When we work on Rails upgrades, most of the time we have to solve issues after updating the gems. These problems can go from simple and straightforward to really complex and hard to debug. Here we will discuss different skills and techniques that we use to complete the upgrade.

Imagine having the ability to deploy the next version of Rails in a dual booted application on your Heroku staging server or review app before deploying it to production. This capability can help you avoid bugs and downtime in your live environment. In this blog post, we will guide you on how to deploy a Rails upgrade to a staging environment, allowing you to thoroughly test it before it goes live.

There have been a lot of changes over the years in asset management for Ruby on Rails applications. The main question, after all the madness, is… “What should I do if I need to upgrade my Rails application?”

In this article we will talk about the options we have for each version jump.

You are upgrading a Rails application. You finished fixing a deprecation warning and it’s not present anymore. You continue working on other tasks and one day you find out the deprecation is back in the codebase. New code was added using the deprecated behavior, but it was not detected and now it needs to be fixed again…

How can you prevent that from happening and, at the same time, let the team know?

Over the years, Rails has been changing the default way to handle assets while also adding different alternative options at the same time.

At first there were static files, then Sprockets appeared, then we had a choice between Webpacker and Sprockets for a few years, now Webpacker is gone and importmaps are the default. But jsbundling-rails and cssbundling-rails are also official options.

Sound confusing? In this article we’ll try to explain the history of all these changes.

On Monday June 12th, 2023, FastRuby.io partnered with Expedited Security to talk about how to secure your Ruby on Rails application.

In this free webinar Ernesto Tagwerker (FastRuby.io) and Mike Buckbee (Expedited Security) discussed topics of interest related to Rails security (exploitable ActiveRecord code, vulnerable dependencies, botnets, DDoS, a breakdown of common threats, and more).

You’ll also get a sneak peak of Wafris, an Open Source service to prevent attackers and dark traffic to your application and of our new Rails Security Audit, a service to detect vulnerabilities and exploitable code in your app!

After upgrading your application from Rails 3 to Rails 4, you might start seeing the following deprecation warning if you are using the readonly option in an association.

DEPRECATION WARNING: The following options in your Company.has_many :users declaration are deprecated: :readonly. Please use a scope block instead. ...

In this blog post, we’ll discuss in detail what the readonly option is and how to handle the deprecation warning.

As always, RailsConf was a great experience this year. For the fourth time, we gave the FastRuby.io Rails Upgrade Workshop. It was actually my 2nd time participating in running the workshop, and my co-worker, Fiona’s 1st time.

Each time we run the workshop, we like to bring in a new co-presenter, so different members of our team can have the opportunity to present at RailsConf.

Rails Engines are an architectural pattern that can be used to modularize a Rails application. They are self-contained applications that can be mounted within a larger Rails application. In this post, we will dive into the world of Rails Engines and explore what they are, how to create them, how to use them, when to use them, and why they are important.

Ever since we started offering productized Ruby and Rails upgrade services and upgrade roadmaps, we’ve been interested in helping as many people and companies as possible.

Unfortunately, in the past we’ve had to turn down companies who wanted to work with us but couldn’t secure the minimum monthly budget to work with our experts.

I’m pleased to announce that we’re now offering new opportunities for startups and small businesses to work alongside our team.

In this article, I will share a few new options to collaborate with our team of experts who specialize in technical debt remediation.

Recently, while working on a Rails 6.1 to 7.0 upgrade, we encountered the following deprecation warning regarding changes made to ActiveRecord::Relation’s merge method:

"Merging (#{node.to_sql}) and (#{ref.to_sql}) no longer maintains both conditions, and will be replaced by the latter in Rails 7.0. To migrate to Rails 7.0's behavior, use relation.merge(other, rewhere: true)."

In this article, we will talk about the expected behavior of merge, how it has changed and what to do in order to use the new behavior if you find yourself looking at this deprecation.

At FastRuby.io we love Ruby on Rails because it is so powerful: You can quickly create an application that is feature complete, stable, and secure

Unfortunately, maintaining a Rails application up to date and secure takes some effort.

