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DO NOT READ THIS FILE ON GITHUB, GUIDES ARE PUBLISHED ON https://guides.rubyonrails.org.
Ruby on Rails 4.2 Release Notes
Highlights in Rails 4.2:
- Active Job
- Asynchronous mails
- Adequate Record
- Web Console
- Foreign key support
These release notes cover only the major changes. To learn about other features, bug fixes, and changes, please refer to the changelogs or check out the list of commits in the main Rails repository on GitHub.
Upgrading to Rails 4.2
If you're upgrading an existing application, it's a great idea to have good test coverage before going in. You should also first upgrade to Rails 4.1 in case you haven't and make sure your application still runs as expected before attempting to upgrade to Rails 4.2. A list of things to watch out for when upgrading is available in the guide Upgrading Ruby on Rails.
Major Features
Active Job
Active Job is a new framework in Rails 4.2. It is a common interface on top of queuing systems like Resque, Delayed Job, Sidekiq, and more.
Jobs written with the Active Job API run on any of the supported queues thanks to their respective adapters. Active Job comes pre-configured with an inline runner that executes jobs right away.
Jobs often need to take Active Record objects as arguments. Active Job passes object references as URIs (uniform resource identifiers) instead of marshalling the object itself. The new Global ID library builds URIs and looks up the objects they reference. Passing Active Record objects as job arguments just works by using Global ID internally.
For example, if trashable
is an Active Record object, then this job runs
just fine with no serialization involved:
class TrashableCleanupJob < ActiveJob::Base
def perform(trashable, depth)
trashable.cleanup(depth)
end
end
See the Active Job Basics guide for more information.
Asynchronous Mails
Building on top of Active Job, Action Mailer now comes with a deliver_later
method that sends emails via the queue, so it doesn't block the controller or
model if the queue is asynchronous (the default inline queue blocks).
Sending emails right away is still possible with deliver_now
.
Adequate Record
Adequate Record is a set of performance improvements in Active Record that makes
common find
and find_by
calls and some association queries up to 2x faster.
It works by caching common SQL queries as prepared statements and reusing them on similar calls, skipping most of the query-generation work on subsequent calls. For more details, please refer to Aaron Patterson's blog post.
Active Record will automatically take advantage of this feature on supported operations without any user involvement or code changes. Here are some examples of supported operations:
Post.find(1) # First call generates and cache the prepared statement
Post.find(2) # Subsequent calls reuse the cached prepared statement
Post.find_by_title('first post')
Post.find_by_title('second post')
Post.find_by(title: 'first post')
Post.find_by(title: 'second post')
post.comments
post.comments(true)
It's important to highlight that, as the examples above suggest, the prepared statements do not cache the values passed in the method calls; rather, they have placeholders for them.
Caching is not used in the following scenarios:
-
The model has a default scope
-
The model uses single table inheritance
-
find
with a list of ids, e.g.:# not cached Post.find(1, 2, 3) Post.find([1,2])
-
find_by
with SQL fragments:Post.find_by('published_at < ?', 2.weeks.ago)
Web Console
New applications generated with Rails 4.2 now come with the Web
Console gem by default. Web Console adds
an interactive Ruby console on every error page and provides a console
view
and controller helpers.
The interactive console on error pages lets you execute code in the context of
the place where the exception originated. The console
helper, if called
anywhere in a view or controller, launches an interactive console with the final
context, once rendering has completed.
Foreign Key Support
The migration DSL now supports adding and removing foreign keys. They are dumped
to schema.rb
as well. At this time, only the mysql
, mysql2
and postgresql
adapters support foreign keys.
# add a foreign key to `articles.author_id` referencing `authors.id`
add_foreign_key :articles, :authors
# add a foreign key to `articles.author_id` referencing `users.lng_id`
add_foreign_key :articles, :users, column: :author_id, primary_key: "lng_id"
# remove the foreign key on `accounts.branch_id`
remove_foreign_key :accounts, :branches
# remove the foreign key on `accounts.owner_id`
remove_foreign_key :accounts, column: :owner_id
See the API documentation on add_foreign_key and remove_foreign_key for a full description.
Incompatibilities
Previously deprecated functionality has been removed. Please refer to the individual components for new deprecations in this release.
