How to upgrade a Ruby on Rails app

Fernando — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 16:05:09 +0000

The idea for this post came because I couldn’t build a rails app on an M1 Mac computer for various reasons. for one, Ruby and Rails versions were old. However, I could run the app in docker so upgrading this app through docker facilitated the ability to do the upgrade. This blog post assumes you already have your application running in Docker and that you are using docker-compose.

Let's upgrade rails

The first step is of course to make sure that the app works in docker. The newer version of Rails come with a docker file that will run your app locally but older versions don’t have this feature.
Get on the docker container by running, docker-compose exec container_name bash
make sure to capture the rails version you are on.
```
  rails -v
```
The next step is to head on to https://railsdiff.org/ to see what changes have been made from the rails version you are on to the want you want to move to.

The common practice when upgrading rails is to go to the latest version in the current sequence. for example, say you have an app that is running Rails 6.1.4, then you want to update your Rails to the latest version of Rails 6.1.4. in this example, you want to update rails to 6.1.4.7. if we look at railsdiff.org for the differences in these two versions. in our example, there is not much that we need to change. so let's continue updating rails.

4.The next thing to do back in our application is to run bundle update rails from inside the docker container.

This will update the needed gems to the compatible versions of our newly updated rails version. You will see something like the below.

5.Lastly, make sure to run the update task. the update task will walk you through changes in the rails configuration files and ask you to review the differences.

  rails app:update

this will look something like this:

6.Our final step is to make sure we run our tests.

```
rails test
```

Great! you have updated your Rails application. Continue doing the same steps for the next rails version and use railsdiff.org as a helping tool.

Conclusion

IMPORTANT At this point you should make sure to run your tests to make sure that everything is working as expected. of course, this implies that you have good test coverage for your entire application. if you have integration tests, make sure those also pass and make changes as needed if they dont. As an extra safety measure, I like to click around and submit forms, etc within my application to make sure the behavior is the same as before.

As a final thought, make sure to read the Rails guides for best practices when upgrading a Rails application. you can see that here:
https://guides.rubyonrails.org/upgrading_ruby_on_rails.html

Thank you for reading. feel free to leave your comments below.

Deploy App with Google Firebase

Fernando — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 19:19:23 +0000

Single page app with Google's Firebase

Nowadays deploying a website out on the web is a trivial process. All you need is a computer to write your code in, an internet connection, a hosting provider, a DNS record, use versioning system to host your app files, and money…. Eh, that list is getting long.

Let's start over, shall we?

Nowadays deploying a website out on the web is a trivial process. Google's Firebase cloud system makes the deployment easy. In this tutorial, we will deploy a single-page website on the web in just a few steps.

Prerequisites

Command line experience. You should be able to create directories and files and run a few commands.
Able to run commands on the command line. Administrator privileges on your machine.
A computer with internet access.
5-10 minutes.
Gmail account.

Step 1

https://console.firebase.google.com/

Step 2

Once you have logged in and are on the main page, click on “Create a Project”. Choose a name for your project. I chose firebase-tutorial.

Feel free to enable/disable analytics for your project in step 2 of the wizard.

Select the default account if you chose to enable analytics*.

Then click “create project”

If you chose to disable analytics, go ahead and click the “create project” button.

*Make sure to accept google analytics terms if you enabled analytics.

Step 3

Once you have created your project, you should now be on the project's homepage.

Let's go ahead and create an app by clicking the web ( </> ) icon.

Step 4

Choose a nickname for your app, I chose “firebase-tutorial”. then click “Register app”.

if you select the Firebase hosting checkbox, you can either accept Google’s site name or you can create a site name. if you create a new site name. your website will be available at **your-site-name.web.app*

Step 5

Download the Firebase tools

curl -sL https://https://firebase.tools | bash

Step 6

Once Firebase tools are installed, type the following

firebase login

Make sure you use the same account to log in as the one you used for creating a project earlier.

Step 7

In your command line, let's navigate to our desktop (or where you keep your project files) and create a directory there. Type the following:

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir firebase-tutorial
cd firebase-tutorial

Step 8

Initiate your project

firebase init hosting

in the prompts that follow,

we already have a project so select, use an existing project. hit enter.
hit enter again for selecting the default project
what do you want to use as your public directory? (public).
1. hit enter again. we will use the default directory.
configure as a single-page app ?
1. enter ‘y’
we will not be setting up automatic deployment with GitHub, enter ‘N’

Step 9

Deploy your app

great!! we are almost there. You now have a single-page web application.

let's see it live on the internet by doing the following:

firebase deploy

Visit your site on the web by selecting the Hosting URL value in the printed output of your terminal.

when you visit your site, you should see something like this:

Congratulations, you now have a single-page web app live on the internet.

Bonus Points

The default page is boring. Let’s spice it up some and let's have our friends visit our site.

Step 1

Rename your index.html file to index1.hml and create a new index.html file inside your public directory. copy the content below and put it in the new index.html file.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <title>Jokes Website</title>
</head>

<body>

    <p>Welcome Friends,</p>
    <p>Want to hear a joke? click the button below. ;)</p>
    <button onclick="fetchAJoke()">Tell me a joke</button>
    <p id="joke-paragraph"></p>

    <script type="text/javascript">
        function fetchAJoke(){
            $("document").ready(function(){
                const jokes_api_url = 'https://v2.jokeapi.dev/joke/Programming,Miscellaneous,Dark,Spooky,Christmas?blacklistFlags=nsfw,racist&type=single'
                $.get({
                    url: jokes_api_url,
                    type: 'GET',
                    success: function(result){
                        const jokeParagraph = $("#joke-paragraph");
                        jokeParagraph.text(result.joke);


                    },
                    error: function(error){
                        alert("error, try again later" + error);

                    }
                })
            })
        }
    </script>

</body>
</html>

Step 2

Let's deploy our website.

firebase deploy

if you followed the steps above, you should have something like the following image.

see my live site here:
https://fir-tutorial-d6310.web.app/

Conclusion

If you are looking to deploy a small site, Googles Firebase is a good tool. It is convenient and you don't have to worry about the other things that come with trying to host a site online. This is also good for showcasing your projects.

Post in the comments your site URL. I look forward to seeing any remixes you guys make.

DEV Community: Fernando

How to upgrade a Ruby on Rails app

Let's upgrade rails

Conclusion

Deploy App with Google Firebase

Single page app with Google's Firebase

Bonus Points

Conclusion