What would happen if you ran bundle update right now?

Is there a bundle command to tell me what would be updated with bundle update, without actually making those updates?

As it turns out there is! Bundler 1.1 introduces a new command:

bundle outdated
    Show all of the outdated gems in the current bundle.  
    This will give you a report of gems that have newer versions available.

By itself, this will list all of the gems in your Gemfile.lock that have newer versions, and what the current and latest versions are.

This gives a good preview of what you are up against if you want to get your gems up to date. From there, use git commits to make incremental changes.

Putting it to use

Today I created an app with the suspenders gem, and noticed it is running on Rails 3.1.1, which I wanted to upgrade to 3.2.2.

I also saw a few other gems with version attributes:

gem 'sass-rails',   '~> 3.1.4'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.1.1'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
gem 'rspec-rails', '~> 2.6.1'
gem 'cucumber-rails', '1.1.0'
gem 'capybara-webkit', '~> 0.7.1'

First I ran rake to confirm all tests were passing, bundle update to make sure the gems were all up to date with the versions specified, and created an initial commit.

Next I upgraded to rails 3.2.2 and reran bundle update, and found out (after a couple itterations) that sass-rails and coffee-rails had to be updated too, because of there dependance on ActiveSomethingOrOther. Updating these three gems to their latest versions allowed bundle update to do it’s thing.

I reran my tests, and did ran git diff Gemfile.lock to see exactly what was new. For giggles I reran bundle outdated and rejoiced at the shrinking list. Time to commit with a message about the gem version changes.

From here it was rinse and repeat, checking rubygems.org and looking at the dependencies, making small changes, bundling, raking, committing.

At the end of the road I had a good series of commits spelling out exactly what was needed to get to my goal of a fully updated rails 3.2.2 environment.

If you run bundleoutdated and all you see is:

Outdated gems included in the bundle:  
* sprockets (2.4.0 > 2.1.2)  

Then you are doing it right!

Have a cookie!

Read more about what’s new with bundler 1.1 from Pat Shaughnessy.

This week in open source

laptop

I was reminded that I’ve been missing out on our sweet laptop script, which is a program we maintain to get a Rails environment set up on OS X as quickly as possible. So over the past week, Antonio Salazar Cardozo (Shadowfiend) fixed our capitalization of Qt (b667280), Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) fixed our capitalization of JavaScript (87fe88f), and Dan Croak (croaky) removed the deprecated Heroku Labs plugin (842cd0d) and gave instructions on installing the command-line XCode tools (a177cca).

suspenders

The suspenders gem, which has helped many people start a Rails app, now shows that the build is broken. Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) added that (76e42eb).

shoulda-matchers

The shoulda-matchers gem is a collection of RSpec matchers for various Rails things. Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) went to town on it this week, cleaning everything up in an effort to make it more pleasant to hack on (2b98e49, 09544fa, 7b3d6d0, 96df0b1, 36006d8, 4ff1344, 3b3181b, 4574f51, 1c517d2, bd52483, e70e1bf, 41bccc8). Having done that, he added a :primary option to the have_db_column matcher (68e65b2). Matthew Daubert (MDaubs) fixed a JRuby failure and also added support for Rails 3.0 (d85503f).

bourne

Due to my complaining last week, the bourne gem now has a NEWS file (8dfb077), thanks to Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw).

paperclip

So we have this gem named paperclip. You might have heard of it. This week, Tony Brewerio (tony-brewerio) fixed the :content_type validator (c4c22f8).

Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) released version 3.0.1, which breaks backward compatibility (d61ddd5, 51bb0f9, 7088f5b, e1951ed, 9ea4a9b, 36d1289, 8390516, b3f9690, 8e80310, ee4107a, b3a63ed, 8a758c2, 84d2d08, fe706c6, b54904e, d3a7427, da5d716, ee42b19, e83f88f, 03f777f, 5232b19, 19aedbc).

Jon Yurek (jyurek) merged in something he has been working on: adapters for different types of I/O (6c5fe19, e10edcd, f4b6d48, 78cfebd, 89c8d11). Adding new file-like things is now easier, including URLs that act like files. Yeah, that’s right.

Jon is so going to write a blog post about this with more explanations, after he updates the README.

factory_girl

A bunch of fun commits to factory_girl this week. Chris Griego (cgriego) used pull requests as a forum to promote his ActiveAttr gem (81c9f2c and 4e2a672). Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) added a before_create callback (24d417d).

Vasiliy Ermolovich (nashby) used ActiveSupport for deprecation warnings (bca13f1 and 28e3c25) and also made use of the singleton_class method in Ruby 1.9 (08d01c1).