The following changes may require immediate action upon upgrade.
render
with a String Argument
Previously, calling render "foo/bar"
in a controller action was equivalent to
render file: "foo/bar"
. In Rails 4.2, this has been changed to mean
render template: "foo/bar"
instead. If you need to render a file, please
change your code to use the explicit form (render file: "foo/bar"
) instead.
respond_with
/ Class-Level respond_to
respond_with
and the corresponding class-level respond_to
have been moved
to the responders gem. Add
gem 'responders', '~> 2.0'
to your Gemfile
to use it:
# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController
respond_to :html, :json
def show
@user = User.find(params[:id])
respond_with @user
end
end
Instance-level respond_to
is unaffected:
# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def show
@user = User.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.json { render json: @user }
end
end
end
Default Host for rails server
Due to a change in Rack,
rails server
now listens on localhost
instead of 0.0.0.0
by default. This
should have minimal impact on the standard development workflow as both
http://127.0.0.1:3000 and http://localhost:3000 will continue to work as before
on your own machine.
However, with this change you will no longer be able to access the Rails
server from a different machine, for example if your development environment
is in a virtual machine and you would like to access it from the host machine.
In such cases, please start the server with rails server -b 0.0.0.0
to
restore the old behavior.
If you do this, be sure to configure your firewall properly such that only trusted machines on your network can access your development server.
Changed status option symbols for render
Due to a change in Rack, the symbols that the render
method accepts for the :status
option have changed:
- 306:
:reserved
has been removed. - 413:
:request_entity_too_large
has been renamed to:payload_too_large
. - 414:
:request_uri_too_long
has been renamed to:uri_too_long
. - 416:
:requested_range_not_satisfiable
has been renamed to:range_not_satisfiable
.
Keep in mind that if calling render
with an unknown symbol, the response status will default to 500.
HTML Sanitizer
The HTML sanitizer has been replaced with a new, more robust, implementation built upon Loofah and Nokogiri. The new sanitizer is more secure and its sanitization is more powerful and flexible.
Due to the new algorithm, the sanitized output may be different for certain pathological inputs.
If you have a particular need for the exact output of the old sanitizer, you
can add the rails-deprecated_sanitizer
gem to the Gemfile
, to have the old behavior. The gem does not issue
deprecation warnings because it is opt-in.
rails-deprecated_sanitizer
will be supported for Rails 4.2 only; it will not
be maintained for Rails 5.0.
See this blog post for more details on the changes in the new sanitizer.
assert_select
assert_select
is now based on Nokogiri.
As a result, some previously-valid selectors are now unsupported. If your
application is using any of these spellings, you will need to update them:
-
Values in attribute selectors may need to be quoted if they contain non-alphanumeric characters.
# before a[href=/] a[href$=/] # now a[href="/"] a[href$="/"]
-
DOMs built from HTML source containing invalid HTML with improperly nested elements may differ.
For example:
# content: <div><i><p></i></div> # before: assert_select('div > i') # => true assert_select('div > p') # => false assert_select('i > p') # => true # now: assert_select('div > i') # => true assert_select('div > p') # => true assert_select('i > p') # => false
-
If the data selected contains entities, the value selected for comparison used to be raw (e.g.
AT&T
), and now is evaluated (e.g.AT&T
).# content: <p>AT&T</p> # before: assert_select('p', 'AT&T') # => true assert_select('p', 'AT&T') # => false # now: assert_select('p', 'AT&T') # => true assert_select('p', 'AT&T') # => false
Furthermore substitutions have changed syntax.
Now you have to use a :match
CSS-like selector:
assert_select ":match('id', ?)", 'comment_1'
Additionally Regexp substitutions look different when the assertion fails.
Notice how /hello/
here:
assert_select(":match('id', ?)", /hello/)
becomes "(?-mix:hello)"
:
Expected at least 1 element matching "div:match('id', "(?-mix:hello)")", found 0..
Expected 0 to be >= 1.
See the Rails Dom Testing documentation for more on assert_select
.
