ActiveCapture is a Ruby on Rails gem that allows you to capture and restore records along with their nested associations. It supports saving data to JSON files and restoring it later, making it useful for auditing, backups, rollback functionality, or seeding data.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

 gem 'active_capture'

And then execute:

 $ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

 $ gem install active_capture

user = User.find(1)
ActiveCapture::Capture.take(user)

This will create a JSON file in the snapshots/ directory.

user = User.find(1)
ActiveCapture::Capture.take(user, associations: [:posts, :comments])

This will include all associated posts and comments of the user.

user = User.find(1)
ActiveCapture::Capture.take(user, filename: "custom_user_data.json")

The file will be saved as snapshots/custom_user_data.json.

user = User.find(1)
ActiveCapture::Capture.restore(user, filename: "user/1_20250329013025.json")

This will restore the user's state from the given file.

user = User.find(1)
ActiveCapture::Capture.restore(user, associations: [:posts])

Only the specified associations (posts) will be restored.

task restore_user: :environment do
  user = User.find(1)
  ActiveCapture::Capture.restore(user, filename: "user_backup.json")
end

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/bhawsartanmay/active_capture.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.