ruby on rails - How can I avoid running ActiveRecord callbacks?

Question

I have some models that have after_save callbacks. Usually that's fine, but in some situations, like when creating development data, I want to save the models without having the callbacks run. Is there a simple way to do that? Something akin to...

Person#save( :run_callbacks => false )

or

Person#save_without_callbacks

I looked in the Rails docs and didn't find anything. However in my experience the Rails docs don't always tell the whole story.

UPDATE

I found a blog post that explains how you can remove callbacks from a model like this:

Foo.after_save.clear

I couldn't find where that method is documented but it seems to work.

Answer 1

Use update_column (Rails >= v3.1) or update_columns (Rails >= 4.0) to skip callbacks and validations. Also with these methods, updated_at is not updated.

#Rails >= v3.1 only
@person.update_column(:some_attribute, 'value')
#Rails >= v4.0 only
@person.update_columns(attributes)

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Persistence.html#method-i-update_column

#2: Skipping callbacks that also works while creating an object

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessor :skip_some_callbacks

  before_validation :do_something
  after_validation :do_something_else

  skip_callback :validation, :before, :do_something, if: :skip_some_callbacks
  skip_callback :validation, :after, :do_something_else, if: :skip_some_callbacks
end

person = Person.new(person_params)
person.skip_some_callbacks = true
person.save

UPDATE (2020)

Apparently Rails has always supported :if and :unless options, so above code can be simplified as:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessor :skip_some_callbacks

  before_validation :do_something, unless: :skip_some_callbacks
  after_validation :do_something_else, unless: :skip_some_callbacks
end

person = Person.new(person_params)
person.skip_some_callbacks = true
person.save