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This week’s Rails contributors

The content for this week’s newsletter is sponsored by the 19 individuals who authored them!

Fixnum and Bignum are deprecated in Ruby 2.4

One of the notable changes in the upcoming Ruby 2.4 release is the unification of Fixnum and Bignum into a single Integer class. Following that change, the legacy classes were deprecated recently.

This pull request avoids triggering those deprecation warnings with a feature detection. If you maintain code that references those constants, you might want to adopt this pattern in your projects too!

Remove json gem dependency

Related to the unification of the integer classes: native extensions that references the rb_cFixum and rb_cBignum C constants need to be updated as well.

The popular json gem is one of those native extensions. Fortunately, all modern versions of Ruby bundles the json library. If your are targeting Ruby 1.9 and above, you could simply remove the json gem as a dependency.

Improved

Avoid bumping the class serial

Back in May, a regression was reported that Rails 5 invalidated Ruby’s class_serial on each request. This internal counter is used to invalidate the class-level method caches.

The issue was tracked down to the use of instance_exec. While there is hope that this restriction could be relaxed inside Ruby itself, this patch at least temporarily fixes the problem on Rails’ side.

Speed up Time.zone.now

Once upon a time, Time.zone.now could be quite a bit slower than the stock Time.now (allegedly up to 25 times slower). This pull request significantly closes the gap.

Fixed

Avoid compiling ruby keywords into template locals

Have you tried rendering a partial while injecting local variables called “class” or “module”? It wouldn’t work, and it will give you a pretty bizarre error.

This pull requests avoids the error by skipping over invalid local variable names, while still allowing them to be accessed via local_assigns.

You can read more about this issue, as well as the story behind this pull request in Peter’s blog post.

Gone

Remove undocumented Action Cable “faye mode”

Did you know that there was an undocumented “faye mode” for Action Cable?

No? Good. Because it’s now gone!

Wrapping up

That’s it for this week, as usual there were more changes than what we can fit, feel free to check them yourself here!

Until next week!

Cadet, you’re at the new frontier! Orbiting the red planet just yonder, you ponder and wonder:

Do Martians drink their Martinis on the rocks?

All this crew member knows is that he prefers his scoops on the Rails — good news, everyone: We’re setting course for such a delivery!

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This Week’s Multiplanetary Contributors

22 contribunauts came aboard the contributor list this week with their precious commits harvested for the good of all. You’ve earned this heart of gold: 💛

Action Cable buffers socket writes

Quoting the description:

Sockets can sometimes block, leading to reduced system throughput as threads get tied up.

Switching to incremental writing allows Action Cable to spread out writes such that a blocked socket can’t block writes to other sockets.

Callbacks leaves less backtrace lines

Callbacks — before_action and friends — moved forward by going back this week: back to the backtrace and removing traces of itself. Try that, McFly!

Check the description for an example, it’s quite easier to see in action.

Improved

Rails’ test runner supports after_run hooks

The Rails test runner switched to using minitest’s autorun across the board, as such it gained support for Minitest.after_run hooks.

autorun also guards against running tests twice, which could happen in some cases. But that’s now fixed too.

Fixed

Don’t leak ActiveModel::Errors default_proc

Previously when serializing ActiveModel::Errors via to_hash or as_json for instance, the default_proc would hide in the engine compartment and spring out when the crew was out of orbit.

No more of those alien capers on this ship!

Make :as option also set request format

In Rails 5 you can make an as of your test requests, as: :json that is.

After adding the option to ActionController::TestCase last week, we’ve opened the pod bay doors once ensuring the format is just right_._

Wrapping up

That’s it for this week, as usual there were more changes than what we can fit, feel free to check them yourself here!

Until next week!

Jon here welcoming you to This Week in Rails!

Today we’ll be touring the wondrous Ruby on Rails chocolate factory to see how its marvelous candy, consumed by web apps and developers everywhere, is made and tested.

Golden tickets in hand? Let’s go!

Welcome! 🎩

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week, 26 fabulous oompa-loompas concocted improvements to make your favorite candy even more delicious – including one for the first time!

Fix Bundler warnings about insecure github sources

If you upgrade to bundler 1.13 and use github options to specify gem sources in your Gemfile, you’ll see warnings when running bundle commands.

