This years's Rails Contributors

554 awesome people contributed to the Rails framework in 2016! A big thanks to everyone, keep up the good work!

Rails 5 has been released!

After a period of betas Rails 5.0 has been released this June. The headline features are Action Cable and a mode primed for API-only apps.
For the new major release, DHH brought us an updated look at Rails in the form of a video tutorial.

Kasper joined Rails core!

That's right Kasper got himself a cartoon face!
Kasper has helped make countless changes and helped others make them as well.
He's continued to making substantial, individual contributions, like the new partial collection caching scheme, wildcard template dependencies, and big improvements to the test runner.

MariaDB support in Rails 5! 🎉

Thanks to Jeremy Daer, Ryuta Kamizono, Vipul A M and Ian Gilfillan, Active Record is now fully compatible with MariaDB ❤️💛💚💜... click on our heroes' names to open the commits and see what went down behind the scenes!MariaDB is a community-developed open source fork of MySQL. Notable users include Wikipedia, Facebook, Google and, yes, Basecamp 3! Here is a good Wikipedia article about MariaDB and MySQL history. Game on!

jQuery is no longer a dependency of Rails

The Rails javascript helpers has been rewritten in a new gem called rails-ujs and they use vanilla javascript, so jQuery is not a dependency of Rails anymore.

"Yarn is good. Yarn works."

Rails 5.1 is gaining a --yarn option. This option is now promoted to be the default: every new Rails app will be set up to use yarn out-of-the-box. It's also worth noting that yarn packages are now installed into the vendor/node_modules directory.

Basic webpack integration

While we are talking about JavaScript, the asset bundling side of things is also getting some love. Rails 5.1 will gain first-class support for webpack via the --webpack option. This is still a pretty early spike, so definitely try it out and help improve it.

RailsConf 2016 talks on YouTube

Confreaks published the recording of the talks from this years RailsConf.

Fresh off the tracks, a new Rails site!

Before the the latest major release of Rails, we got a new website and logo and... doctrine?
Yes! See, Rails has been going strong for over 10 years, the Rails Doctrine just captures that magic and spells it out. Thus Rails is ready to roll on for the next decade. The blog post dishes on the new design's backstory.

P.S. The Rails core team got some awesome new pictures too!

New welcome page for Rails 5

Do you remember the old Welcome aboard page? It's now replaced by Yay! You are on Rails! The welcome page got a big facelift in Rails 5, gone are the needless links and extra data. It's compact and mentions only relevant things.

Bona fide system testing in Rails 5.1

From DHH on Twitter:

“System tests have finally taken strong hold at @Basecamp. Can't wait for us to level-up @Rails with great defaults for it in 5.1!”

The work being done is soon to be bundled into a new gem inside of Rails, that will hopefully be part of Rails 5.1!

New syntax for Action View tag helpers

Building on an implementation proposal by DHH, new syntactical sugar has been introduced for tag helpers that supports HTML5 markup by default and avoids positional parameters. See the PR for details and code examples as well as #25289 for the groundwork and discussion.

Ability to add database comments

It is possible to specify comments for tables, columns, and indexes in the database itself now with this addition. It currently works for MySQL and PostgreSQL adapters.

New exception handling APIs for Active Job

New APIs retry_on and discard_on have been added to Active Job. These provide hooks for a job class to perform some additional functionality when exceptions occur. The PR for this feature has some nice discussion, check it out!

Active Record got a few extra query methods

Ever find yourself writing cumbersome things like User.count.zero?? You can now use the terser User.none?, as well as User.one? and User.empty?, as these three methods just got added.

2x performance boost for String#blank? in Ruby 2.4!

String#blank? now uses Regex#match? following the backwards compatible addition of Regex#match? that was introduced.

Ensure compatibility between Rails Session and Rack Session

Rails session is now compatible with other Rack frameworks like Sinatra that are mounted in Rails. They can also use session tooling of Rails without any issues now.

Show error message when Rails runner fails

The Rails runner will give you a hint of what is going on whenever it fails with an exception.

Allow download of email attachments in the Mailer Previews

Now we can download email attachments in mailer previews similar to real-world emails thanks to this change.

Rails' test runner supports after_run hooks

The Rails test runner switched to using minitest's autorun across the board, as such it gained support for Minitest.after_run hooks.
autorun also guards against running tests twice, which could happen in some cases. But that's now fixed too.

Change default primary keys to BIGINTs

Friends don't let friends use INT as a primary key – your app might hit Webscale™ before you know it, resulting in much sadness when your primary key column overflows. To help put you on the right path, Rails 5.1 will default to using BIGINTs for primary key columns in MySQL and PostgreSQL.