Question

rails generate model User email:string password:string

creates the following migration script

class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :users do |t|
      t.string :email
      t.string :password
      t.timestamps
    end
  end
  def self.down
    drop_table :users
  end
end

What is timestamps and why is it getting created, when I didn’t ask it to be created?

Answer 1

Rails automatically adds two columns, created_at and updated_at to your table/migration/ActiveRecord model. If you don’t want them you can remove them.

Doing stuff for you automatically that you “didn’t ask it” is what Rails is good at: this is “convention over configuration (CoC).” You can (almost) always specify that you want something else, but in general, Rails will do stuff the way most users want it.

Created and updated timestamps are generally very useful.