no no. not that kind of audit :p. I’ve been spending the last couple of days going over different versioning/audit gems to find the best for my project, and this post is to compare and comment on my findings. currently this goes over vestal_versions, paper_trail, and acts_as_audited. if you know of any others i should add please let me know.

lets get down to brass tax. here is a simple table of comparison, then i will go into detail for each gem. also if you see any features that should be added to the list, let me know, i will add them and compare each gem.

	Vestal Versions	Paper Trail	Acts as Audited
Popularity
Watchers	359	156	253
Forks	19	4	24
Features
Storage	Serialized	Yaml	Yaml
History	Changes	Full	Full
Diff	-/Fields/-*	-/Old/All	All/Fields/All
Log Action	No	Yes	Yes
Log User	No	Yes	Yes
Version Numbers	Yes	No	Yes*
Include/Exclude Fields	Yes	Partial*	yes
Reconstruct	No	Yes	Yes*
Association Access	Yes	Yes	Yes
Test Suite
Test Count	35	44	69
Assertions	154	65	46
Failures	0	5	0
Errors	0	11	0
Coverage	76.69%	72.35% ?	92.68%

Vestal Versions

as a side note, this might not belong here as it may be more aimed toward ‘versioning’ and not exactly as an auditing solution. but i put it here anyway.

im slightly put off by vestal. It has a lot of nifty features but a few of the big things really make it a non-solution (at least for me.) note for the rcov coverage i had to manually place an Rcov task in Rakefile, but it worked seemlessly.

Pros

• easy to revert to older versions
• able to revert by datetime or version number

Cons

• never stores full object in history
• no action/user tracking
• destroys history on record removal

Now for me that last one is a definite deal breaker. even when using isparanoid with vestal the history is removed (yet you still have a primary record.) though i have talked to the author of vestalversions and this is something that will be fixed/optional in the 1.0 release so thats good. as for the action tracking you can technically check if the changes field is null or not (it will be null on the create version)

Paper Trail

paper trail as of right now, I feel is one of the best for this. though it is also missing a few minor things that would make it a lot better. and the testing suite needs and overhaul. one ‘minor’ thing about papertrail is that it only has an :ignore option for ignoring fields to be audited. this i personally don’t find too much of a problem though, and im sure the other could easily be implemented.

Pros

• full history always
• reify (revert) for record reconstruction is awesome!
• reconstructed records keep id & timestamps
• able to turn papertrail off temporarily

Cons

• no time based reify (revert)
• no version tracking
• poor test coverage

for me version tracking isn’t to bad. a version # really isn’t that important as long as the history is actually there. and given my project people are going to worry about time more than a version number.

Acts as Audited

aaa has a few nice features though its a bit quirky around the edges. a few things i think are important to an auditing plugin just don’t exist or act really funny with aaa.

Pros

• stores less in database than papertrail
• cleaner interface for doing ‘asuser’ stuff than paper trail

Cons

• reconstruct gives record a new ID and timestamps
• whodunnit limited to ‘username’ attribute on currentuser

the new id & timestamps on record reconstruction im not a big fan of. as if you have associations that also need to be reconstructed this will put a hamper into the entire operation.