To fix, you can run bundle config github.https true on the command line.

Or if you don’t control the environment the Gemfile will execute in, you can add this to the Gemfile, like Rails now does:

git_source(:github) |repo_name| do
  “https://github.com/#{​repo_name}​.git”
end

Backported to 5-0-stable.

Improving the chocolate 🍩🍫

Puma docs: Disconnect connections before preloading

This pull request added documentation for config/puma.rb to recommend closing database connections if preloading an application that uses Active Record. See the discussions in the pull request and in puma/puma#1001 for more.

Improve assert_response helper

To improve productivity when writing tests, if an assert_response test fails, Rails nows outputs the actual response body if it’s not too large (less than or equal to 500 chars).

Fixing bugs in the candy 🍬

Clear attribute changes after touching

Following-up on a very good bug report, this PR fixed a Rails 5 regression so that calling ActiveRecord#touch when using optimistic locking once again leaves the model in a non-dirty state with no attribute changes.

Prevent mutation of constants

Tests using ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest were failing when run after any controller test that modified request.session_options. It turned out that  ActionController::TestSession::DEFAULT_OPTIONS was being mutated, and as a result, Rack::Session::Abstract::Persisted::DEFAULT_OPTIONS also, which made integration tests inherit that value and fail.

This pull request dup’ed the AC default options constant to prevent mutation, and a pull request to Rack was merged to freeze the Rack default options constant and avoid the issue in the future.

Force correct namespace with TransactionManager

This pull request fixed issue #26441: “NameError: uninitialized constant AR::ConnectionAdapters::DatabaseStatements::TransactionManager when calling reset_transaction”.

How to contribute? Some examples from this week 🍰

Fix warnings in the test suite

Running the Rails test suite can be a great way to uncover minor issues to fix. This pull request addressed 2 warnings in the test suite that arose simply from not wrapping a method argument in parentheses.

Add missing tests

Noticing that there were no tests for when ActiveRecord::Enum#enum was called with a specific suffix, this contributor added some.

Improve the Rails Guides

Better documentation is always welcome. After seeing issue #26286, this contributor helpfully improved the documentation for the render partial ‘as’ option.

Add a bug report template

The commit message says it all: “I created this for testing migrations in isolation and thought it would be helpful to others in the future to avoid having to dig through the Rails migration tests.”

Remove duplicate code

This elsif branch was a duplicate of the else branch just after it. You’ll never believe what happened next 😮.

How to inherit a world of unlimited imagination 🍭

That’s it for today’s tour, but the true journey has only just begun.

Starting today, choose any file in the Rails codebase and read it.

Pick an open issue on the master branch, and try to reproduce the bug using the Rails bug report templates.

Go through the Contributing to Ruby on Rails Guide. Set up your Rails test environment.

Pick an open pull request and test it or review it.

You’ll be surprised what baby steps like these can lead to!

Enjoy the wonderful chocolate – and see you next week.

Howdy everyone!

This is Prathamesh bringing you the changes from this week in Rails!

Featured

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week we had 22 awesome people making Rails better. We also had 3 people contributing for the first time. 

One more step towards Ruby 2.4 compatibility

Ruby 2.4 is coming! If you have already tried it with Rails 5, a key must be 32 bits error was raised due to a breaking change in Ruby 2.4 related to openssl cipher key lengths. It is now fixed, while keeping backward compatibility with any existing signed data. 🎉

Improved

Allow download of email attachments in the Mailer Previews

Now we can download email attachments in mailer previews similar to real-world emails thanks to this change.

Fixed

Make fixture_file_upload work in integration tests

This change makes sure that the  fixture_file_upload   test helper works properly in integration tests. In case you missed it, integration tests are the default way of testing controllers in Rails 5.

Use proper test adapter for Active Jobs inheriting from ApplicationJob

Rails 5 introduced ApplicationJob as the default base class for Active Job classes. When testing these classes, the proper test adapter was not being invoked due to looking for subclasses of ActiveJob::Base instead of its descendants. This change fixes it.

Wrapping Up

Although I enjoyed reviewing all the commits from the last week, there were as usual too many to mention exhaustively. But do check them out yourself here!   Until next week!