In this blog post, we will cover a few Ruby gems and best practices that you can use to stay on top of your security, reliability, and stability needs.

Have you ever tried to update a Rails app from 5.2 to 6.0, or from 6.0 to 6.1? If so, you might have seen this deprecation:

DEPRECATION WARNING: Dangerous query method (method whose arguments are used as raw SQL) called with non-attribute argument(s): "random()". Non-attribute arguments will be disallowed in Rails 6.0. This method should not be called with user-provided values, such as request parameters or model attributes. Known-safe values can be passed by wrapping them in Arel.sql(). (called from ...)

Note: While this deprecation message mentions Rails 6.0 as the version where the behavior is disallowed, that change was postponed, so the deprecation also shows in Rails 6.0. The behavior is actually disallowed in Rails 6.1.

What does this deprecation mean exactly? In this article, I will explain that in plain English, what issue it is trying to prevent, and how to fix the problem if you come across it in your codebase.

Recently I got to work on a task that included understanding how to test JavaScript requests with RSpec. One thing that I found missing during my time researching solutions was organized and detailed documentation explaining the solutions based on the version of Rails and RSpec the application runs on.

Ruby on Rails is a popular web application framework that is constantly evolving with new versions being released frequently. While upgrading to a newer Rails version can bring new features, better performance, and security patches/improvements, it can also be a challenging task.

In this blog post, we will discuss 7 common mistakes made while doing Rails upgrades and how to avoid them.

A race condition is a type of software bug that occurs when multiple threads or processes access a shared resource simultaneously, and the outcome of the execution depends on the timing of these accesses.

You might have extended classes or instances in Rails, but do you know you can also extend Rails associations?

class Account < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :people, -> { extending FindOrCreateByNameExtension }
end

In this article I’ll discuss a strategy for different readability: a simple way to split your routes file on a Ruby on Rails project.

Let’s begin with a simple question:

Have you seen config.load_defaults 6 in any application?

6 is an argument and could vary, I’m just giving an example.

In the developers’ world, there is a well known quote by Phil Karlton that goes There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. We usually think about that phrase in the sense that it’s hard to come up with a clear, descriptive, and concise name for the code we write (variables, methods/functions, modules/classes, etc), but sometimes, the perfect name we found can be a problem too.

At OmbuLabs, one of our specialities is upgrading Ruby on Rails applications through our specialized service called FastRuby.io. In this post, I want to share with you some of the things that I’ve learned while working on my first Rails upgrade client project as a less experienced Rails developer.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 6.1 to version 7.0.

In modern apps, it’s common to enhance the user experience with JavaScript. Whether it’s just some JavaScript sprinkles here and there or a full JS-based frontend, this is as important as your Ruby code when it comes to the app’s correct functionality. In this article we’ll show how to measure the test code coverage for the JavaScript code when running system/integration tests along with the Ruby code coverage.

Zeitwerk is the code autoloader and reloader that was integrated with Rails 6. Beginning in Rails 7, it will be the only codeloader option. As a result, upgrading to Zeitwerk will be an important step in getting your application ready for the next version of Rails. In this article, we’ll talk about upgrading your Rails 6 application from classic to zeitwerk mode.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 6.0 to 6.1.

One of the steps we recommend taking when doing an upgrade for any Rails version is to dual boot the application with your current Rails version and your next rails version.

This is important because it allows you to quickly run the test suite for both versions, having dual booting available allows you to debug and also revert to your current version in a much simpler fashion.

However, sometimes changes that you make for the new version of Rails may not be compatible with your current version of Rails. This means that you will need to use a few different techniques to get both versions to be able to use the dual booting and run smoothly.

If you’ve been following me awhile, you know that I was hired by AppFolio years ago to measure Ruby 3’s performance, especially on Rails. This has been a long trip. And that very first project is finally over: Ruby 3 exists and I can check its final, released Rails performance.

If you have been following along, the numbers in this post won’t surprise you. But it’s important to do the final measurement. If you haven’t been following, this will bring you up to date.

