User's Email Parameter Not Been Persisted Into The Database - ruby-on-rails

Question

I created a users model in a rails 4.1.8 application with the attributes email and password. I fired up rails console, user = User.new(email: "user#example.com" , password: "example") work but user.save saves the password and omits the email. below is the model, migrated database file and rails console log.
USER MODEL
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
before_save {self.email = email.downcase! }
VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+#[a-z\d\-]+(\.[a-z\d\-]+)*\.[a-z]+\z/i
validates :email, presence: true, length: { maximum: 255 },
format:{with: VALID_EMAIL_REGEX},
uniqueness: { case_sensitive: false }
has_secure_password
validates :password, presence: true, length: { minimum: 6 }
end
DATABASE FILE (For the User)
class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :users do |t|
t.string :email, unique: true
t.string :password_digest
t.timestamps null: false
end
end
end
RAILS CONSOLE LOG
<r.new(email: "user#example.com" , password: "example")
=> #<User id: nil, email: "user#example.com", password_digest: "$2a$10$jxwd/oriT
z2HklHK4b4nf.P.DWb6s35YTO.EbYwup0I...", created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>
irb(main):008:0> user.save
(1.0ms) BEGIN
User Exists (1.0ms) SELECT 1 AS one FROM `users` WHERE `users`.`email` = 'user#example.com' LIMIT 1
SQL (46.0ms) INSERT INTO `users` (`created_at`, `password_digest`, `updated_at`) VALUES ('2015-07-20 20:54:35', '$2a$10$jxwd/oriTz2HklHK4b4nf.P.DWb6s35YTO.Eb
Ywup0I.gMTOLSNKa', '2015-07-20 20:54:35')
(89.1ms) COMMIT
=> true
USERS CONTROLLER
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def new
end
private
def user_params
params.require(:user).permit(:email)
end
end
Looking at the log the email parameter was not inserted into; please, any help with this is appreciated.

Answer 1

Try the following in your User model:
before_save {self.email = email.downcase } # no "!"
downcase! edits the variable on which it is called and does not return the downcased string unless there is something to downcase (i.e., if you use it on an all lower-case email, it returns nil and based on your console output, this is what is happening). downcase alone should be fine.
downcase! on the API