Oh, hello there!

This is Tim here bringing you your latest installment of This Week in Rails. We had another corker this week chock full of great updates - read on for the full details!

Featured

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week saw 99 commits from 27 fantabulous people contributed to Rails, including an amazing 5 first-timers! If you’d like to see your name up there next week, why not take a gander at the issues board, or you may even consider the next item for inspiration….

Documentation Galore

This week saw a whopping 11 documentation PRs successfully merged. Improvements to the documentation are not only gratefully received, but are a great way to start getting involved.

Improved

Make public asset use explicit

When calling asset_path with an invalid file name, this method would simply pass the string that you gave it back to you. This revision adds a configurable flag called unknown_asset_fallback which when set to false will raise an error if the asset is not found. Setting it to true will preserve the current behavior, but will indicate that it is being deprecated.

Don’t unnecessarily load a belongs_to when saving

This change prevents an already-loaded model from being reloaded if its id gets assigned to another model in a belongs_to association and then saved.

Fixed

Fix performance regression in TimeWithZone#to_time

Up until Rails 4.0.0.beta1, TimeWithZone#to_time could return a cached instance attribute. Since that release it has been coercing the value to a Time on each call. This revision reverts the old behavior, which, according to the author’s benchmarks, is over 5 times faster.

Allow send_file to declare a charset

Previously, calling send_file with type: "text/calendar; charset=utf-8" , would result in the charset’s being deleted - a bug that was fixed in this PR.

Wrapping Up

Although I enjoyed reviewing all the commits from the last week, there were as usual too many to mention exhaustively. But do check them out yourself here!

Until next week!

Hello there!

Yes, this is Godfrey again. I am glad a lot of you found last week’s Cool Trick™ useful. However, wouldn’t life be pretty boring if you just keep getting useful information? So I figured I would change things up a bit by delivering you an issue full of bad puns, dad jokes and other useless information. Let’s get to it!

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week, 11 new contributors along with 19 other returning contributors took some time to keep Rails chugging along.

Include The Content of “The Flash” In ETags

When confronted about code bloat, DHH does not take it lightly. This week, he pulled another one of those moves by committing the content of The Flash into the Rails codebase.

Redirect POST Requests With 307 Status Code

Chirag Singhal decided to stir up some drama here by sending browsers a HTTP 307 “YOU JUST DON’T GET IT” status code when upgrading POST/PUT/DELETE requests to HTTPS connections.

Remove over meta programming in AR::Relation

When Bogdan Gusiev dived into the AR::Relation code base, he was not pleased with what he saw. After making some tweaks in this PR, he seemed happy with the result. Why?

Well.

( •_•)>⌐■-■

(⌐■_■)

It doesn’t meta anymore.

YEEEEAAAAAAAAHH

Improve tag_option performance

Amadeus Folego identified  tag_options  as a hotspot in his application and decided to help improve its performance by throwing in some frozen strings. Cool!

Update docs with Action Cable Redis dependency

Coming back from his vacation, Rafael Reggiani Manzo redis™covered a new dependency for developing Rails. To ease the shock for the next person, he added the setup instructions to the guides.

Missing key should throw KeyError

Last but not least, Eileen M. Uchitelle committed a key error this week.

Wrapping Up

That’s all from me this week, I hope you find this information useless! For a more informative view, check out (no pun intended) the commits here.

Okay, please don’t unsubscribe! 😭 Your favorite rotation of editors will be back starting next week to replace me, so I’m sure things will get better from here!

Promise!

This is Godfrey, reporting in from Portland, OR. We have a lot to cover this week, let’s dive right into the stories so you can go back to watching Olympics!

👀
👅

Cool Trick™

Router Visualizer

Have you ever wondered what happens when you visit a URL (say /posts/5 ) in your Rails app? How does the Rails router know where to send your users?

The first (of many) step is to compare the URL against the routes table for potential matches. To make this lookup as fast as possible, the routes table is pre-compiled into a finite state machine, specifically a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA).

If that sounds very intimidating, don’t worry! The Rails router actually comes with a debugging tool that could generates an interactive visualization of your router NFA.

