Rails 7.1: Dockerfiles, BYO Authentication, More Async Queries, and more! (rubyonrails.org)

This is the ✨ official announcement post ✨ for Rails 7.1, featuring a breakdown of the major highlights — Dockerfiles, auth improvements, async queries, composite primary keys, and much, much more.

It’s definitely worth a read, as is the detailed release info (see next paragraph). As with every Rails release, there are heaps of small tweaks and changes that have been merged in, but don’t warrant an announcement or blog post. I’m talking about things like —

• Adding timestamptz support for Postgres databases (nice one Alex 😉)

• Specifying multiple fixture paths with TestFixtures#fixture_paths

• Adding support for Array#intersect? to ActiveRecord::Relation

• Literally hundreds of other changes!

You can check out the official release notes for a breakdown of most changes, or if you’re feeling up to it, dig through the GitHub release info to see everything new.

→ 🍃 Introducing ActiveRecord::Base::normalizes (mintbit.com)

Here’s another cool new Rails 7.1 addition — normalized columns! Model files now support normalizes:, which is a handy way to sanitize input, and keep your database clean and consistent.

Copying directly from the article, in Rails 7.1, you can write code like this —

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  normalizes :email, with: -> email { email.downcase }
end

_{(Also, can I say — MintBit, your blog is beautiful ❤️)}

→ 💾  Introducing Trilogy: a new database adapter for Ruby on Rails (github.blog)

It’s no secret that PostgreSQL is the database-darling of the Rails world. Not everyone uses it though. For instance, GitHub runs mysql, and Trilogy is the release of their new mysql database adapter.

The article itself dives into why GitHub released a new adapter (spoiler: performance). It also includes some hidden gems, like the joke embedded in the name Trilogy — “The name is a pun: it’s the third adapter GitHub has used, and it’s used to query sequel.”

→ 💼 Add perform_all_later to enqueue multiple jobs at once (github.com)

Here are some PRs for you to read! (It’s OK, I’m not asking for a code review 😉). This one introduces the perform_all_later method to ActiveJob, drawing on the existing push_bulk method from Sidekiq.

This should be a great help in cases where you have heaps of jobs to enqueue at once — Your app will just hit Redis once, and skip callbacks, keeping things snappy.

Also, as a bonus, here’s another great PR (and something I’ve personally been hoping to see) — Allow templates to define which locals they accept.

# Add Rails.env.local? 
# short for Rails.env.development? || Rails.env.test?.
#- DHH

# ✅
if Rails.env.local? do 
  ...
end

# ❌
if Rails.env.development? or Rails.env.test? do 
  ...
end