Mike Subelsky (subelsky) fixed a typo in the docs around the name FactoryGirl::Syntax::Methods (266b1d6), Dan Croak (croaky) mentioned the supported Ruby versions in the README (bed50ec), Josh renamed Changelog to NEWS because that’s exactly what it is (4f5b775) and also renamed *rb files to *erb to handle yardoc better (a6ccbcb).

capybara-webkit

I totally dropped the ball on releasing a new version of capybara-webkit this week. Sorry about that! Joe Ferris (jferris), however, refactored some of the C++, which is very welcome (c2a2bd0 and 4531f65).

appraisal

Some news in our appraisal gem this week: Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) added a contribution guideline (fd05fdf), then osheroff fixed appraisal to handle weird filenames (1d4fa93, b21220a, and 75a4970).

This week in open source

paperclip

Much of the work over the past week was done in paperclip, so now you can upload files to your Rails apps with more flare and style!

It now supports an option for keeping old files, so you can pass :keep_old_files to has_attached_file and, when you destroy an attachment (@user.avatar.destroy) it won’t actually delete the underlying files (345ec74). Many people find this useful for S3 storage, which hints that there may be a deeper problem elsewhere. This is thanks to Eike Bernhardt (teefax) but was originally written by Philippe Creux (pcreux).

Christoph Lupprich (kitto) saw a quick way to speed up the #public_url method for Fog storage using AWS as the provider, so he did (989ec0e).

I’ve long wanted a migration helper, and Daniel Schierbeck (dasch) wrote it with some git cleanup from Alexey Mahotkin (693b528, b922111, f82c0d9, f3eacd2, e0a6732, ffbfc24, 500f1bb, b70ffbc, 65a6ae8). It looks like this:

class AddAvatarColumnsToUser < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    change_table :users do |t|
      t.has_attached_file :avatar
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_attached_file :users, :avatar
  end
end

There were also some important internal changes. For example, Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) replaced the AWS::S3 gem with AWS::SDK (1df1b03, 81129ad, 88a8af9, 75f413d, 2cf7378). He called out AWS (amazonwebservices) and Trevor Rowe (trevorrowe) for helping, and John Joseph Bachir (jjb) updated the docs appropriately (308f1a0).

Prem also got Paperclip passing on Rubinius (001fd99).

In bug fixes, base URLs with a ? but no = will produce Paperclip URLs using ? (128d664 and bb22be3). Prem thinks that’s the right behavior now, but it’s tricky to nail down.

Nick Padgett (npadgett) found an edgecase where we were calling strip on a non-string object, sometimes, and fixed that (34913f1).

Dimitrij Denissenko (dim) handled the case where using the :id_partition pattern in a URL or path pattern raises a NoMethodError on an unsaved resource (ac82244). He and I are now enemies for life for his use of nil.

Prem fixed another bug: if you have a path or URL pattern with :class in it it will show a warning. He removed this warning (b4ff2c5).

Prem worked with Steve Richert (laserlemon) to show the Gemnasium results in the README (3e20907 and 777ac90), and Prem also updated the README to be more readable (adcd03c).

fake_braintree

The fake credit card processor, fake_braintree, hit 0.0.6 (eed875e and 0934f1e) this week as Ben Orenstein (r00k) added support for discounted subscriptions (757c0aa) and Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) exposed the transactions that have run (8dde09c and ab93137).

suspenders

Taking a stance on whether we play along with the little Open Directory Project game, suspenders now defaults to NOODP on every page which, as Matt Jankowski (mjankowski) points out, tells Web crawlers to never bother looking for ODP details (6275d0f).

shoulda-matchers

The sweet shoulda-matchers collection of RSpec matchers now has more accurate error messages for the allow_value matcher (25c2623), thanks to Clemens Helm (clemenshelm). It uses the underlying internationalization information to generate this.

bourbon

Another documentation update on bourbon as Phil LaPier (plapier) explained that multiple background images with shorthand notation are unsupported (798aa1c), after clarifying that multiple background images themselves have fancy comma-separated syntax (aa66831).

This week in open source

kumade

It was a refactoring week on kumade, the Heroku deployer. Gabe Berke-Williams and Josh Clayton refactored the Packager class, splitting it out into handlers for Jammit, Less, and no-op packagers (d854184). Then Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) went off on his own to introduce a CommandLine class, wrapping Cocaine with some Thor (0c3840d and 72424c0). Meanwhile Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) changed should_not have_received to should have_received.never (6652197).

suspenders

Our app making gem, suspenders, saw some updates from Matt Jankowski (mjankowski): Rails 3.1 (10ac09a, 97881fc, 354321d, c8f8c85, and db08366), bourbon (d490b36), flutie (e0bab83), the Hoptoad → Airbrake name change (6def3d7), and tying together the asset pipeline (a4ce3e7 and c760a33).

paul_revere

We have a one-off announcement plugin for Rails, named paul_revere. Nick Quaranto (qrush) released version 0.2.1 (3574b40 and dfbf940).

shoulda-matchers

Our collection of RSpec matchers, shoulda-matchers, is not passing on my laptop. Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) built out the continuous integration tests more to attempt to clarify the issue (3d94390, 4450c86, 1a3aeec, 6785f59, f1f5e6d).

