Rails quick tips #1: Console sandbox

This is the first in a series of Ruby on Rails related quick tips I’m going to publish over the next few days/weeks.

If I had to name the most underused tool in most Rails developer’s toolboxes, rails console --sandbox would be my choice. Here’s what the documentation has to say on it:

If you wish to test out some code without changing any data, you can do that by invoking rails console --sandbox.

Here’s an example sandbox console session:

→ rails c --sandbox
Loading development environment in sandbox (Rails 5.2.0)
Any modifications you make will be rolled back on exit
[1] (rails_new) main: 0> User.count
   (17.7ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "users"
=> 1
[2] (rails_new) main: 0> User.destroy_all
  User Load (0.4ms)  SELECT "users".* FROM "users"
   (1.5ms)  SAVEPOINT active_record_1
  User Destroy (7.4ms)  DELETE FROM "users" WHERE "users"."id" = $1  [["id", 1]]
   (0.7ms)  RELEASE SAVEPOINT active_record_1
=> [# ">ROLLBACK, so we’re leaving everything just the way we originally found it.
That’s it for today, I’ll be back with another database related Rails quick tip soon.