Hello everyone! This is Greg with help from Andy (welcome!) bringing you the latest news from Rails.

Featured

This weeks Rails contributors

33 people contributed to Rails this week, including 3 first-time contributors! If you are interested in becoming a contributor, have look on the issues list.

New Stuff

Add job priorities to ActiveJob

This commit allows you to set the priority for your jobs with Active Job, if your backend supports this. For more details head over to the pull request.

Fail fast reporting in test runner

If you call your test suite with --fail-fast it will abort the test run on the first failure.

Allow fixtures files to set the model class in the file itself

From now on you can set the model class in your fixture files, but set_fixture_class on your model will override it.

Fixed

Handle nested fields_for by adding indexes to record_name

This commit adds indexes to the inputs in the inner blocks of a nested fields_for, so Rails won’t raise an exception on the submission of the form.

Add a hidden field on the collection_radio_buttons

This commit fixes an issue with strong_parameters if you have a single collection_radio_button on your form and the form is submitted with no selection.

Fix parameter sanitization for query methods

With this commit the Action Controller parameters are sanitized before being passed to the Active Record query methods.

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 with help from Andy (welcome!) bringing news from yet another week of Rails.

Featured

Google Summer of Code 2015

The fourth year of participation in Google Summer of Code 2015 is over with excellent work done in the areas of Asset Pipeline (performance and… source maps!), Web Console (browser extension), the Rails test suite (Regression Test Selection), development setup (evented file system monitoring) and internals refactoring (cookies). Special thanks to Google, mentors and students who made this all possible.

This weeks Rails contributors

46 people contributed to Rails this week, including 7 first-time contributors! If you are interested in becoming a contributor, you can have a look at the issues list.

New Stuff

Introduce Active Record ignored_columns

A use case for this would be ignoring columns that are transient. This may happen when using online schema change tools like lhm or pt-online-schema-change.

Foreign keys are now supported in create_table DSL

Not only is it more convenient to pass in the foreign_key as an option to the references method of the create_table DSL, it generates slightly more efficient SQL.

Improved

Improve the performance of Active Record save and friends

By taking advantage of internal code improvements (the MutationTracker object), Active Record’s save and similar methods have received a noteworthy performance improvement.

Change assert_difference to return the result of the yielded block

With this we can perform new assertions on the returned value without assigning it to an outer variable or otherwise wrapping subsequent assertions inside the assert_difference block.

Fixed

Fix arguments of AR::Calculations#sum

The arguments and behavior of #sum are now consistent with the other aggregate methods (count, average, minimum, and maximum) defined in ActiveRecord::Calculations.

Fix silent failure when MySQL is not running

Nothing is more frustrating than a silent failure. This fix handles an error when rake db:structure:load is run and MySQL is not installed. Previously there were no output.

Active Record: Use database precision when assigning a value to a timestamp attribute

Timestamp columns can have less precision than Ruby timestamps. This affects how a fraction of a second can be stored in the database. To fix this, the precision of the column was used when assigning a value to the timestamp attribute.

Fix ignored usages of unscoped when preloading Active Record models

Preloading an association that is using unscoped was dropping the unscoped part.

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!

This year marked our fourth participation in Google’s Summer of Code (GSoC). In this post we’d like to tell you a bit about this year’s projects:

Asset Source Maps (Andrei Istratii)

Andrei has added support for several types of Source Maps to Sprockets 4. With Source Maps users can see a readable version of their code inside Developer Tools (Javascript, CSS, etc.) after it’s been minified or compiled. Check out Andrei’s sprockets and sass-rails contributions to find out more about the project status.

Test Failure Prediction (Genki Sugimoto)

Inspired by Aaron Patterson’s ideas on testing, Genki Sugimoto created a testing library called ttnt. It tells you which tests are relevant to a particular commit inside your application, giving you the option of skipping full test-suite runs.

Web Console (Hiroyuki Sano)

The Rails Web Console helps Rails developers debug running applications inside the browser. This project was created in 2013 by Genadi Samokovarov as part of that year’s GSoC. In 2015 Hiroyuki Sano improved it by creating a browser extension so you can use the console inside the Developer Tools.

Performance Enhancements for the Asset Pipeline (Martha De Luque)

Martha focused on finding and addressing performance issues inside our asset generation pipeline. With her work we now have support for faster asset compilation libraries, and thanks to her benchmarks we now know where to focus future optimization efforts.

Evented File System Monitoring (Puneet Agarwal)

Rails monitors application files when running in development mode, if any change is detected the application code is reloaded on the next request. Currently Rails walks the application tree to detect said changes, Puneet’s contribution implements an alternative using native operating system events.

