exist"
14
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By default, required option is set to false.

Opting out of this default behavior in Rails 5

We can pass optional: true to the belongs_to association which would remove this validation check.

1
2class Post < ApplicationRecord
3  belongs_to :user, optional: true
4end
5
6post = Post.create(title: 'Hi')
7=> <Post id: 2, title: "Hi", user_id: nil>
8
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But, what if we do not need this behavior anywhere in our entire application and not just a single model?

Opting out of this default behavior for the entire application

New Rails 5 application comes with an initializer named new_framework_defaults.rb.

When upgrading from older version of Rails to Rails 5, we can add this initializer by running bin/rails app:update task.

This initializer has config named Rails.application.config.active_record.belongs_to_required_by_default = true

For new Rails 5 application the value is set to true but for old applications, this is set to false by default.

We can turn off this behavior by keeping the value to false.

1
2Rails.application.config.active_record.belongs_to_required_by_default = false
3
4class Post < ApplicationRecord
5  belongs_to :user
6end
7
8post = Post.create(title: 'Hi')
9=> <Post id: 3, title: "Hi", user_id: nil, created_at: "2016-02-11 12:36:05", updated_at: "2016-02-11 12:36:05">
10
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