How to Use the Rails find Method

In this article, you will learn how to use the Rails find method.

Rails find Method

In Ruby on Rails, the find method is used to retrieve a record from the database based on its primary key. Here’s how you can use the find method in your Rails application:

Find a single record by ID

@user = User.find(1)

This will retrieve the user record with the ID of 1 from the database and assign it to the @user variable.

Find multiple records by IDs

@users = User.find([1, 2, 3])

This will retrieve the user records with the IDs of 1, 2, and 3 from the database and assign them to the @users variable as an array.

Find the first record

@user = User.first

This will retrieve the first user record from the database and assign it to the @user variable.

Find the last record

@user = User.last

This will retrieve the last user record from the database and assign it to the @user variable.

Find a record by a specific attribute

@user = User.find_by(email: "example@example.com")

This will retrieve the user record from the database with the email address of “example@example.com” and assign it to the @user variable.

Note that the find method raises an ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound error if the record with the specified primary key or attribute is not found in the database. To handle this error, you can use the find_by method instead, which returns nil if the record is not found.