Refactoring Rails Cookie Internals (Siddharth Bhatore)

Siddharth worked on laying the infrastructure for a more robust implementation of cookies in Rails. Some of his changes include support for JSON Web Encryption (JWE) and JSON Web Signatures (JWS). With these changes in place we can add cool features like cookie purposes and coherent expiration.

Wrapping Up

We want to thank all the students and mentors involved in this year’s Summer of Code, we hope it was a good experience for everyone. We also want to thank Google for supporting the projects, and José Valim, Pat Shaughnessy and O’Reilly Media for helping out with learning resources for our students.

See you next year!

This is Prathamesh after a long long time bringing you latest and greatest news from Rails world!

Featured

This weeks Rails contributors

37 people contributed to Rails this week, including 7 first-time contributors. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, you can have a look at the issues list.

New Stuff

Drop indexes concurrently in PostgreSQL

Now you can drop PostgreSQL indices concurrently in Rails 5, just like how you can already add indices concurrently today.

Approachable SSL handling

Remember good ‘ol config.force_ssl? You can now use it with greater control. With improvements in SSL redirect and better handling of Strict Transport Security, you will surely love this improved version of config.force_ssl.

Mult-context validations

Ever faced the need of running validations of create and update contexts both at the same time? Now you can do that by passing multiple contexts to the #valid? and #invalid? methods.

Improved

Active Record performance improvements

This week lot of work was done for improving Active Record internals by reducing object allocations, avoid creating relations when not required and so on. Kudos to @tgxworld!

Prepared statements with MySQL

Rails now supports latest version of mysql2 gem. Is this a big deal? Yes!! You can now use prepared statements using this version. Now that’s awesome!

Improve sql logging coloration

If you are using custom SQL queries with Ruby herredoc, you will be able to identify them instantly in your logs. Why? Because they will have better colors thanks to this patch.

Not just that, overall coloration of all SQL queries is improved here as well!

Reaching into the cookie jar

The cookie-handling code in Rails is one of the more complicated code in the framework, largely due to the need to support and migrate legacy cookies produced by older versions of Rails.

Kasper refactored some of those code to make it less hostile to future improvements, nice!

Fixed

Generator errors messages will be in plain English

If you have seen some weird characters showing up in error messages of rails g commands due to localization of some messages, it is now fixed!

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!

Have you been thinking about writing for us, but you’re scared of putting yourself out there? Don’t worry, you can help our editors improve their writing with thoughtful critique and general grammar policing.

You up for that? Tell Godfrey today.

Back away, bystander.

There’s a flame war going on, and we’d best contain it soon — the people need their Rails news!

Kasper pats flames and waters ferns in hopes we douse the mighty fires.

I’ll go brush up on campfire safety rules. Here, you read these.

Featured

Over 4000 people contributed to Rails

A little while ago we crossed 4000 contributors – that’s crazy! Remember the old days when only one person contributed to Rails? Well, I wasn’t him so I don’t. Wups!

36 people made their mark this week. If you’re new, peruse the list and join us. If you do you’ll find a new friend waiting for you.

Everybody meet Rails bot

That friend is Rails bot. Fresh off the assembly line to bring those new to Rails a welcome message and tips. You’ll even get a reviewer assigned to help move things along. Come say hi with a pull request.

Improved

Confirmation validation reduced sensitivity to case

If you’re validating an email confirmation and you don’t care about the case, it can be skipped with case_sensitive: false

Migrations explains which part is irreversible

In Rails 5 if you’re using a migration method that isn’t reversible (meaning it can’t rollback) you will be warned about the offending method and how to roll your way out of that mess.

Fixed

Passing a relation to cache uses Relation#cache_key

Banking on the cache_key added to relations a while ago, any cache calls in your views correctly use that instead of turning the relation into an array.

bin/rails test -e requires an argument

In Ruby’s OptionParser, if you wrap a parameter in brackets it’s considered optional.

By breaking it out of the brackets, writing bin/rails test -e with an empty argument now raises a more appropriate error.

Array Inquirer finds both symbols and strings

Using any?(:idea) on ["innovative", "idea"].inquiry wouldn’t find anything because the symbol passed to any didn’t match any of the strings in the array.

Now everyone expects the string inquiry — and there’s room for “innovative” “ideas” once again.

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!

Have you been thinking about writing for us, but you’re scared of putting yourself out there? Don’t worry, you can help our editors improve their writing with thoughtful critique and general grammar policing.

You up for that? Tell Godfrey today.

Hi, everybody! This is Tim and Claudio reporting here from sunny Los Angeles. It’s been a week of intense weather here, and even more intense activity in the Rails community. Let’s take a look at the highlights…

Releases

Rails 4.2.4 and 4.1.13 have been released!

The new versions are backward compatible, so if you are using any 4.2.x version, you can safely upgrade to 4.2.4. And if you are using 4.1.x, bump your Gemfile to 4.1.13.

