Rails 5 changed belongs_to default validation

New Rails 5 applications comes with this initializer:

# config/initializers/active_record_belongs_to_required_by_default.rb
Rails.application.config.active_record.belongs_to_required_by_default = true

So now, belongs_to associations require presence by default.

In order to make this relation optional you can change the initializer value for the whole app, or add optional: true to your relation:

belongs_to :user, optional: true

That's the code change.