• Add prepend: true option to ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe.

  When `prepend: true` is passed, the subscriber is added to the front of
  the subscriber list for the given event, ensuring it runs before any
  previously registered subscribers. This allows mutating the event payload
  before other subscribers process it.
  
  ```ruby
  ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe("sql.active_record", prepend: true) do |event|
  event.payload[:name] = "[IDC] #{event.payload[:name]}"
  end
  ```
  
  *Jean Boussier*, *Federico Carrocera*

• Deprecate require_dependency.

  require_dependency is deprecated without replacement and will be removed in Rails 9.

  • Recommendations for applications:

    - If the call is an old one written in the days of the classic
    autoloader to ensure a certain constant is loaded for constant lookup
    to work as expected, you can simply remove it.
    
    - In order to preload classes when the application boots, which may be
    necessary for things like STIs or Kafka consumers, please check the
    autoloading guide for modern approaches.

  • Recommendations for engines that depend on Rails >= 7.0:

    Same recommendations as for applications, since the classic autoloader is no longer available starting with Rails 7.0.

  • Recommendations for engines that support Rails < 7.0:

    Guard the call with a version check just in case the parent application is using the classic autoloader:

    require_dependency "some_file" if Rails::VERSION::MAJOR < 7

  Xavier Noria

• Add group method to ::ActiveSupport::ContinuousIntegration for parallel step execution.

  Groups collect steps and run them concurrently using a thread pool, reducing CI times by running independent checks in parallel. Sub-groups run sequentially within a single parallel slot allowing dependent steps to be grouped together.

  CI.run do
    step "Setup", "bin/setup --skip-server"
  
    group "Checks", parallel: 2 do
      step "Style: Ruby", "bin/rubocop"
      step "Security: Brakeman", "bin/brakeman --quiet"
      step "Security: Gem audit", "bin/bundler-audit"
  
      group "Tests" do
        step "Tests: Rails", "bin/rails test"
        step "Tests: Seeds", "env RAILS_ENV=test bin/rails db:seed:replant"
      end
    end
  end

  Donal McBreen

• Introduce this_week?, this_month?, and this_year? methods to Date/Time

  Similar to today?, tomorrow?, and yesterday?, these methods are useful to query time instances against the current period.

  unless post.created_at.this_week?
    link_to "See week recap", week_recap_path(date)
  end

  Matheus Richard

• Removed the deprecated ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars class.

  As well as String#mb_chars

  Jean Boussier

• Changed ActiveSupport::EventReporter#subscribe to only provide the event name during filtering.

  Otherwise the event reporter would need to always build the expensive payload even when there is no active subscriber, which is very wasteful.

  Jean Boussier

• Fix inflections to better handle overlapping acronyms.

  ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections(:en) do |inflect|
    inflect.acronym "USD"
    inflect.acronym "USDC"
  end
  
  "USDC".underscore # => "usdc"

  Said Kaldybaev

• Add ::ActiveSupport::CombinedConfiguration to offer interchangeable access to configuration provided by either ENV or encrypted credentials. Used by Rails to first look at ENV, then look in encrypted credentials, but can be configured separately with any number of API-compatible backends in a first-look order.

  The object is inspect safe and will only show keys, not values.

  DHH, Emmanuel Hayford

• Add ::ActiveSupport::EnvConfiguration to provide access to ENV variables in a way that's compatible with ::ActiveSupport::EncryptedConfiguration and therefore can be used by ::ActiveSupport::CombinedConfiguration.

  The object is inspect safe and will only show keys, not values.

  Examples:

  conf = ActiveSupport::EnvConfiguration.new
  conf.require(:db_host) # ENV.fetch("DB_HOST")
  conf.require(:aws, :access_key_id) # ENV.fetch("AWS__ACCESS_KEY_ID")
  conf.option(:cache_host) # ENV["CACHE_HOST"]
  conf.option(:cache_host, default: "cache-host-1") # ENV["CACHE_HOST"] || "cache-host-1"
  conf.option(:cache_host, default: -> { "cache-host-1" }) # ENV["CACHE_HOST"] || "cache-host-1"

  DHH, Emmanuel Hayford

• Make flaky parallel tests easier to diagnose by deterministically assigning tests to workers.

  Rails assigns tests to workers in round-robin order so the same --seed and worker count will result in the same sequence of tests running on each worker (whether processes or threads) increasing the odds of reproducing test failures caused by test interdependence.

  This can make test runtime slower and spikier when one worker gets most of the slow tests. Enable work_stealing: true to allow idle workers to steal tests from busy workers in deterministic order, smoothing out runtime at the cost of less reproducible flaky-test failures.

  Jeremy Daer

• Make ActiveSupport::EventReporter#debug_mode? true by default to emit debug events outside of Rails application contexts.

  Gannon McGibbon

• Add SecureRandom.base32 for generating case-insensitive keys that are unambiguous to humans.

  Stanko Krtalic Rusendic & Miha Rekar

• Add a fast failure mode to ::ActiveSupport::ContinuousIntegration that stops the rest of the run after a step fails. Invoke by running bin/ci --fail-fast or bin/ci -f.

  Dennis Paagman

• Implement LocalCache strategy on ::ActiveSupport::Cache::MemoryStore. The memory store needs to respond to the same interface as other cache stores (e.g. ActiveSupport::NullStore).

  Mikey Gough

• Add a detailed failure summary to ::ActiveSupport::ContinuousIntegration.

  Mike Dalessio

• Introduce ::ActiveSupport::EventReporter::LogSubscriber structured event logging.

  class MyLogSubscriber < ActiveSupport::EventReporter::LogSubscriber
    self.namespace = "test"
  
    def something(event)
      info { "Event #{event[:name]} emitted." }
    end
  end

  Gannon McGibbon

Please check [8-1-stable]) for previous changes.