Railties
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
Removals
-
The
--skip-action-view
option has been removed from the app generator. (Pull Request) -
The
rails application
command has been removed without replacement. (Pull Request)
Deprecations
-
Deprecated missing
config.log_level
for production environments. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
rake test:all
in favor ofrake test
as it now run all tests in thetest
folder. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
rake test:all:db
in favor ofrake test:db
. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
Rails::Rack::LogTailer
without replacement. (Commit)
Notable changes
-
Introduced
web-console
in the default applicationGemfile
. (Pull Request) -
Added a
required
option to the model generator for associations. (Pull Request) -
Introduced the
x
namespace for defining custom configuration options:# config/environments/production.rb config.x.payment_processing.schedule = :daily config.x.payment_processing.retries = 3 config.x.super_debugger = true
These options are then available through the configuration object:
Rails.configuration.x.payment_processing.schedule # => :daily Rails.configuration.x.payment_processing.retries # => 3 Rails.configuration.x.super_debugger # => true
(Commit)
-
Introduced
Rails::Application.config_for
to load a configuration for the current environment.# config/exception_notification.yml: production: url: http://127.0.0.1:8080 namespace: my_app_production development: url: http://localhost:3001 namespace: my_app_development # config/environments/production.rb Rails.application.configure do config.middleware.use ExceptionNotifier, config_for(:exception_notification) end
-
Introduced a
--skip-turbolinks
option in the app generator to not generate turbolinks integration. (Commit) -
Introduced a
bin/setup
script as a convention for automated setup code when bootstrapping an application. (Pull Request) -
Changed the default value for
config.assets.digest
totrue
in development. (Pull Request) -
Introduced an API to register new extensions for
rake notes
. (Pull Request) -
Introduced an
after_bundle
callback for use in Rails templates. (Pull Request) -
Introduced
Rails.gem_version
as a convenience method to returnGem::Version.new(Rails.version)
. (Pull Request)
Action Pack
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
Removals
-
respond_with
and the class-levelrespond_to
have been removed from Rails and moved to theresponders
gem (version 2.0). Addgem 'responders', '~> 2.0'
to yourGemfile
to continue using these features. (Pull Request, More Details) -
Removed deprecated
AbstractController::Helpers::ClassMethods::MissingHelperError
in favor ofAbstractController::Helpers::MissingHelperError
. (Commit)
Deprecations
-
Deprecated the
only_path
option on*_path
helpers. (Commit) -
Deprecated
assert_tag
,assert_no_tag
,find_tag
andfind_all_tag
in favor ofassert_select
. (Commit) -
Deprecated support for setting the
:to
option of a router to a symbol or a string that does not contain a "#" character:get '/posts', to: MyRackApp => (No change necessary) get '/posts', to: 'post#index' => (No change necessary) get '/posts', to: 'posts' => get '/posts', controller: :posts get '/posts', to: :index => get '/posts', action: :index
(Commit)
-
Deprecated support for string keys in URL helpers:
# bad root_path('controller' => 'posts', 'action' => 'index') # good root_path(controller: 'posts', action: 'index')
Notable changes
-
The
*_filter
family of methods have been removed from the documentation. Their usage is discouraged in favor of the*_action
family of methods:after_filter => after_action append_after_filter => append_after_action append_around_filter => append_around_action append_before_filter => append_before_action around_filter => around_action before_filter => before_action prepend_after_filter => prepend_after_action prepend_around_filter => prepend_around_action prepend_before_filter => prepend_before_action skip_after_filter => skip_after_action skip_around_filter => skip_around_action skip_before_filter => skip_before_action skip_filter => skip_action_callback
If your application currently depends on these methods, you should use the replacement
*_action
methods instead. These methods will be deprecated in the future and will eventually be removed from Rails. -
render nothing: true
or rendering anil
body no longer add a single space padding to the response body. (Pull Request) -
Rails now automatically includes the template's digest in ETags. (Pull Request)
-
Segments that are passed into URL helpers are now automatically escaped. (Commit)
-
Introduced the
always_permitted_parameters
option to configure which parameters are permitted globally. The default value of this configuration is['controller', 'action']
. (Pull Request) -
Added the HTTP method
MKCALENDAR
from RFC 4791. (Pull Request) -
*_fragment.action_controller
notifications now include the controller and action name in the payload. (Pull Request) -
Improved the Routing Error page with fuzzy matching for route search. (Pull Request)
-
Added an option to disable logging of CSRF failures. (Pull Request)
-
When the Rails server is set to serve static assets, gzip assets will now be served if the client supports it and a pre-generated gzip file (
.gz
) is on disk. By default the asset pipeline generates.gz
files for all compressible assets. Serving gzip files minimizes data transfer and speeds up asset requests. Always use a CDN if you are serving assets from your Rails server in production. (Pull Request) -
When calling the
process
helpers in an integration test the path needs to have a leading slash. Previously you could omit it but that was a byproduct of the implementation and not an intentional feature, e.g.:test "list all posts" do get "/posts" assert_response :success end
Action View
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
Deprecations
-
Deprecated
AbstractController::Base.parent_prefixes
. OverrideAbstractController::Base.local_prefixes
when you want to change where to find views. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
ActionView::Digestor#digest(name, format, finder, options = {})
. Arguments should be passed as a hash instead. (Pull Request)
Notable changes
-
render "foo/bar"
now expands torender template: "foo/bar"
instead ofrender file: "foo/bar"
. (Pull Request) -
The form helpers no longer generate a
<div>
element with inline CSS around the hidden fields. (Pull Request) -
Introduced a
#{partial_name}_iteration
special local variable for use with partials that are rendered with a collection. It provides access to the current state of the iteration via theindex
,size
,first?
