In my app, only admins can create new User records. The user is emailed an activation link where they set their password.
I\'d like to use the has_secure_passord met
Since 4.X versions of rails, has_secure_password takes an option :validations. If you set it to false, it will not run validations.
The 3.X version of the gem does not support this parameter. However you can backport the activemodel/lib/active_model/secure_password.rb from latest 4.0.XRC code which supports this argument.
So with that, your code will look like this:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_secure_password :validations => false
...
end