Why does my rails rollback when I try to user.save?

Question

I have installed the RailsTutorial sample app(the twitter like application) and am trying to understand why the following piece of console code does not update the database

Answer 1

I had the same issue of the database rolling back my transactions in the console while I was trying to update the admin property on a user. If you are doing the Hartl rails tutorial, the issue is that if you type in user.errors.messages in the console, it will tell you that the password is too short. That is because in the model there is a password validation before it saves and hashes your password into the password_digest.

The work around to this is in the console perform your normal activity like setting user.admin = true, and then when you are done, enter user.password = "foobar", then enter user.password_confirmation = "foobar", and then when you perform user.save it will commit all your changes.