Surprisingly useful Rails console tips

#​733 — January 9, 2025

Read on the Web

Hi folks – we're back from our extended holiday break and will now be with you till at least April ;-) I have a lot of email to get through from the break, but if you have anything to submit, hit reply and let me know.
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Peter Cooper

Ruby Weekly

Ruby 3.4's Modular Garbage Collection and MMTk— Ruby’s garbage collector has been the subject of numerous tweaks and improvements over the years, but in Ruby 3.4 you can replace it with an alternative implementation at runtime. It’s a cutting edge, experimental idea, but will allow implementers to improve things and try out new approaches faster.

Matthew Valentine-House

💎 The Previous Ruby Weekly, If You Missed It— I wouldn’t normally feature a prior issue, but it was a ‘surprise’ one to focus on the Christmas Day Ruby 3.4 release, so it’s worth a read if you missed it. We also had some sad news about a much appreciated community member, Noah Gibbs.

Ruby Weekly

Seamless Rails Upgrades: Fixed Price Maintenance— Upgrading RoR can be daunting. Outdated gems, breaking changes, & limited resources often hinder smooth transitions. We offer expert Rails maintenance at a fixed monthly price, your application remains secure, performant, minimal business disruptions.

reinteractive / CodeCare sponsor

Useful Things You Can Do with the Rails Console— It’s always a good sign when you see people linking to an article saying they’ve been using the Rails console for ten years or more and still learnt something from it! There’s a lot of great stuff here.

Paweł Dąbrowski

IN BRIEF:

• 🇺🇸 RailsConf 2025 is now official and will be taking place in Philadelphia on July 8-10. There's also no RubyConf 2025 but it will return in 2026.

• We're seeing a lot of libraries bumping up minimum Ruby version support to Ruby 3.1 recently, so if you're running an older version, the time to upgrade is rapidly approaching..

• Stan Lo posted over the Christmas break about steps being made to improve Ruby 3.4's documentation.

• Ruby Central is supporting RubyInstaller’s expansion to ARM64.

• The Ruby community lost one of its greatest contributors last month: In Memoriam - Noah Gibbs

• The Rails Foundation has a quick 2024 wrap up post. On a more technical level, though, Greg Molnar has a great roundup of what changed in Rails in 2024.

A Simple Trick to Understand Ruby’s Lazy Enumerator— This article employs some simple, effective, and interactive visuals to drive home the benefit of lazy enumeration in Ruby.

Ross Kaffenberger

How Honeybadger Migrated from Sidekiq to Karafka— Honeybadger ran into some limitations with Sidekiq’s Redis backend, so decided to try Karafka’s Kafka-based approach. Here’s what they learnt.

Roel Bondoc

Can Kamal Really Beat a PaaS? ⚔️ Read the Developer’s Guide— With Rails 8 hot off the presses, we explore just how far Kamal can take your app.. and exactly where it can’t! 😱

Judoscale sponsor

Dissecting Puma: Anatomy of a Ruby Web Server— You might need a few cups of coffee at the ready for this epic! Dan digs into the popular Puma server for serving up Rack apps over HTTP and covers a huge amount of ground about how it works.

Dan Svetlov

📄 How to Build an API with Sinatra and MongoDB– A code heavy walkthrough. Alvaro (Blag) Tejada Galindo

📄 Is Docker on macOS Still Slow?– A quick benchmark of different approaches. Paolo Mainardi

📄 Writing Elegant Custom Matchers in RSpecTejas Bubane

📄 Auto-Saving Rails Forms with Turbo StreamsJosef Strzibny

🛠 Code & Tools

Refrigerator: A Way to Freeze All Core Ruby Classes— Designed to be used in both production and testing to make sure no code is making unexpected changes to core classes or modules at runtime.

Jeremy Evans

Gem Shop: A Vulnerable Rails 8 App for Security Education— An intentionally vulnerable Rails app with various security issues so you can see them, explore fixes, and learn about cybersecurity issues in a more hands-on manner rather than encountering them via a text message at 4am..

Michael Lubas (Paraxial.io)

Log Everything, Ask Anything with Honeybadger— Honeybadger transforms your logs into rich events that help you fix issues before your users know what happened. Try our free plan!

Honeybadger sponsor

Sanitize 7.0: Ruby HTML and CSS Sanitizer— A popular, long-standing library that, oddly, we’ve never linked to before despite using it a lot. Sanitize removes all HTML and/or CSS from a string you supply except for the things you want it to contain. v7.0 requires Ruby 3.1+ and improves its set of default ‘relaxed’ rules to fit modern standards.

Ryan Grove

Rumale 1.0: A Machine Learning Library for Ruby— Offers a similar interface to Python’s Scikit-Learn for working with support vector machines, regression, perceptrons, decision trees, K-means, component analysis, and similar concepts and algorithms.

A. Tatsuma

Active Record Adapter for AWS Aurora DSQL— The “very beginnings” of an Active Record connection adapter for Amazon’s new Aurora DSQL database (essentially a Postgres-compatible serverless, distributed database service).

Samuel Cochran

• connection_pool 2.5– Generic connection pooling for Ruby. Idle connections can now be reaped.

• Mechanize 2.14– Library to automate web interactions. Now with a write_timeout option.

• Hotwire::Livereload 2.0– Auto reload Hotwire Turbo when app files are modified.

• ValidatesTimeliness 8.0– Date/time validation for Active Model. Now for Rails 8.

• Spreadsheet Architect 5.1– Create XLSX, ODS, or CSV spreadsheets from Ruby.

• Brakeman 7.0– Static analysis security vuln scanner for Rails apps.

• sqlite3-ruby 2.5– Now with native gem packages for Ruby 3.4.

• React on Rails 14.1– A way to integrate React with Rails apps.

• Good Job 4.7– Postgres-backed job queue for Rails.

• parallel_tests 4.8– More cores == faster testing.

• TinyTDS 3.1– FreeTDS bindings for Ruby.

• Resque 2.7– Background job scheduler.

• Alba 3.5– JSON serializer for Ruby.

• Gollum 6.1– Git-powered wiki.

💬 Ok, that's our first issue of 2025! If you've got any links to articles or resources you'd like to share with us, just hit reply and let us know to take a look. You can also share your links over on RubyFlow, the Ruby community link site. Finally, we're also beginning to use Bluesky now if you'd like to follow there too.