Rails 5.0! Can you believe it? We only just celebrated the tenth anniversary of Rails 1.0 a few days ago. Time flies when you’re having fun with good friends, and we’ve never had more fun or better friends in the Rails community, so no wonder it’s going swoosh! Now this is just the first beta release, but Rails 5.0.0.beta1 is already running Basecamp 3 in production.

Action Cable

The big new thing in Rails 5.0 is a brand-new framework for handling WebSockets called Action Cable. It’s a completely integrated solution that includes an EventMachine-powered connection loop, a thread-backed channels layer for server-side processing, and a JavaScript layer for client-side interaction. It’s incredibly easy to use, and makes designing live features like chat, notifications, and presence so much easier. It’s what’s powering all those features of Basecamp 3, if you want to see it in action.

What’s really lovely about Action Cable is that you get access to your entire Active Record and PORO domain model in your WebSockets work. We even added a brand-new ActionController::Renderer system that makes it trivial to render your templates outside of controllers, when you want to reuse server-side templates for WebSocket responses.

In development, Action Cable runs in-process with the rest of your app. To do this, we’ve switched the default development server from Webrick to Puma. In production, you may well want to run Action Cable servers in their own processes. That’s how we run it at Basecamp at scale.

Special thanks to Pratik Naik and Javan Makhmali for their formative work.

API mode

Rails is not only a great choice when you want to build a full-stack application that uses server-side rendering of HTML templates, but also a great companion for the new crop of client-side JavaScript or native applications that just needs the backend to speak JSON. We’ve made this even clearer now with the new –api mode. If you create a new Rails application using rails new backend --api, you’ll get a slimmed down skeleton and configuration that assumes you’ll be working with JSON, not HTML.

There’s still more work to be done on this feature, but we’re off to a great start. By default, API mode just relies on #to_json calls on model classes. But you can either use Jbuilder, Active Model Serializers, or look at the new JSONAPI::Resources project for a more advanced solution.

Thanks in particular to Santiago Pastorino and Jorge Bejar for making this happen.

One Rails command to rule them all

Why are some commands living in bin/rails and some commands living in bin/rake? That’s a common question, especially for beginners, and we never had a good answer (just lots of technical excuses). So now we’ve committed to making bin/rails the one master command to rule them all. All your rake commands are available through here as a gateway, but we’ll eventually port many of them over. So your fingers will now have to get used to bin/rails db:migrate instead of bin/rake db:migrate. That should only take a few months!

Kasper Timm Hansen has been herding this project.

A few other highlights

• New Attributes API by Sean Griffin.
• The test runner now reports failures inline, so you don’t have to complete the suite to see what went wrong.
• ApplicationRecord has been born as a default parent class of all models created by the generators.
• ActiveRecord::Relation#in_batches makes it much easier to deal with record work in batches at a time to lessen memory overloads.
• Post.where(‘id = 1’).or(Post.where(‘id = 2’)) gives you exactly what you’d think!
• No more accidentally halting Active Record callbacks because the last statement is false. Now you throw(:abort) explicitly!

You should really checkout the CHANGELOGs, though. There’s just so much new and good stuff available in all the frameworks:

• Action Mailer CHANGELOG
• Action Pack CHANGELOG
• Action View CHANGELOG
• Active Model CHANGELOG
• Active Record CHANGELOG
• Active Support CHANGELOG
• Active Job CHANGELOG
• Railties CHANGELOG

Claudio did a nice little slide deck walking through some of his favorite improvements (and removals!).

Note too that we’re cooking Turbolinks 5 – the one with native iOS and Android wrapper implementations! – for concurrent release with Rails 5. You can follow along on basecamp/turbolinks/v5.

Maintenance consequences

As per our maintenance policy, the release of Rails 5.0 will mean that bug fixes will only apply to 5.0.x, regular security issues to 5.0.x and 4.2.x, and severe security issues also to 5.0.x and 4.2.x (but when 5.1 drops, to 5.1.x, 5.0.x, and 4.2.x). This means 4.1.x and below will essentially be unsupported! Ruby 2.2.2+ is now also the only supported version of Ruby for Rails.

Please help us make Rails 5.0 solid!

We rely on the feedback from everyone in the community to flush out bugs and upgrade issues ahead of a big release like this. So please give Rails 5.0 a try on your app, and if you’re starting a new app today, you should probably use the beta1 for that, if you’re just the least bit savvy with Rails.

Issues can be recorded on the Github issues tracker.

Already, 789 people have contributed to this new release of Rails. Please do become one of them!

