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 case you are not familiar with us, FastRuby.io specializes in Ruby and Rails upgrades. Over these past 10 years we have had the opportunity to perform dozens of upgrades for our clients, which has given us all sorts of experiences. A common scenario that we experience is when the upgrade isn’t straightforward and we can’t just upgrade the Ruby or the Rails version directly.

We often find ourselves in a situation where we need to upgrade one or more dependencies before we can actually upgrade Ruby or Rails itself. For instance, if your want to upgrade your app from Rails 5.x to 6.x and the application still uses Paperclip to manage your file attachments, first you’ll need to replace that gem because Paperclip was deprecated in favor of Active Storage after Rails 5.2 was released.

This was the case for one of our clients that has been doing upgrades with us for a few years now. In this article I’m going to share the mishaps found by the team and the strategy that we adopted to migrate their huge volume of attachments over to Active Storage while still keeping Paperclip active until the migration was finished.

Ruby 3.0 was released on December 25th 2020. We can now enjoy the great new features of this version, such as performance boost (we talked about that in this recent article), ractors for concurrency, fiber schedulers, and type checking.

If you already have an application running in production and want to be able to use such benefits you’ll need to upgrade your Ruby version.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you’ll need to know to get your Ruby application from version 2.7 to 3.0

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.

At OmbuLabs we like to follow a style guide to drive our own products. A style guide is a document that provides guidelines for the way your brand should be presented from both a graphic and language perspective. You can see FastRuby.io’s style guide at this link.

Since we have a few applications in place and it’s important to make sure that they all use the same style, we need to ensure that they will all inherit the same CSS files. One way to do this is to copy the above style guide and paste it inside all of our apps, but this would end up causing a lot of duplicated code. If we decided to change the font-style, for example, we would need to change it in all apps individually.

Something else we are super fans of at OmbuLabs is to follow good code and development practices. One of our favorites is the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, which states that duplication in logic should be eliminated via abstraction. So to avoid the duplicated code here, we decided to create a gem to encapsulate our style guide and to be bundled in all of our products.

In this article, I’ll show you how we did it!