How to Prepare Your App according to all new Rails 6.1

Rails 6.1 has finally been launched. There seems to be a range of memory optimizations for your Rails apps that should boost their efficiency and speed. A variety of new features are going to be introduced soon too. Although 3rd-party libraries are now providing means to manage several databases, horizontal sharding and making switches between connections on a per-database basis. However, with the recent launch, all of this will be now available for all the applications.

It’s incredible how Rails has evolved over time, and with the introduction of all the new upgrades, Rails have definitely improved for the better. The enhancements in this update concentrate on providing the flexibility you need for decades to come to hold your application running smoothly.

Now, let us have a look at the new features:

Multi-DB Updates

Horizontal Sharding

Rails 6.0 included the flexibility to divide your database functionally (multiple partitions, different schemas), but was unable to accept horizontal sharding (same schema, multiple partitions). As models in Active Record could only have one link per role per class, Rails was not able to support horizontal sharding before. All of this is resolved and there is horizontal sharding possible with Rails.

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Pre-database Connection Switching

Rails 6.1 offers you the opportunity to toggle connections per-database. In 6.0, all database connections also moved to the reading role if you shifted to the reading role. If you configured legacy connection handling to false in your configuration now in 6.1, Rails will enable you to transfer connections to a single database by calling the appropriate abstract class connected to.

Strict Loading Associations

In reference to the several database and connection management enhancements, there was also an addition of support for strict loading alliances. With this function, you can guarantee that all your associations are loaded diligently and avoid N+1’s before they occur.

Destroy Associations Async

Destroy associations async provides the way for apps to destroy associations in the background task. This will enable you to prevent timeouts and several different performance concerns in your application when destroying data.

Error Objects

Active Model errors are now objects with an interface that makes it easier for your application to manage and deal with model errors. Lulalala has introduced the function and provides a query interface, allowing for more accurate testing, and accessibility to error information.

Active Storage

Active storage has been one of the greatest updates in Rails 6.1. Now you can customize attachments for the service in which you want them to be placed. Dmitry Tsepelev introduced this functionality, which was eventually loved by everyone.

In addition, Rails 6.1 provides support to active Storge for permanent URLs for blobs. Enacted by Shopify’s Peter Zhu, this function enables your attachments to be configured to use a private or public URL and guarantees that a permanent URL will still be used by public URLs.

Disallowed Deprecation Support

If you want to execute your free deprecation-warning program, then this function is for you. The function allows applications to optionally display an error if a deprecation alert is shown. This is necessary to make sure that programmers don’t reinstate alerts of deprecation that have already been resolved.

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Enhanced performance

A release is not just about the amazing updates of functionalities you now have access to. It’s all about fixing the bugs or errors, increasing efficiency, and making everybody more comfortable with Rails. This update contains an enhancement that prevents a query if there passes an empty array reported by Molly Struve. A performance enhancement was also introduced by Eileen M. Uchitelle and Aaron Patterson that accelerates where queries are an integer because we know all the values.

The classic Autoloader is Deprecated

Since the very first Rails update, the classic autoloader has supported us in all of its entirety, but there is something even better and it’s going to begin its deprecation cycle.

New Rails programs are severely prevented from using the classic autoloader, and we suggest that current projects run on the classic switch to zeitwerk mode when upgrading.

The Upgrade Process

When moving from one Rails version to another, it is always great to move slowly, while making effective use of the deprecation alerts. Version numbers for the Rails are in the Major.Minor.Patch form. Changes to the public API can be made to major and minor versions, so it may lead to errors in your application. Patch versions contain fix bugs only and do not modify any public API.

The method ought to go as follows:

1. Write tests and ensure that they are passed.
2. After your new update, switch to the most recent patch version.
3. Fix tests and obsolete functionalities.
4. The next minor update will be shifted to the new patch version.

Repeat this step until your desired version of Rails is reached. You’ll need to modify the Rails version number in the Gemfile (and probably other gem versions) every time you switch versions and run a package update. Then run the Update task below to update your configuration files, and run the tests.

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The Update Task

Rails offer the command for the app:update (rake rails:update on 4.2 and earlier). After you have modified the version of Rails in Gemfile, run this command. It will allow you to create new files and alter old files in the sense of an interactive session.

bin/rails app:update

The Installation Process

It’s simple to install Rails after setting up your development environment and installation of Ruby.

Once you have access to the current version of Rails i.e., Rails 6.1, you just have to follow the given options for installing Rails.

If you wish to install the current stable release:

$ gem install rails

If you wish for the latest beta version or release candidate, you can install with –pre.

$ gem install rails --pre

Or you can also have access to a particular version.

For example, if you wish for the Rails 5.2.4 release:

$ gem install rails --version=5.2.4

After the installation is done, shut and the terminal window again.

Make sure that the correct version of Rails is installed with rails -v.

Whenever you are able to wrap up everything, you will understand that Rails is safely installed. If you want, you can terminate the Terminal window. Now that you are able to install most of the things, you will now lose anything by shutting down the Terminal.

Will we benefit from the new Rails upgrade?

Major corporations such as Shopify, Basecamp, and Github have spent a lot of their engineering time in order to give something back to the core Rails framework, m. As a group, we seek to ensure that there are limited breaking modifications in major/minor upgrades.

We hope that the upgrades will keep getting simpler than they were a few years earlier. Could this be one of the factors you’re trapped where you are? Have you gone through a costly update before? Have you tried the new version of Rails 6.1? We would love to understand your views in the comments section.