Your dynamic release manager duo for Rails 5.0 is Eileen M. Uchitelle and Sean Griffin. And the undisputed PR merge champ is Rafael França!

Hello everyone! 🌨

This is Vipul, bringing you the latest from Rails.

P.S: Here’s something for all those at RubyKaigi 🍣. Enjoy!

Featured

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week 26 fabulous people contributed to Rails, including 6 first-time contributors! Check out the list of issues if you’d like to help out as well.

Sprockets: Reintroduce gzip file generation

GZip file generation was taken out last year from sprockets. This change re-introduces compressed file generation and parallel file writing, which is useful for web servers that don’t support gzipping static assets. This is pretty useful if you are on a service like Heroku.

New Stuff

Introduce after_{create,update,delete}_commit callbacks

New shortcuts were added to after_commit .. on: :action.

For example, after_commit :add_to_index_later, on: :create can now be written as after_create_commit :add_to_index_later.

Improved

Rails API: Ability to return error responses in json format in development

Previously error pages are always being delivered in html pages in development mode, which is not handy when you would like to view json responses. This change adds support for viewing errors in json format. It also makes sure that when requesting resources like post/1.json, when error occurs, it returns json response based on json format in url, unlike previously used html format.

Changed the protect_from_forgery prepend default to false

protect_from_forgery will now be inserted into the callback chain at the point it is called in the application. This is useful for cases where you want to protect_from_forgery after you perform required authentication callbacks or other callbacks that are required to run after forgery protection.

If needed, you can use protect_from_forgery prepend: true to always run protect_from_forgery before others.

request_forgery_protection initializer is removed from Rails API

Usually in Rails API, you would not use protect_from_forgery, by default. The initializer to add this option- request_forgery_protection is now removed if you are creating an API.

Fixed

Subscribing to notifications while inside the instrumented section.

Previously if we tried to do

ActiveSupport::Notifications.instrument('foo') do
  ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe('foo') {}
end

it would create an error, because for the subscribe inside block, the dynamic subscription does not yet exist. This change make sure that subscriptions inside instrumentation get notified as well.

Add redirection path in the error message of assert_response if response is :redirect

Previously, if assert_response was checking for any non-redirect response like :success and actual response was a :redirect then, the error message displayed was like - Expected response to be a <success>. This change, now shows the redirected path in error response as - Expected response to be a <success>, but was a redirect to <http://test.host/posts/lol>

Wrapping Up

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are many more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself.

Until next time!

Hello everyone!

This is Marcel, bringing you the latest news in Rails.

Featured

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week 28 fabulous people contributed to Rails. Check out the list of issues if you’d like to see your name up there.

New Stuff

Rails Command Infrastructure

The infrastructure needed to support the movement of rake tasks to the rails command is now in place. This paves the way to make it easier to learn commands for persons new to Rails.

Improved

Allow use of minitest-rails gem with test runner

An explicit global namespace to Rails::TestUnitReporter has been added to resolve a namespace conflict between minitest-rails and Rails test runner.

Fixed

Initialized STI models are now casted to the default type

If a database default was specified for the type column used in Single Table Inheritance (STI), it did not cast new instances to default type on initialize. This is now fixed.

Replace ActionMailer::Base.respond_to? with respond_to_missing?

This simple refactor utilizes the respond_to_missing? hook introduced in Ruby 1.9. This prevents the usage of the method method from raising a NameError.

Clarify connection pool error message

The previously error message whenever all connections in the pool were used up, did not mention that.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are many more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself.

Until next time!

Hello everyone!

This is Godfrey, bringing you the latest news deals in Rails. Have you been holding out on getting the latest copy of Rails? Don’t wait any longer as we are having our biggest sale of the year this weekend. Check out these unbelievable deals before they are gone!

Featured

🆓 RailsConf Tickets Giveaway

Limited Time Offer! Enter the RailsConf Tickets Giveaway (a.k.a. the Call For Proposals) by submitting a talk proposal! If your talk is selected, you will win a FREE admission to the conference!

Terms and conditions apply, see website for details.

🆓 Lifetime Rails Contributor Membership

As Seen On The Interwebs! Start collecting points like these 25 individuals with our award-winning rewards program. To apply for your FREE membership, simply submit a pull request to Rails. Membership never expires!

New Stuff

🆓 PostgreSQL Geometric Types Support

In-Store Only! Get FREE support for PostgreSQL data types (such as line, path and polygon) in schema.rb when you upgrade to Rails 5.

