All Articles

Securing Dependencies With Bundler-audit

These days, maintaining a secure codebase is crucial. Vulnerabilities in your application’s dependencies can pose significant risks to the security of your application. This is where tools like bundler-audit opens a new window come into play. bundler-audit is a gem that helps you identify and manage security vulnerabilities in your Rails application’s external dependencies. In this article, we will explore how to use bundler-audit to keep your Rails codebase secure.

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How to Create a Custom Gemfile for Development

While working with a client, we noticed that they had two Gemfiles: one with gems specifically for development and local references to a gem, and the other with a reference to a resource on GitHub. They wanted to switch between the local installation of the gem and the external GitHub reference based on whether they were in development or production. This approach worked well for their needs; however, our team was concerned that one downside was the difficulty in maintaining two separate Gemfiles. In this article, we will discuss an approach to creating conditional Gemfiles for development.

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From Code to Compliance: Accessibility Testing

In a previous blog post, How Do You Know When Your App is Not Compliant? opens a new window , I briefly discussed the importance of the accessibility standards of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG opens a new window , to ensure that everyone, including those with disabilities, can use web applications effectively. In this blog, we are going to further explore the importance of maintaining accessibility compliance, what it means to users, as well as how to use the axe-core-gems opens a new window for automated accessibility testing to help identify and resolve any gaps that may be currently present in a project.

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Exploring Ruby's # frozen_string_literal

Ruby 3.4 has been released, and the Ruby Core team continues to refine the language for a better developer experience and enhancements so our Ruby apps can have the best performance. In this blog post, we will talk about an interesting discussion happening about the # frozen_string_literal comment at the top of Ruby files.

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The Next Rails Gem

Did you know that we love using the Dual-Boot technique opens a new window for our Rails upgrades? We rely on the next_rails gem opens a new window to help us with dual-booting our Rails applications. This gem does more than just enable dual-booting; it also helps us identify outdated gems, check Rails compatibility, find the minimum compatible Ruby version for a target Rails version, and more.

Sounds interesting? Keep reading to learn more about the features of the next_rails gem.

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Unlocking Value with Bonsai

Managing technical debt opens a new window is a huge concern for businesses of all sizes. At FastRuby.io, we understand the challenges of maintaining a healthy codebase while continuously delivering value to your users. That’s why we’ve introduced Bonsai, our fixed-cost, monthly maintenance service opens a new window tailored to gradually alleviate technical debt. Join us as we take a deep dive into the value Bonsai brings to the table over the course of a month.

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How Outdated Are These Popular Ruby Projects?

In a previous post opens a new window , we discussed the importance of assessing an application’s dependency freshness and demonstrated how you can use different tools for this purpose. One of these tools is libyears opens a new window . In this post, we’ll share the libyears calculations for several popular Ruby projects and discuss our findings with you.

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What Is Technical Debt?

Technical debt, a term coined by Ward Cunningham in the 1990s, refers to the trade-off between short-term gains and long-term consequences in the development process. In this article, we will explore what technical debt is, why it happens, why you should care about it, and discover some new tools to help you discover the technical debt in your Rails applications opens a new window .

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Can You Upgrade Rails in Increments?

Ruby on Rails is a powerful web application framework that has evolved over the years, with new versions bringing in features, improvements, and security updates. As your application matures, keeping it up-to-date with the latest Rails version becomes crucial. However, the prospect of upgrading an entire Rails application can be daunting. In this blog post, we’ll explore whether it’s possible to upgrade your Rails application in increments and how to go about it.

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