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Ruby on Rails 3.2 Release Notes

Highlights in Rails 3.2:

These release notes cover only the major changes. To learn about various bug fixes and changes, please refer to the changelogs or check out the list of commits in the main Rails repository on GitHub.


Upgrading to Rails 3.2

If you're upgrading an existing application, it's a great idea to have good test coverage before going in. You should also first upgrade to Rails 3.1 in case you haven't and make sure your application still runs as expected before attempting an update to Rails 3.2. Then take heed of the following changes:

Rails 3.2 requires at least Ruby 1.8.7

Rails 3.2 requires Ruby 1.8.7 or higher. Support for all of the previous Ruby versions has been dropped officially and you should upgrade as early as possible. Rails 3.2 is also compatible with Ruby 1.9.2.

TIP: Note that Ruby 1.8.7 p248 and p249 have marshalling bugs that crash Rails. Ruby Enterprise Edition has these fixed since the release of 1.8.7-2010.02. On the 1.9 front, Ruby 1.9.1 is not usable because it outright segfaults, so if you want to use 1.9.x, jump on to 1.9.2 or 1.9.3 for smooth sailing.

What to update in your apps

What to update in your engines

Replace the code beneath the comment in script/rails with the following content:

ENGINE_ROOT = File.expand_path('../..', __FILE__)
ENGINE_PATH = File.expand_path('../../lib/your_engine_name/engine', __FILE__)

require "rails/all"
require "rails/engine/commands"

Creating a Rails 3.2 application

# You should have the 'rails' RubyGem installed
$ rails new myapp
$ cd myapp

Vendoring Gems

Rails now uses a Gemfile in the application root to determine the gems you require for your application to start. This Gemfile is processed by the Bundler gem, which then installs all your dependencies. It can even install all the dependencies locally to your application so that it doesn't depend on the system gems.

More information: Bundler homepage

Living on the Edge

Bundler and Gemfile makes freezing your Rails application easy as pie with the new dedicated bundle command. If you want to bundle straight from the Git repository, you can pass the --edge flag:

$ rails new myapp --edge

If you have a local checkout of the Rails repository and want to generate an application using that, you can pass the --dev flag:

$ ruby /path/to/rails/railties/bin/rails new myapp --dev

Major Features

Faster Development Mode & Routing

Rails 3.2 comes with a development mode that's noticeably faster. Inspired by Active Reload, Rails reloads classes only when files actually change. The performance gains are dramatic on a larger application. Route recognition also got a bunch faster thanks to the new Journey engine.

Automatic Query Explains

Rails 3.2 comes with a nice feature that explains queries generated by Arel by defining an explain method in ::ActiveRecord::Relation. For example, you can run something like puts Person.active.limit(5).explain and the query Arel produces is explained. This allows to check for the proper indexes and further optimizations.

Queries that take more than half a second to run are automatically explained in the development mode. This threshold, of course, can be changed.

Tagged Logging

When running a multi-user, multi-account application, it's a great help to be able to filter the log by who did what. TaggedLogging in Active Support helps in doing exactly that by stamping log lines with subdomains, request ids, and anything else to aid debugging such applications.

Documentation

From Rails 3.2, the Rails guides are available for the Kindle and free Kindle Reading Apps for the iPad, iPhone, Mac, Android, etc.

Railties

Deprecations

Action Mailer

Action Pack

Action Controller

Deprecations

Action Dispatch

Deprecations

Action View

Deprecations

Sprockets

Active Record

Deprecations

Active Model

Deprecations

Active Resource

Active Support

Deprecations

Credits

See the full list of contributors to Rails for the many people who spent many hours making Rails, the stable and robust framework it is. Kudos to all of them.

Rails 3.2 Release Notes were compiled by Vijay Dev.