Rails 6 provides a way to define default enum value. Let’s see how it works with an example. For this example we are using Rails alpha.

Default enum in action

Using the Post model, with status as draft & published, and will be using draft as default will be something like:

  class Post < ApplicationRecord
    enum status: %i[draft published], _default: :draft
  end

On checking a new post’s status turns out to be a draft. In previous versions of Rails this turns out to be nil.

Pull Request