Welcome to our series of Rails upgrade miniguides. Here you’ll find links to all of the relevant posts to help with an upgrade.

Sometimes you will be caught between a rock and a hard place. For example: You really need to upgrade your Rails application because Heroku is discontinuing your stack in two weeks so you don’t have the time to write an entire test suite.

Sometimes the situation will be that your boss really needs you to upgrade Ruby or Rails to use a version that gets security updates and they won’t allow you to write tests beforehand.

This article will explain how to ship a Rails upgrade project without a test suite. If your application has no tests, you will learn how to upgrade without having to write tests first.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to prepare your Ruby on Rails application for working on an upgrade.

If you’re a developer you know the reasons why you should be using the latest Rails framework. You understand the implications of performance gains, dependency issues and unsupported versions.

But these big picture benefits get lost in translation when talking to non-technical executives. What they need to know is the business case for an upgrade, how the work will translate into increased revenue.

So, here is an article to use or forward to communicate why an upgrade should be a priority. We also wrote an article on the more technical reasons if you are interested.

When upgrading a Rails application, you might find that sometimes functionality is extracted from Rails and moved into a new gem. These gems are called shims, and they will basically allow you to keep using an old functionality, once the core API takes that out. You can also find shims in form of monkey patches. In this case it’s functionality that you develop to make your migration easier.

In this article I will list some of the functionality of past versions of Rails that was extracted into gems.

Back in 2011, Rails 3.1 introduced The Assets Pipeline feature using the Sprockets gem. This made it really easy to handle assets (images, fonts, JavaScript, CSS and more), solving many of the issues that developers had to face everyday.

In 2012, Webpack was released solving the same issues in a different way and in time became the most used solution to handle assets. And since Rails 6, Webpack became the default solution to handle JavaScript assets using the Webpacker gem on new Rails applications.

In this article I’ll explain the steps we took to migrate to Webpack to handle our JavaScript assets, and how we added support as a node module in our styleguide.

Do you ever look at the list of Amazon EC2 instance types?. Those are sizes of virtual machine you can rent to run your code on. Well, okay, they’re groups of sizes, since each one of those headings has a bunch of different sizes of VM…

So what type of EC2 instances should you run your Rails app on?

The answer is simpler than it looks.

Do you love numbers? I love numbers. Do you hate numbers? Skip to the bottom, there’s a nice summary paragraph. Do you really really love numbers? There are raw data dumps including all my intermediate results.

When inheriting a project or starting an upgrade, it is useful to understand how big and complex the application really is. So, what is a good way to understand whether a Rails application is tiny, medium, or huge?

The good news is that there are a couple of gems that make this easy for us.

In this article I will explain how you can use these gems to begin to understand the size and complexity of a Rails application.

The new Ruby 3.0 preview is out! Woo-hoo!

If you’ve heard of me, you know performance is kinda my thing, especially Rails performance on large apps. I do other stuff too, but I got paid to do that for years (thanks, AppFolio!), so I’ve written a lot about it.

How does the new preview’s performance stack up on Rails? And how reliable are these numbers?

At FastRuby.io we are constantly looking at code coverage metrics for Ruby on Rails applications. It’s a key indicator for us. We even use that information to decide whether we work on a Rails upgrade project or not.

So, I was interested in seeing code coverage metrics for the Ruby on Rails framework. I couldn’t find any information about this online, so I decided to generate a few reports for each component.

This is an article about my process and my findings.

Having a clear idea of how much test coverage your Rails application has is really important. Especially if you are planning to upgrade to a newer version of Rails. A good test suite will tell you if your application is working as it did before the upgrade.

At FastRuby.io, we recommend having at least 80% of your application covered before attempting to upgrade. A number lower than that would require you to make a lot more manual testing to ensure that the application is properly working after the upgrade. If your application doesn’t meet that number, we suggest to first spend some time improving the test suite before starting the upgrade.

In this article, I’ll show you how you can measure your test coverage using SimpleCov.