Featured

This week’s Rails contributors

This week 47 awesome people helped to make Rails even better, including 3 for the first time. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, you can have a look at the issues list.

New Stuff

An AsyncAdapter for Active Job

Do you need to create asynchronous jobs without installing additional gems? Set config.active_job.queue_adapter = :async and post your jobs to a concurrent-ruby thread pool.

A new format for params.require

params.require can now take multiple values as an array, allowing for more succinct code such as params.require(:person).require([:first_name, :last_name])

Getting ready for Rack 2

In Rack 2, the env hash will be changed to be actual request and response objects. This commit paves the way for Rails to be compatible when Rack 2 is released.

Improved

Speed improvements for loadable_constants_for_path

Pull requests that improve the performance of Rails are always welcome, especially when they come with benchmarks showing a speed increase of 9x!

Fixed

Goodbye 418 (I’m a teapot)

RFC 7231 changed the list of HTTP status codes (dropping “418 I’m a Teapot” among others). Rails documentation has now been fixed to list the symbols that can be used to represent status codes.

Wrapping Up

One last thing that deserves a mention is that the new Code of Conduct has gone live on the main website. Hurrah!

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!

Have you been thinking about writing for us, but you’re scared of putting yourself out there? Don’t worry, you can help our editors improve their writing with thoughtful critique and general grammar policing.

You up for that? Tell Godfrey today.

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce that Rails 4.2.4 and 4.1.13 have been released.

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

CHANGES since 4.1.12

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 4.2.3

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 4.1.13:

$ shasum *4.1.13*
7c637fed154a152451adb8ef1ebae136e0502ebd  actionmailer-4.1.13.gem
61303b7ee877aa06f16ce0ba6a7cce21ca031f42  actionpack-4.1.13.gem
39c5a4a290a5969402bf5c4ac61b99e5dcb40c3c  actionview-4.1.13.gem
6d88159aa15ea48f9118ece97ec549807a504f55  activemodel-4.1.13.gem
1107470b19cc0d6608d431678c78d3871c8df229  activerecord-4.1.13.gem
f79bdfa0105c1a833069d989291ec9d23bc84d92  activesupport-4.1.13.gem
6391b4a323e0b30118ffdbad6bb5f68459920d7b  rails-4.1.13.gem
fc64a4f89a3fa8f9ab2a9edd37d7338a79cb9859  railties-4.1.13.gem

Here are the checksums for 4.2.4:

$ shasum *4.2.4*
a866394bb4682afaa6d54458b1f3be0dca5e862e  actionmailer-4.2.4.gem
b625e58fb8fa11185ff81630f3bef5c517e294e4  actionpack-4.2.4.gem
334ddc60724e4e1ff99e2170d2e435805d0ade0b  actionview-4.2.4.gem
7bd46253f17bcff5c8ae3ba0f0938c38b0ca1e2f  activejob-4.2.4.gem
d361d1e0eac7851103ac2de4c9359a556c724ab9  activemodel-4.2.4.gem
d9faecb759827fc7944558463388efbbd9f20005  activerecord-4.2.4.gem
ab4283126725e3aa9c248e2e2119548ad205732d  activesupport-4.2.4.gem
67d7a12105f5389dd7b511eff5f56c6c048175d8  rails-4.2.4.gem
8e9eab180dbd97eaf7626601c55e61ea1ae68284  railties-4.2.4.gem

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

Good News Everyone, This Week In Rails has been acquired by BuzzFeed!

Just kidding. This is Godfrey here. It’s been a while since I get to write one of these myself and I’m very happy to be back. Without further ado, let’s dive right into it!

✨ Featured ✨

❤️ Code of Conduct

The Rails team is committed to fostering a welcoming community for everyone. With the help of our community, we have added an official Code of Conduct for the project this week.

😱 37 Programmers Contributed To Rails And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

Well, their pull requests were merged and they are immortalized on the Rails Contributors website. And oh, everyone please send a warm welcome to the 10 first-time contributors this week!

📦 Releases 📦

📢 Sprockets Has Hit Version 3.3.3, What Does That Really Mean For The Rest Of Us?

According to @schneems who is responsible for the release, this is supposed to fix an issue for those of you “who share a cache in different directories between deploys”, which includes Heroku deployments.

💎 New Stuff 💎

💾 MySQL Finally Gets A Native JSON Data Type – But Is It Too Late To Save California?

MySQL has recently added a native JSON data type (perhaps inspired by its more popular cousin, PostgreSQL). Thanks to this patch, you will be ready to take advantage of that feature in Rails 5.

👌 Fixed 👌

🎂 The One Weird Trick That Lets You Write To Files Atomically

Concurrency is hard, but Rails might have finally cracked the nut. You might not know that Active Support offers a way to write to a file atomically with File.atomic_write.

