How can I avoid running ActiveRecord callbacks?

This solution is Rails 2 only.

I just investigated this and I think I have a solution. There are two ActiveRecord private methods that you can use:

update_without_callbacks
create_without_callbacks

You're going to have to use send to call these methods. examples:

p = Person.new(:name => 'foo')
p.send(:create_without_callbacks)

p = Person.find(1)
p.send(:update_without_callbacks)

This is definitely something that you'll only really want to use in the console or while doing some random tests. Hope this helps!

You could try something like this in your Person model:

after_save :something_cool, :unless => :skip_callbacks

def skip_callbacks
  ENV[RAILS_ENV] == 'development' # or something more complicated
end

EDIT: after_save is not a symbol, but that's at least the 1,000th time I've tried to make it one.

The only way to prevent all after_save callbacks is to have the first one return false.

Perhaps you could try something like (untested):

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessor :skip_after_save

  def after_save
    return false if @skip_after_save
    ... blah blah ...
  end
end

...

m = MyModel.new # ... etc etc
m.skip_after_save = true
m.save

with Rails 6 you can now use the insert methods

from the documentation:

Inserts multiple records into the database in a single SQL INSERT statement. It does not instantiate any models nor does it trigger Active Record callbacks or validations. Though passed values go through Active Record's type casting and serialization.

# for rails 3
  if !ActiveRecord::Base.private_method_defined? :update_without_callbacks
    def update_without_callbacks
      attributes_with_values = arel_attributes_values(false, false, attribute_names)
      return false if attributes_with_values.empty?
      self.class.unscoped.where(self.class.arel_table[self.class.primary_key].eq(id)).arel.update(attributes_with_values)
    end
  end

I wrote a plugin that implements update_without_callbacks in Rails 3:

http://github.com/dball/skip_activerecord_callbacks

The right solution, I think, is to rewrite your models to avoid callbacks in the first place, but if that's impractical in the near term, this plugin may help.

For custom callbacks, use an attr_accessor and an unless in the callback.

Define your model as follows:

class Person << ActiveRecord::Base

  attr_accessor :skip_after_save_callbacks

  after_save :do_something, unless: :skip_after_save_callbacks

end

And then if you need to save the record without hitting the after_save callbacks you defined, set the skip_after_save_callbacks virtual attribute to true.

person.skip_after_save_callbacks #=> nil
person.save # By default, this *will* call `do_something` after saving.

person.skip_after_save_callbacks = true
person.save # This *will not* call `do_something` after saving.

person.skip_after_save_callbacks = nil # Always good to return this value back to its default so you don't accidentally skip callbacks.

Why would you want to be able to do this in development? Surely this will mean you are building your application with invalid data and as such it will behave strangely and not as you expect in production.

If you want to populate your dev db with data a better approach would be to build a rake task that used the faker gem to build valid data and import it into the db creating as many or few records as you desire, but if you are heel bent on it and have a good reason I guess that update_without_callbacks and create_without_callbacks will work fine, but when you are trying to bend rails to your will, ask yourself you have a good reason and if what you are doing is really a good idea.

I faced the same problem when I wanted to run a Rake Task but without running the callbacks for every record I was saving. This worked for me (Rails 5), and it must work for almost every version of Rails:

class MyModel < ApplicationRecord
  attr_accessor :skip_callbacks
  before_create :callback1
  before_update :callback2
  before_destroy :callback3

  private
  def callback1
    return true if @skip_callbacks
    puts "Runs callback1"
    # Your code
  end
  def callback2
    return true if @skip_callbacks
    puts "Runs callback2"
    # Your code
  end
  # Same for callback3 and so on....
end

The way it works is that it just returns true in the first line of the method it skip_callbacks is true, so it doesn't run the rest of the code in the method. To skip callbacks you just need to set skip_callbacks to true before saving, creating, destroying:

rec = MyModel.new() # Or Mymodel.find()
rec.skip_callbacks = true
rec.save

Not the cleanest way, but you could wrap the callback code in a condition that checks the Rails environment.

if Rails.env == 'production'
  ...