Upgrading Rails is easy, right? Sure, as long as you're upgrading your patch version. A Rails upgrade in a big application is not a trivial project: it took GitHub a year and a half to upgrade from Rails 3.2 to 5.2.

While upgrades have become easier with every new Rails version, your application has only become more complicated with every new dependency you added.

In this workshop, you will learn a proven Rails upgrade process for major and minor version changes of Rails. You will leave this workshop with a roadmap to upgrade your Rails application.

PREPARATION

You should bring your laptop and make sure you have an Internet connection. This is an important pre-requisite of this workshop.

In order to have a better workshop experience, attendees are expected to bring an outdated Rails application to work on. If you have one, that's great. Just make sure that you can run `bundle install` and `bundle exec rake`.

If you don't have one and still want to participate, I will provide a sample open source, Ruby on Rails application. You should follow these steps:

git clone http://git@github.com:fastruby/e-petitions.git
cd e-petitions
./bin/setup
bundle exec rake

Make sure that your development environment has everything you need to run the test suite for your application.

In terms of versions of Ruby, if you are upgrading from Rails 4.2 to 5.0 (that is the case for our sample app), you should make sure that you have a Ruby version manager installed (rvm or rbenv) and one of these versions:

For Rails 4.2: 1.9.3; 2.0.0-p648; 2.1.10; 2.2.10; 2.3.8; or 2.4.6
For Rails 5.0: 2.2.10; 2.3.8; or 2.4.6

ERNESTO TAGWERKER

Ernesto is the Founder of Ombu Labs, a software development company based in Philadelphia. When he is not playing table tennis, he likes to maintain a few Ruby gems. He is passionate about writing Rails, launching minimal products, coaching entrepreneurs, contributing to open source, and eating empanadas.

Workshop: Upgrade Rails 101: The Roadmap to Smooth Upgrades