🆓 Certificate of Origin

Bonus Upgrade Offer! Rails 5 apps will be equipped with a FREE Origin header check if one is present in the request. When upgrading, existing apps will be given an option to enable the security feature at no additional cost.

Improved

🆓 Source Code Extraction

NOT A Pricing Error! If something went wrong in an AJAX request, Rails will now throw in the extracted source code in plaintext for FREE, making things easier to read in your browser’s console.

🆓 Dead Code Removal

Everything Must Go! As part of our clearance, a piece of dead code was discovered and promptly set FREE. No wonder everyone is so excited!

Fixed

🆓 Race Condition Protection

While Supplies Last! When the Evented File-System Monitoring project landed on master, a contributor pointed out a potential race condition. After ( a few attempts, we have finally arrived at a solution to FREE us from the danger!

Correction

🆓 byebug Upgrade Program

Manufacturer Rebate! In the last issue, we recommended byebug 7.0. Turns out the latest version is actually 8.2.1 (as of this week), which addressed some issue with the 7.0 release.

To compansate you for the trouble, we decided to offer a FREE byebug upgrade program for our readers. Simply change your Gemfile entry accordingly and run bundle install, and our agents will make sure the library is upgraded.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are many more changes deals than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself.

Until next time!

Hi everyone! This is Godfrey bringing you the latest news from Rails.

Featured

RailsConf 2016

The RailsConf 2016 website is up! This year, we will be gathering in Kansas City from May 4 to May 6. If you would like to submit a talk, the call for proposals (CFP) is open from now until Jan 15!

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week we have seen commits from 29 different contributors in the Rails repository, including 6 new faces!

Improved

Frozen FK Names For Association

When you use a non-frozen (i.e. mutable) string as a Hash key, Ruby would have to duplicate and freeze it in order to guarantee a stable hash key.

This is usually fine, but when that string is used to build many different hashes, the work adds up. Fortunately, we can simply freeze it upfront to avoid the repeated work.

Faster byebug

byebug 7.0 has recently been released with some major performance improvements. (See this pull request for details.) If you are using byebug for debugging, you might want to upgrade!

Speeding Up Enumerable#sum

Did you know that Enumerable#{inject,reduce} can take a symbol as its argument? Apparently, this is slightly faster too! (Note: this is different from inject(&:method) which goes through Symbol#to_proc.)

Fixed

Use … Instead Of +…+ In Docs

Usually, you can use +some_word+ to switch to fixed-width fonts in Rails’ documentation. However, the parser for this rule would sometime fail in some more complex cases.

If you are not sure when to use which, be sure to check the guidelines, or just check the output locally by running rake rdoc.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are many more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself.

Until next time!

Hey everyone - Tim here with another monster update with all the exciting Rails-related goings-on from this week.

Featured

Riding Rails: Snappier Development Mode in Rails 5

One of the nicest things about development mode in Rails has to be the sheer convenience of running on your latest revision on each request. This of course comes at a performance cost but is about to change: instead the filesystem will notify Rails asynchronously of any changes.

Rails 4.2.5 and 4.1.14 are here!

This week saw the release of both 4.2.5 and 4.1.14 versions of Rails. Go upgrade while they’re still hot!

This Week’s Rails Contributors

This week 33 fabulous people contributed to Rails. Check out the list of issues if you’d like to see your name up there.

New Stuff

New! days_in_year method added to Time

Now you can can call Time.days_in_year and, at the time of writing it will return 365. Call it next year and it will give you 366. Nice!

String#parameterize gets a preserve_case option

This change adds an option to Preserve-the-CASE of the string instead of casting-everything-to-lowercase when generating parameters.

Improved

Improve support for non Active Record associations on validation

Support for non-Active Record associations just got better by skipping marked_for_destruction? when going through validations if it’s not implemented, making it easier to define virtual associations.

Return a sized Enumerator from Hash#transform_values

You can now discover the size of a hash whose values have been transformed.

Fixed

Exclude views when fetching tables on all the connection adapters

This brings more consistency across the adapters where those for MySQL and SQLite would return views in addition to tables when calling #tables, where PostgreSQL would not. Now they all return tables, and no views.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are many more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself.

Until next time!

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce that Rails 4.2.5 and 4.1.14 have been released.

No regressions were found so these releases include the same changes that the last release candidates.

CHANGES since 4.1.13

To view the changes for each gem, please read the changelogs on GitHub:

• Action Mailer CHANGELOG
• Action Pack CHANGELOG
• Action View CHANGELOG
• Active Model CHANGELOG
• Active Record CHANGELOG
• Active Support CHANGELOG
• Railties CHANGELOG

Full listing

To see the full list of changes, check out all the commits on GitHub.