andlast?
methods. (Pull Request) -
Placeholder I18n follows the same convention as
label
I18n. (Pull Request)
Action Mailer
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
Deprecations
-
Deprecated
*_path
helpers in mailers. Always use*_url
helpers instead. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
deliver
/deliver!
in favor ofdeliver_now
/deliver_now!
. (Pull Request)
Notable changes
-
link_to
andurl_for
generate absolute URLs by default in templates, it is no longer needed to passonly_path: false
. (Commit) -
Introduced
deliver_later
which enqueues a job on the application's queue to deliver emails asynchronously. (Pull Request) -
Added the
show_previews
configuration option for enabling mailer previews outside of the development environment. (Pull Request)
Active Record
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
Removals
-
Removed
cache_attributes
and friends. All attributes are cached. (Pull Request) -
Removed deprecated method
ActiveRecord::Base.quoted_locking_column
. (Pull Request) -
Removed deprecated
ActiveRecord::Migrator.proper_table_name
. Use theproper_table_name
instance method onActiveRecord::Migration
instead. (Pull Request) -
Removed unused
:timestamp
type. Transparently alias it to:datetime
in all cases. Fixes inconsistencies when column types are sent outside of Active Record, such as for XML serialization. (Pull Request)
Deprecations
-
Deprecated swallowing of errors inside
after_commit
andafter_rollback
. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated broken support for automatic detection of counter caches on
has_many :through
associations. You should instead manually specify the counter cache on thehas_many
andbelongs_to
associations for the through records. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated passing Active Record objects to
.find
or.exists?
. Callid
on the objects first. (Commit 1, 2) -
Deprecated half-baked support for PostgreSQL range values with excluding beginnings. We currently map PostgreSQL ranges to Ruby ranges. This conversion is not fully possible because Ruby ranges do not support excluded beginnings.
The current solution of incrementing the beginning is not correct and is now deprecated. For subtypes where we don't know how to increment (e.g.
succ
is not defined) it will raise anArgumentError
for ranges with excluding beginnings. (Commit) -
Deprecated calling
DatabaseTasks.load_schema
without a connection. UseDatabaseTasks.load_schema_current
instead. (Commit) -
Deprecated
sanitize_sql_hash_for_conditions
without replacement. Using aRelation
for performing queries and updates is the preferred API. (Commit) -
Deprecated
add_timestamps
andt.timestamps
without passing the:null
option. The default ofnull: true
will change in Rails 5 tonull: false
. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
Reflection#source_macro
without replacement as it is no longer needed in Active Record. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
serialized_attributes
without replacement. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated returning
nil
fromcolumn_for_attribute
when no column exists. It will return a null object in Rails 5.0. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated using
.joins
,.preload
and.eager_load
with associations that depend on the instance state (i.e. those defined with a scope that takes an argument) without replacement. (Commit)
Notable changes
-
SchemaDumper
usesforce: :cascade
oncreate_table
. This makes it possible to reload a schema when foreign keys are in place. -
Added a
:required
option to singular associations, which defines a presence validation on the association. (Pull Request) -
ActiveRecord::Dirty
now detects in-place changes to mutable values. Serialized attributes on Active Record models are no longer saved when unchanged. This also works with other types such as string columns and json columns on PostgreSQL. (Pull Requests 1, 2, 3) -
Introduced the
db:purge
Rake task to empty the database for the current environment. (Commit) -
Introduced
ActiveRecord::Base#validate!
that raisesActiveRecord::RecordInvalid
if the record is invalid. (Pull Request) -
Introduced
validate
as an alias forvalid?
