paper-trail-gem/paper_trail

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

7032 stars · 908 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

PaperTrail is a Ruby gem that tracks changes to Rails ActiveRecord models, recording every create, update, and destroy as versioned snapshots. It lets you audit model history, view a model at any past point, revert to any version, and restore destroyed records.

Use cases

• audit changes to rails models
• track who changed a record and when
• revert a model to a previous version
• restore a deleted record
• view how a model looked at any point in time
• diff versions of a model over its lifecycle

When to choose

• you need an audit log or version history for Rails ActiveRecord models
• you want undo/rollback and undelete capabilities for records
• you need to record which user made each change

When to avoid

• you are not using Ruby on Rails or ActiveRecord
• you need full database-level auditing rather than model-level versioning
• you only need simple timestamps without version history

Facets

library · maturity stable

logging orm middleware databases developer-tools web-development backend ruby jvm audit-trail versioning activerecord rails undo soft-delete-restore

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="paper-trail-gem/paper_trail")