Rails console with inexplicable error on production on fetching a record from a specific model

Question

I have been facing this strange issue on production in Rails console: rails c -e production, where trying to fetch the user: User.first results in the following error:

2.7.2 :005 > User.first
Traceback (most recent call last):
ArgumentError (wrong number of arguments (given 0, expected 1))

Nothing can be figured out from this error. For some reason, it happens only with this user model, for rest of the models, everything is working fine.

Also, this error does not appear locally either in development or production mode.

Attaching the user model here, for reference:

# frozen_string_literal: true

class User < ApplicationRecord
  devise :database_authenticatable,
         :registerable,
         :recoverable,
         :rememberable,
         :trackable,
         :confirmable,
         :omniauthable,
         :validatable

 ....
end

Any pointers to solving this issue will be highly appreciated.

Update

On further investigation and some help from chatGPT, I figured that the devise' database_authenticable method in the cause of the error. On removing it, everything is working fine.

Now I need to figure out why that method is throwing the error.

Answer 1

Alright so the issue was that database_authenticable module has a method named password_digest which accepts an argument and hashes the password using bcrypt.

Now, I had an existing password_digest column in the database which was required by ActiveRecords's has_secure_password that I was using earlier. So that method was being called without arguments and hence throwing the error: ArgumentError (wrong number of arguments (given 0, expected 1)).

I had a migration to remove the password_digest column but apparently it failed at some point of time and I had to remove the column to make things work.

I hope it helps anyone facing a similar issue.