To generate one for your app, simply run Rails.application.routes.router.visualizer from your Rails console and save the returned string into an html file. (You will need the dot command-line tool for this – OS X users can get it from homebrew with brew install graphviz. )

…

Oh, is it not working? I forgot to mention that this tool is broken on Rails 5 by an internal refactor. Don’t worry though, because Seth fixed it for us in this pull request, which would come out with the next 5.0 patch release. If you are impatient, you could try it out by running the 5-0-stable branch.

Before you build your next billion-dollar startup with this awesome tool, please note that this is an undocumented ( private! ) API, and as you can see, could break unexpectedly between versions (or go away entirely).

While it’s definitely not Production Grade™ software, it’s still very useful for learning and debugging purposes. Enjoy it while it lasts!

New Stuff

Optional schema.rb Alignment

When dumping the schema, Rails tries to align things vertically for readability. However, this could result in a bigger diff than you would like when making changes to an existing table. With this PR, you now have an option to turn that off!

Controller Tests Now Supports as Option

While integration tests are strongly preferred over controller tests going forward, this PR allows you to simulate a request content type in controller tests using the same as: :json (or as: :xml , and so on) option. 

retry_on Gets A Job

Active Job’s retry_on API can now access to the job instance that failed, in addition to the exception object.

Make touch_later Respects no_touching

The no_touching API now composes correctly with touch_later as you would expect.

Query With Arrays and Ranges

With this PR, you will be able to pass an Array or Range object to where(some_column: …) when querying an array/range column, assuming your database supports those column types.

Fix Upgrade Task Documentation

This is a periodic PSA that when it comes to upgrading Rails apps, the update task is going to be your friend. In Rails 5, this command has been renamed to rails app:update , whereas when upgrading to Rails 4.2 and below, you would want to use rake rails:update instead.

See the upgrade guide for more details.

In Case You Missed It…

Active Job Defaults To Async Adapter

In case you missed it, Active Job in Rails 5 defaults to using the “async” adapter for jobs processing (the previous default was the “inline” adapter). The documentation has been updated to reflect that change.

Wrapping Up

That’s it from This Week in Rails! As always, there were a lot more changes than we have room for. If you are interested, definitely go check them out yourself!

Until next week!

Hello! This is Roque covering latest events from the Rails community. Like in Rio, our week was busy with plenty of amazing participants #Rio2016 🇧🇷

Featured

Security releases!

New Rails versions are released with many important security fixes. If you have not done already, do not drop the ball and upgrade as soon as possible.

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week 29 code athletes contributed to Rails. We also got 1 first time contributor. Welcome aboard the Rails Games!

Allow specifying encoding of parameters by action

Controllers can list the parameters with parameter_encoding, providing the action and the encoding type.
This allows parameters in the same request to have particular encoding types.

Fixed

Fix thread_mattr_accessor class leaking

thread_mattr_accessor was sharing the variable with superclasses and subclasses. Setting the variable in one would compromise the other.

Fix the Accept header overwritten issue in integration tests

XHR integration tests were overwriting the Accept header and creating inconsistency with HTTP_ACCEPT.

Improved

Better logging of cached partial renders

A while ago, DHH suggested an improvement to better log cached partial renders. It looks pretty clean!

Show error message when Rails runner fails

The Rails runner will now give you a hint of what is going on whenever it fails with an exception.

Wrapping Up

That’s it from This Week in Rails! There were many other great code athletes, too numerous to list here, but feel free to check them out!

Until next week!

Hi everyone!

Rails 5.0.0.1, 4.2.7.1, and 3.2.22.3 have been released! These release contain important security fixes, so please upgrade when you can.

Versions 5.0.0.1, 4.2.7.1, and 3.2.22.3 contain a fix for CVE-2016-6316 which you can read about here. Version 4.2.7.1 also contains CVE-2016-6317 which you can read about here.

To ease upgrading, these releases contain only security fixes.