. (Pull Request) -
touch
now accepts multiple attributes to be touched at once. (Pull Request) -
The PostgreSQL adapter now supports the
jsonb
datatype in PostgreSQL 9.4+. (Pull Request) -
The PostgreSQL and SQLite adapters no longer add a default limit of 255 characters on string columns. (Pull Request)
-
Added support for the
citext
column type in the PostgreSQL adapter. (Pull Request) -
Added support for user-created range types in the PostgreSQL adapter. (Commit)
-
sqlite3:///some/path
now resolves to the absolute system path/some/path
. For relative paths, usesqlite3:some/path
instead. (Previously,sqlite3:///some/path
resolved to the relative pathsome/path
. This behavior was deprecated on Rails 4.1). (Pull Request) -
Added support for fractional seconds for MySQL 5.6 and above. (Pull Request 1, 2)
-
Added
ActiveRecord::Base#pretty_print
to pretty print models. (Pull Request) -
ActiveRecord::Base#reload
now behaves the same asm = Model.find(m.id)
, meaning that it no longer retains the extra attributes from customSELECT
s. (Pull Request) -
ActiveRecord::Base#reflections
now returns a hash with string keys instead of symbol keys. (Pull Request) -
The
references
method in migrations now supports atype
option for specifying the type of the foreign key (e.g.:uuid
). (Pull Request)
Active Model
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
Removals
- Removed deprecated
Validator#setup
without replacement. (Pull Request)
Deprecations
-
Deprecated
reset_#{attribute}
in favor ofrestore_#{attribute}
. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
ActiveModel::Dirty#reset_changes
in favor ofclear_changes_information
. (Pull Request)
Notable changes
-
Introduced
validate
as an alias forvalid?
. (Pull Request) -
Introduced the
restore_attributes
method inActiveModel::Dirty
to restore the changed (dirty) attributes to their previous values. (Pull Request 1, 2) -
has_secure_password
no longer disallows blank passwords (i.e. passwords that contains only spaces) by default. (Pull Request) -
has_secure_password
now verifies that the given password is less than 72 characters if validations are enabled. (Pull Request)
Active Support
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
Removals
-
Removed deprecated
Numeric#ago
,Numeric#until
,Numeric#since
,Numeric#from_now
. (Commit) -
Removed deprecated string based terminators for
ActiveSupport::Callbacks
. (Pull Request)
Deprecations
-
Deprecated
Kernel#silence_stderr
,Kernel#capture
andKernel#quietly
without replacement. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
Class#superclass_delegating_accessor
, useClass#class_attribute
instead. (Pull Request) -
Deprecated
ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer#prepend!
asActiveSupport::SafeBuffer#prepend
now performs the same function. (Pull Request)
Notable changes
-
Introduced a new configuration option
active_support.test_order
for specifying the order test cases are executed. This option currently defaults to:sorted
but will be changed to:random
in Rails 5.0. (Commit) -
Object#try
andObject#try!
can now be used without an explicit receiver in the block. (Commit, Pull Request) -
The
travel_to
test helper now truncates theusec
component to 0. (Commit) -
Introduced
Object#itself
as an identity function. (Commit 1, 2) -
Object#with_options
can now be used without an explicit receiver in the block. (Pull Request) -
Introduced
String#truncate_words
to truncate a string by a number of words. (Pull Request) -
Added
Hash#transform_values
andHash#transform_values!
to simplify a common pattern where the values of a hash must change, but the keys are left the same. (Pull Request) -
The
humanize
inflector helper now strips any leading underscores. (Commit) -
Introduced
Concern#class_methods
as an alternative tomodule ClassMethods
, as well asKernel#concern
to avoid themodule Foo; extend ActiveSupport::Concern; end
boilerplate. (Commit) -
New guide about constant autoloading and reloading.
Credits
See the full list of contributors to Rails for the many people who spent many hours making Rails the stable and robust framework it is today. Kudos to all of them.