Delete Paranoid Records In Rails

The ActsAsParanoid gem provides soft delete functionality to ActiveRecord objects in Rails. You can enhance a model with its functionality like so:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid
end

This gem hijacks ActiveRecord's standard destroy and destroy! functionality. If you call either of these methods, instead of the record being deleted from the database, it's deleted_at column is updated from nil to the current timestamp. Resulting in a soft deleted record.

If you call destroy or destroy! a second time (i.e. on a record that has already been soft deleted), it will be actually deleted from the database. Alternatively, you can call destroy_fully! from the beginning to skip the soft delete.