Rails 8 is finally here, and it's shaking things up in a pretty exciting way. If you're already active in the Rails community, you might have heard the tagline: "No PaaS Required." This is an unusual (but not surprising) mission—the release is all about making it easier to deploy your Rails apps without needing a fully-featured platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

Continuous integration (CI) pipelines are an important part of building and deploying reliable software. Whether it's building a Docker image, running tests, or even just doing code linting, CI pipelines help you automate repetitive tasks and ship better code even faster. GitHub Actions lets you create pipelines to build containers, test source code, and publish software.

Whether or not you're active in the Rails ecosystem, you might already have heard some of the buzz around Solid Queue, a new database-backed backend for ActiveJob. Solid Queue is a simple and performant option for background jobs that lets you queue large amounts of data without maintaining extra dependencies like Redis. We've already talked about how to deploy, run, and monitor Solid Queue, but we haven't yet explored how Solid Queue works.

Feature flags are a powerful tool in software development, allowing developers to control the behavior of an application at runtime without deploying new code. They enable teams to test new features, perform A/B testing, and roll out changes gradually. In Ruby on Rails, feature flags can be managed using diverse tools, the most popular being the Flipper gem.

Engines are one of the best ways to share functionality across Rails applications. Whether you're looking to extend your Rails application, modularize your project for better maintainability, or are just curious about the finer details, join us as we explore the intricacies of Rails engines. This article dives into everything you need to know about Rails engines, from their definition to their types, popular examples in the real world, and even building your own.

A bug in software can be disruptive, elusive, maddening, and invasive. Indeed, a developer often needs the tenacity of Edison to find and fix an issue. But grit isn't the only asset a developer requires. One also needs information to debug code: What are the symptoms and effects of the issue? What is its frequency? Pervasiveness? Provenance? The evidence and artifacts of a bug — a core dump, stack trace, log, or test case — are invaluable.

It's 2024, and the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is 35 years old. The fact that the vast majority of web traffic still relies on this simple, stateless form of communication is a marvel in itself. A first set of content retrieval optimizations were added to the protocol when v1.0 was published in 1996. These include the infamous caching instructions (aka headers) that the client and server use to negotiate whether content needs refreshing.

Ruby on Rails is an excellent choice for building a REST API, stemming from its design principles and robust feature set. It encourages a resource-oriented architecture, including built-in routing, migrations, and task tools. Rails also includes Active Record, an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) layer, which simplifies database interactions.

Ruby on Rails is currently in major version 7.1 and rolling towards Rails 8, the next comprehensive new release. Before Rails 8, though, there’s a significant version that will help bridge the gap: Ruby on Rails 7.2. In this post, we’ll dive into several noteworthy changes in Ruby on Rails 7.2, focusing on the support for database changes in Active Record. You'll come away with hands-on opportunities to work with these features. Let's get started!

From custom-made to plug-and-play forms of authentication, Ruby developers have plenty to choose from these days. Yet, as you may know, building your own solution can be costly and dangerous. If Devise is the de facto standard for most teams, an alternative might simplify the lives of most. This article will cover the setup and use of Auth0 in a Ruby on Rails application, including everything you need to get going properly, from handling roles to relying on multiple providers to authenticate users.