CHANGES since 4.2.4

To view the changes for each gem, please read the changelogs on GitHub:

• Action Mailer CHANGELOG
• Action Pack CHANGELOG
• Action View CHANGELOG
• Active Model CHANGELOG
• Active Record CHANGELOG
• Active Support CHANGELOG
• Active Job CHANGELOG
• Railties CHANGELOG

Full listing

To see the full list of changes, check out all the commits on GitHub.

SHA-1

If you’d like to verify that your gem is the same as the one I’ve uploaded, please use these SHA-1 hashes.

Here are the checksums for 4.1.14:

$ shasum *4.1.14*
5919a0cab01f7c3f8d5f0a6cff842892cce518dd  actionmailer-4.1.14.gem
20bb0227cbaa19eb98e874e95db2fd753222a587  actionpack-4.1.14.gem
fb6c11e671d1feaa8e87f9acd869905fec044009  actionview-4.1.14.gem
9ab9d3ba4d8a67d8b40e2cf43ac6e2e0d0334437  activemodel-4.1.14.gem
9e0911dcc1b63a3dd651f5cce2cca04cf2cbf2f7  activerecord-4.1.14.gem
0a1d85dda70b940ca15d3b61cd4dd7edf1414275  activesupport-4.1.14.gem
146ac389047574a995dda86d464788c6c742ae02  rails-4.1.14.gem
d09a0fb9d9c66119f990afa0441eaebdbcbafa51  railties-4.1.14.gem

Here are the checksums for 4.2.5:

$ shasum *4.2.5*
bddfd0c5032babc04a6b6d096a19195a4fde8581  actionmailer-4.2.5.gem
21f3ccbfa63d6a97ea5c3a9ae816388e138d767a  actionpack-4.2.5.gem
1295aae8a8b5389b3e067ba937abecbd2a61eacf  actionview-4.2.5.gem
9583de133e9fe152ba36491ec0a8255d73416503  activejob-4.2.5.gem
f93fcd7979a4a8370783a88535d4409e70dbb3d1  activemodel-4.2.5.gem
c7c3466b4c6866577b18c4e1238c5db1f6bfdd03  activerecord-4.2.5.gem
454eb06a069f82d5830232edde40c14fd0f1cc3c  activesupport-4.2.5.gem
95b0fa311e719893165ae33c8378580b6da5e485  rails-4.2.5.gem
672b88b0d54b48f71893a99e581032054d688e70  railties-4.2.5.gem

I’d like to thank you all, every contributor who helped with this release.

In Rails 5 development mode is going to be a tad snappier for large code bases.

As you know, when a request comes in Rails reloads¹ applications in development mode² if something has changed. The way this is done has evolved over the years.

For a long time Rails simply reloaded unconditionally in every request.

Rails 3.2 improved that with the implementation of a file system monitor which (mod details) walks the application tree on every request checking mtimes.

That tree walk is done per request, not per page view. In particular, it happens when serving each one of the assets so, albeit walking an application tree once may not be a big deal, it may add up depending on the number of assets and how large is your code base.

Rails 5 is going to ship also with an evented file system monitor. When something changes the operating system calls Rails asynchronously and a flag is toggled. When a request comes in, the flag is checked, done.

This monitor is disabled by default, applications may opt-in just loading the listen gem in their Gemfile:

group :development do
  gem 'listen', '~> 3.0.4'
end

On Linux and Mac OS X there are no additional dependencies, but some are required for *BSD and for Windows. Note that some setups are unsupported.

Even if the evented monitor is enabled, the console still needs manual reload because it could be surprising that classes change behind the scenes while there are objects already instantiated. Better be explicit.

Thanks to Puneet Agarwal, who wrote the initial patch for this feature as part of this year’s GSoC.

Also kudos to the listen authors and maintainers, thanks to listen this was infinitely easier to implement in a portable way.

¹ For a technical explanation of what “reloading” means please check the Autoloading and Reloading Constants guide.

² Technically when config.cache_classes is false.

####

Hi there everyone o/

Washington here putting together another weekly Rails issue for the most awesome community.

Featured

Rails 4.2.5.rc2 and Rails 4.1.14.rc2 are out

Please take a minute or two to update your project Gemfile and run the build on the RCs. Spotting regressions now means they’re fixed in another RC rather than a new point release some month(s) away.