A quick note before starting: SimpleCov doesn’t work in projects with Ruby 1.8.7 or lower. If that’s your case, you can try rcov.

We recently collaborated with Procore on a Rails upgrade for their Rails application which allows teams in the construction industry to connect their entire business process.

We spoke with Andy Maltun, Procore’s VP of Software Engineering, about the work performed to help them upgrade their app to version 5.1. According to Maltun, Procore’s R&D department is large and complex. While Procore previously had handled their Rails upgrades internally, with so many teams working on the application, it caused a lot of disruption as each team would handle only part of the upgrade. Therefore, Maltun “wanted to take a different approach this time in an effort to centralize the update and minimize the project management overhead and disruption of teams.”

Rails upgrades can be done in many different ways. Depending on the application that you want to upgrade, some ways make more sense than others. There are factors that determine which Rails upgrade strategy is the best for your case, like how big your application is, or how frequently changes are pushed to the master branch. In this article I’ll be covering two common Rails Upgrade strategies so you can decide which one is the best for your application.

We all know testing is important. We have our unit tests and integration tests to make sure everything is working as expected. At OmbuLabs, we use Capybara for our integration tests so that we can interact with the app as a real user would.

This is the process we used to replace the capybara-webkit gem in a legacy project with a more modern approach that uses the webdrivers gem and a headless browser.

Deprecation warnings are a common thing in our industry. They are warnings that notify us that a specific feature (e.g. a method) will be removed soon (usually in the next minor or major version) and should be replaced with something else. Features are deprecated rather than immediately removed, in order to provide backward compatibility (a solution that works in both the current and the future version), and to give programmers time to implement the code in a way that follows the new standard.

In this guide we’ll show you what the workflow is that we use at FastRuby.io to address deprecation warnings when we upgrade Rails applications.

We know that there are many challenges involved in a Rails upgrade project. Depending on how big your application is, how old your Rails version is and how well structured your code is, it can be difficult to perform that job and keep your sanity. If you don’t find a reliable and trustable process to guide you from version X to version Y, you can end-up in a nightmare.

The good news is that here at OmbuLabs, we have been upgrading Rails applications for over 10 years now and this gave us a know-how to define a process that has proven to be very effective. And today I want to share Our Rails Upgrade Process with you.

Technology evolves quickly. When you first created your Rails application, it’s likely you did it using the latest version of Rails. As time passes, however, new Rails versions come out and your application becomes more and more out of touch with the latest version. But why is this important? Why does it matter?

There are several different reasons to upgrade your Rails application. In this article, I’ll list what we consider to be the most important ones.

Migrating from Protected Attributes to Strong Parameters in a Rails project can be a huge step of the upgrade process. Especially when we are upgrading a large application. This guide is meant to help you tackle that step faster and with a lot less pain.

As part of our Roadmap service at FastRuby.io, we have to analyze the test suite of the application we are upgrading to give a proper estimate on how long it will take us to upgrade. We use SimpleCov for this.

Most of our clients use parallelization in their continuous integration tools. SimpleCov generates multiple .resultset.json files for the same codebase. Our goal was to have a single result for the whole application, so in this blog post we are going to show you how we solved that problem.

We recently collaborated with Amitree on a Rails upgrade for their application which “is an AI assistant for email, integrated deeply within Google and Microsoft’s products and is in heavy use by real estate professionals” and were able to speak to them about their experience with OmbuLabs.

An outdated Rails application doesn’t happen overnight. In FastRuby.io we work with a lot of clients who have outdated Rails applications and we help them upgrade to a newer Rails version. In this article I share some things that you could start doing to avoid falling out of date.

Every time we start a new Rails upgrade project, we need to setup a whole new environment in our local machines. Sometimes that leads us down the rabbit hole which ends up breaking our environment for other client projects.

After years upgrading Rails applications, we learned that the best way to isolate our client projects’ environments is using Docker.

That’s why we decided to use Docker and docker-compose for all of our client projects. This year I had the opportunity to share our process in a series of workshops: Upgrade Rails 101: The Roadmap to Smooth Upgrades

Here we continue with the series of articles where we talk about how minor adjustments in the code can lead to major performance improvements.