Even if you have heard about it, you probably didn’t realize there is a subtle race condition in its implementation. Anyway, with this patch landing on master, those bugs will soon be behind us and we can all just sit back and enjoy the convenience it provides.

👍 Improved 👍

🚨 Nobody Likes To Do Repeated Work – Here Is A Cache They Won’t Tell You About

It turns out that things do not run twice as fast when you double-cache them. Who would have thought? (I wish we all wrote great commit messages like this by the way!)

✂️ Testing Is Important, But Has Rails Gone Too Far?

Along those same lines, it turns out that testing the same thing twice doesn’t provide much value either.

🙈 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!

Have you been thinking about writing for us, but you’re scared of putting yourself out there? Don’t worry, you can help our editors improve their writing with thoughtful critique and general grammar policing.

You up for that? Tell Godfrey today.

Hello Everyone! This is Roque bringing the latest from Rails with some help from Kasper.

Featured

This Week’s Rails Contributors

We had 36 awesome contributors to the Rails codebase this week. Check out the active issues over on GitHub if you’d like to see your name here.

Rails 4.2.4 RC1 and 4.1.13 RC1 have been released!

There’s new release candidates, please try them and report any regressions you find, so that the Rails team can fix them before the final release.

Thank you to all contributors for these releases!

New Stuff

Active Record relations come in batches

This week Active Record got a new method that works like find_in_batches but yields relations instead of arrays. It also added a cool delegation API that lets you do something like:

People.in_batches.delete_all('age > 21')

Oh, in case you were wondering – this is pretty much how Skynet works.

Improved

i18n reloading picks up new and deleted files

This patch allows new locale YAML files to be loaded without having to restart the Rails server. It also reloads the available locales when files are deleted.

Active Job assertions returns matched job

The matched job returned by these methods can be used for advanced assertions like:

job = assert_enqueued_with(job: SomeJob) do
  some_business_logic
end
assert_equal 5, job.arguments.second

Spun Off

XML serialization have been moved to a gem

As usage for XML serialization declined, it’s become less of a core concern of Rails. In Rails 5, this feature will be moved to the activemodel-serializers-xml gem.

If you’re still using the XML Serialization feature in your app, you will need to add this to your Gemfile when you upgrade.

That’s a wrap

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!

Have you been thinking about writing for us, but you’re scared of putting yourself out there? Don’t worry, you can help our editors improve their writing with thoughtful critique and general grammar policing.

You up for that? Tell Godfrey today.

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce that Rails 4.2.4.rc1 and 4.1.13.rc1 have been released.

If no regressions are found expect the final release this Wednesday, on August 19, 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 4.1.12

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 4.2.3

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 4.1.13.rc1:

$ shasum *4.1.13.rc1*
284f1eb3a000d54f07435e0b19e88f1ba80f738b  actionmailer-4.1.13.rc1.gem
352ad673a18efe226ed3e1b1eb7e61818ccae1a2  actionpack-4.1.13.rc1.gem
f7e147aa4377149a7516bf23fa5892979a7ff77f  actionview-4.1.13.rc1.gem
70da96abb737ef31eba8e1b57fa2cb122110bb59  activemodel-4.1.13.rc1.gem
c571e1092a3982517d353ff85fab2c5e9b3c28cc  activerecord-4.1.13.rc1.gem
19e9f8f248261d6b605c62eca071e29e9c7e5a90  activesupport-4.1.13.rc1.gem
7c418986f10ff82fbb1be1b3a6c9defb80aac5eb  rails-4.1.13.rc1.gem
e5ca51e2cb32fa57bd7ba18f8fe52cd3c0e2bbb9  railties-4.1.13.rc1.gem

Here are the checksums for 4.2.4.rc1:

$ shasum *4.2.4.rc1*
7f343fd97d1e41920feac65020fa487c4d0be67e  actionmailer-4.2.4.rc1.gem
f815f40569f0e6b93f10c61d696d9ab06aba6531  actionpack-4.2.4.rc1.gem
bca83efa6384b88b5429f1dad1dd1a05e7c8e491  actionview-4.2.4.rc1.gem
7d8694143e23712da67606ea78919ed71605dd19  activejob-4.2.4.rc1.gem
674d0fd053f8365a1be9fe787f6fe10c5b9b3993  activemodel-4.2.4.rc1.gem
ec34623a19a136dcb62308ad3dfeba3209a5beac  activerecord-4.2.4.rc1.gem
8673028f02630357ea1f086323468b4a733b00aa  activesupport-4.2.4.rc1.gem
970ee741e3e2ffcaae6cbb33895ee2dc407bb5a3  rails-4.2.4.rc1.gem
69f16c95fac8739bc62e5f2cbe352bfa05746223  railties-4.2.4.rc1.gem

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