This Week’s Rails Contributors

As of 17h15min, UTC -3, 28 contributors made their commits to Rails master. Some of those for the very first time. Welcome!

Make migrations concurrent safe (using advisory locks)

MySQL and Postgres Active Record adapters were enhanced to avoid confusing behaviour or exceptions when running migrations on multi-instance clusters. See the issue as well for more details.

New Stuff

Add enabled flag to public_file_server settings

Good old serve_static_files is being deprecated as of Rails 5 in favor of public_file_server.enabled so we have all static asset options under the same public_file_server key.

Improved

Deprecate exception#original_exception in favor of exception#cause

Exception wrapping implementation got a bit simpler this week by using Ruby’s built in Exception#cause, available since version 2.1.

Require only necessary concurrent-ruby classes

Another concurrent-ruby bump and related load time improvements.

Don’t allow arbitrary data in :back urls

This was reported quite a while ago, but now someone stepped up to the plate and followed it through. Rails got a bit safer again, thanks to the community. ❤️

Allow passing an env to config_for

Sanity checking configuration files in other environments just got easier as well.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are many more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself.

Until next time!

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce that Rails 4.2.5.rc2 and 4.1.14.rc2 have been released.

If no regressions are found expect the final release this Wednesday, on November 11, 2015. If you find one, please open an issue on GitHub and mention me (@rafaelfranca) on it, so that we can fix it before the final release.

CHANGES since 4.1.13

To view the changes for each gem, please read the changelogs on GitHub:

• Action Mailer CHANGELOG
• Action Pack CHANGELOG
• Action View CHANGELOG
• Active Model CHANGELOG
• Active Record CHANGELOG
• Active Support CHANGELOG
• Railties CHANGELOG

Full listing

To see the full list of changes, check out all the commits on GitHub.

CHANGES since 4.2.4

To view the changes for each gem, please read the changelogs on GitHub:

• Action Mailer CHANGELOG
• Action Pack CHANGELOG
• Action View CHANGELOG
• Active Model CHANGELOG
• Active Record CHANGELOG
• Active Support CHANGELOG
• Active Job CHANGELOG
• Railties CHANGELOG

Full listing

To see the full list of changes, check out all the commits on GitHub.

SHA-1

If you’d like to verify that your gem is the same as the one I’ve uploaded, please use these SHA-1 hashes.

Here are the checksums for 4.1.14.rc2:

$ shasum *4.1.14.rc2*
7c546616f87939a01807a55e78ed8494acc7c2ec  actionmailer-4.1.14.rc2.gem
8f80145fa65746c8a0a5492ae6213f447bbb0aaa  actionpack-4.1.14.rc2.gem
f0186571e89372ffbea47fbc4a3b901e46b0760e  actionview-4.1.14.rc2.gem
558e4eabcd1cec6a5089348dfd5a6f949d7606cc  activemodel-4.1.14.rc2.gem
0db20360a75bfa74b6539df190af8920bd75ff2f  activerecord-4.1.14.rc2.gem
3a2608827b895234e3d3b99e95df29344e31f875  activesupport-4.1.14.rc2.gem
5a9bd84dbc15a06128fc71d197cd6ee3d783114a  rails-4.1.14.rc2.gem
742da45dc3d63b43c882d7ce1d71f682bd1149c0  railties-4.1.14.rc2.gem

Here are the checksums for 4.2.5.rc2:

$ shasum *4.2.5.rc2*
d8fa2707c7f88aaf033b6ef2f0e39b5805823a8b  actionmailer-4.2.5.rc2.gem
80e43409399bcf3377c4a1aab803c442a635cadb  actionpack-4.2.5.rc2.gem
21d4a14dfec4ccfb321d51c1a73854f7c90003e0  actionview-4.2.5.rc2.gem
c1e258c2ed4b4e91b6d2f31d1a2020179043b5ba  activejob-4.2.5.rc2.gem
72f86e0ccb22e1b0f2980b500f1d7ced4d887da1  activemodel-4.2.5.rc2.gem
dc8cbcd461f3d3b583ac18c2d3c4fc5a8857ce72  activerecord-4.2.5.rc2.gem
40b5b72140f30bc97b7dc9e30c12d86ade0692b8  activesupport-4.2.5.rc2.gem
d3b7ee2ef71d9a9a4cb0a237162a67393549eeed  rails-4.2.5.rc2.gem
5969ef6ef00239fb5d2b012eb23068f1620a2563  railties-4.2.5.rc2.gem

I’d like to thank you all, every contributor who helped with this release.