In this article we’ll focus on the use of ActiveRecord::Batches#find_each when it comes to iterations across a large number of records.

Over the years we have seen a significant increase in the demand for Ruby on Rails upgrades. That’s why a few years ago we decided to launch FastRuby.io, our Ruby on Rails upgrade service.

When we receive an inquiry via FastRuby.io, the first thing we like to do is schedule a call with the potential client to get more details about their app.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 5.2 to 6.0.

This is a short post to show the compatibility between Ruby on Rails and Ruby across different versions. In the process of upgrading really old applications to more modern versions of Ruby and Rails we have run into a lot of these combinations.

Some time ago we wrote a couple of Tips for Writing Fast Rails. It was about time we wrote part two so here it is!

We recently spoke with Ryan Findley, Principal at Neomind Labs. We worked with his team to execute a Rails upgrade from 2.3 to 4.2 on one of their applications.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 5.1 to 5.2.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 5.0 to 5.1.

Today we are happy to announce the launch of our new microsite: Gemfile.lock Audit Tool - a tool created to allow users to check their Gemfile.lock for vulnerabilities in a quick and secure manner.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 4.2 to 5.0.

We recently collaborated with Power Home Remodeling on a Rails upgrade for their self-described “monolith CRM/ERP application” and were able to speak to them about their experience with OmbuLabs.

This article takes a look at some of the changes to the ActiveRecord::Dirty module between Rails 5.1 and 5.2.

If you’re running Rails 5.1, you may have already seen some of the deprecation warnings related to the API changes contained in it. Most of them are behavior changes, and there are some new additions as well.

To better understand these modifications, we’ll take a look at sample projects in Rails 5.1 and Rails 5.2.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 4.1 to 4.2.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 4.0 to 4.1.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, check our article title The Rails Upgrade Series.

A previous post covered some general tips to take into account for this migration. This article will try to go a bit more in depth. We will first go from 3.2 to 4.0, then to 4.1 and finally to 4.2. Depending on the complexity of your app, a Rails upgrade can take anywhere from one week for a single developer, to a few months for two developers.

This is part of our Upgrade Rails series. We will be covering the most important aspects that you need to know to update your Ruby on Rails application from version 3.1 to 3.2.

This is part of our Upgrade Rails series. We will be covering the most important aspects that you need to know to update your Ruby on Rails application from version 3.0 to 3.1. If you are in an older version, you can take a look at our previous article.

This article is the first of our Upgrade Rails series. We will be covering the most important aspects that you need to know to update your Ruby on Rails application from version 2.3 to 3.0.

Rails is a powerful framework. You can write a lot of features in a short period of time. In the process you can easily write code that performs poorly.

At OmbuLabs we like to maintain Ruby on Rails applications. In the process of maintaining them, adding features and fixing bugs, we like to improve the code and its performance (because we are good boy scouts!)

Here are some tips based on our experience.

Prefer where instead of select

When you are performing a lot of calculations, you should load as little as possible into memory. Always prefer a SQL query vs. an object’s method call.

There are already quite a few guides in the wild to help with the upgrade of Rails 3.2 to Rails 4.0.

The official Rails guide for upgrading from Rails 3.2 to 4.0 is very thorough. With the recent release of Rails 5.0, apps currently in production running Rails 3.2 should probably be updated to any stable Rails 4 release as soon as possible.

There is even an e-book about upgrading from Rails 3 to 4, which serves as a useful guide to make this upgrade easier, and also helps understand the advantages & disadvantages of this new (soon to be old) version.

However, if you’re using any non-standard gems, you’re mostly on your own. Some gems stopped being maintained before Rails 4 was released, as was the case with CanCan, a well known authorization library. After many open pull requests were left unmerged, CanCanCan was released. It is a community driven effort to have a semi-official fork of CanCan. It serves as a drop-in replacement for people who want to use CanCan after upgrading to Rails 4.