Here are checksums for the gems:

Rails 3.2.22.3

[aaron@TC release]$ shasum *3.2*
6ba79586fa0c60de8e13d0e2bdd9508ae03e0222  actionmailer-3.2.22.3.gem
aa26322bef392b2911d94d4d7390b7c20d2ac8c6  actionpack-3.2.22.3.gem
8a5c3cf72592d670b23e2ccfa22d13929dbbed6e  activemodel-3.2.22.3.gem
2354c885903252bc8acd6cd03c13f0b8f3f4d9a4  activerecord-3.2.22.3.gem
824b2a7eb4b65fd70051006645400ad16aeb095e  activeresource-3.2.22.3.gem
3d026ae2c0aa9807510d033abee424ada82782bf  activesupport-3.2.22.3.gem
9d40b008c664fb234158f8e68c589dc410520c96  rails-3.2.22.3.gem
26e6d7cb9b6fdb160486e8b850ca31fff250b69f  railties-3.2.22.3.gem

Rails 4.2.7.1

[aaron@TC release]$ shasum *4.2*
00a9b8ed92e96abf11aead750f98558a0bc136a7  actionmailer-4.2.7.1.gem
b7c08b66da4532acc84d099733a8148bbbdbb108  actionpack-4.2.7.1.gem
1e843b678e08b503f1521fcbf159f166141221b9  actionview-4.2.7.1.gem
93acc93ae1098ef0c5ac6798ca700422b484114c  activejob-4.2.7.1.gem
b0a0008a67d8995da0c25e610c659ff69c031c0d  activemodel-4.2.7.1.gem
07537cb059779e92615a34b205f3b1e8a722d78b  activerecord-4.2.7.1.gem
33b1220c3739453b872cdc1eda193841c0a14033  activesupport-4.2.7.1.gem
d39f1fc8c7d86ada1c7243bd713b03ec09889b8b  rails-4.2.7.1.gem
5f39ebc0f270d95df72ef38311362cf2d0aaaa87  railties-4.2.7.1.gem

Rails 5.0.0.1

[aaron@TC release]$ shasum *5.0*
721f9e6079d184b58b225a88b28c8aeca6b3f388  actioncable-5.0.0.1.gem
1dfd080bd3e780816fb0d4b25a8d5cf111e78784  actionmailer-5.0.0.1.gem
b557b5c3b94b63356de93c985bf70be8df7619f3  actionpack-5.0.0.1.gem
d58cf5cb5b4dc4e0cc33eea9c3d9c4426363922a  actionview-5.0.0.1.gem
9f1038a26bac62c97189f664c53729bf74abee24  activejob-5.0.0.1.gem
b09333355633f7674f04e098e6766c0fe3ac966b  activemodel-5.0.0.1.gem
4ca136b557265b4ee307c8f936180680cc0fcde0  activerecord-5.0.0.1.gem
297d6b1bb741226a1aec4081cbdfa61ce27d8e8b  activesupport-5.0.0.1.gem
24b7f00cbd411784be774dc526e5398a9c438a3d  rails-5.0.0.1.gem
a46d76ae93a8c740a63ef245af3bbe75e491e4f0  railties-5.0.0.1.gem

Hello! This is Andy bringing you another week’s worth of highlights from Rails. Today also marks the official start of the #Rio2016 Olympic Games 🇧🇷 . New events this time around include golf, sevens rugby and kitesurfing, so check those out!

Featured

Rails Contributors

This week we’d like to thank 18 contributors to Rails and extend a welcome to this week’s only first-time contributor!

New exception handling APIs for ActiveJob

New APIs retry_on and discard_on have been added to ActiveJob. These provide hooks for a job class to perform some additional functionality when exceptions occur. The PR for this feature has some nice discussion, check it out!

New ActiveRecord transaction error classes

ActiveRecord can now distinguish between serialization failures and deadlocks. A more specific error in the case of deadlocks is now returned where supported (currently only PostgreSQL). Check the PR for an analysis of other database adapters and the latest code as the class names may have changed.

Fixed

Activesupport::Duration inconsistencies around daylight saving time

Since this commit from December, “week” durations are no longer converted to days. This means we need to add :weeks to the parts that ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone will consider being of variable duration to take account of DST transitions.

Improved

YAML Parameters backwards compatibility

This change provides backwards compatibility for Rails 4.2 based on YAML serialization changes made in Rails 5.

Wrapping Up

That’s it from This Week in Rails! There were many other great contributions and investigations too numerous to list here, but feel free to check them out!

Until next week!