How to check if a record exists before creating a new one in rails3?

Question

Heres what I\'m trying to accomplish:

• I have a tagging system in place.
• Tags are created, when Posts are created (posts has_many :tags, :through => :tag

Answer 1

I believe the other answers are a bit dated. Here's how you should probably accomplish this for Rails 4

tag = Tag.first_or_initialize(:name => self.name, :user_id => current_user.id)
if !tag.new_record?
    tag.id = self.id
    tag.save
end