bourbon

The SCSS gem, bourbon, saw actual words being used by Matt Jankowski (mjankowski) in the documentation (b8afdea), plus Phil LaPier (plapier) updated the docs with resources for investigating browser compatibility (35539c9). He also added this sweet variable, $all-text-inputs, representing all HTML5 textual inputs like color, date, phone, password, URL, and so on (d1def76 and fb299e6). To wrap it all up he released version 0.1.8 (f3046bd).

paperclip

Lots of bug fixes in paperclip, the Rails image uploader plugin gem, this week. Cody Caughlan (ruckus) added S3 support for an HTTP proxy (4661cef). Denis Yagofarov (denyago) preserved the path set for the Cocaine gem (3a35ba9). Aditya Sanghi (asanghi) gave us a warning when two models save files to the same place on the filesystem (8d43e19). Daniel Evans (danielevans) removes the temporary file after it has been uploaded and processed (748332e). Edison (edison) added a feature where you can set the file system path based on a method in the model (996ca87 and 1738f3c).

Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) then attacked some outstanding bugs: escape the URL (23cb822), handle a space leak where an array was growing by one for each request (d18d814), make the Interpolations.hash class method confirm to the expected signature for hash methods (e526c86), and preserve the filename for S3 attachments when we know the filename (522a53e).

Prem then did some refactoring, splitting the storage tests into individual unit tests (0ca98d1, d204c7d, 31d74d6), stubbing Cocaine (0a77f64), removing some noisy debugging (fd891e0), and cleaning up whitespace (825e1f1 and b2cac53). After all of this he released version 2.4.2 (9edeb01).

factory_girl

Features and refactorings were the name of the game for factory_girl, the fixture replacement for Rails. Joe Ferris and Josh Clayton fixed traits so now you can override attributes of them. They did this by refactoring attributes, introducing an intermediate Declaration object that knows how to compile down to a full factory (a154e64 and f8638b). Joe Ferris (jferris) made callbacks into first-class objects with validations (0f87ca3, ede051f, and 4d30663). Thomas Walpole (twalpole) fixed an inconsistency, ensuring that parent callbacks are called before child callbacks (27c4b21).

Oh man check this: Joel Meador (janxious) updated the ChangeLog (306e51b and 88cf88)! Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) went along with this, too (9c95a2) before releasing version 2.1.2 (58e75bc and c1360e).

capybara-webkit

The capybara-webkit test driver, which Joe presented about at Boston Ruby, continues to improve. Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) gave us a documentation edit (f493b22), while Matthew Mongeau (halogenandtoast) striped and normalized spaces for consistency with Selenium (6d92f35) and also added support for unknown content types (ff0a6e7, 9257fe3, and 353fe86)

The Road to Rails 3

Being at RailsConf 5 has given us the opportunity to finalize a lot of the work we’ve done to prepare our plugins and gems for Rails 3. Thankfully, for many of the most popular gems, we’ve been able to maintain both Rails 3 and Rails 2.3.x compatibility in one gem.  However, we’re taking this opportunity to say goodbye to some of our less widely used plugins, and some we plan on dropping Rails 2 support for altogether.

Obviously, Rails 3 isn’t actually out yet, so what we’re talking about here is Rails 3 beta 4.  We’ll continue to keep things up to date and tested as we all move toward the release of Rails 3.  Your help and patches are more than welcome.

So here is a comprehensive overview of the current status of the projects for both Rails 3 beta 4 and Rails 2.

Paperclip

We released Paperclip 2.3.3 a few days ago. This new version of Paperclip will work with Rails 3. Thanks to the investigation of nragaz and help from isaac and joeljunstrom on github, we worked out the kinks and it should be working with the Rails 2.3.x line, and Rails 3-beta 4.  For the latest version of Paperclip, we’re no longer officially supporting Rails 2.0.x. The earliest version that will work is Rails 2.1.0.  If you need support for an older version of Rails than that, you can use Paperclip 2.3.1.1.

hoptoad_notifier

A few days ago we released hoptoad_notifier 2.2.6 with includes support for Rails 3-beta 4 as well as all versions of Rails 2.x and Rails 1.2.6. 

shoulda

We just released shoulda 2.11.  Along with Rails 3 support, we’re maintaining support for Rails 2.3.x in this latest release.  However, the latest version of shoulda will not support versions of Rails less than 2.3.  If you need support for a version of Rails older than that, you can use a previously released version.

In addition to the Rails 3 support, shoulda 2.11 introduces some dramatic changes to shoulda, including a new way of interacting with all shoulda macros.  The previous way has been deprecated and will be removed in shoulda 3.0.  We’ll make a separate blog post detailing many of the very cool changes to shoulda and more details about the future of shoulda soon, but for now, take a look at the README for the latest information on setting up and using shoulda.

Factory Girl

We just pushed factory_girl 1.3 and factory_girl_rails 1.0.  This new version adds Rails 3 support.  Because of the way that Rails 3 loading has changed, we’ve decided to make a separate factory_girl_rails gem that will be used for when you want to use factory_girl with Rails.  The existing factory_girl gem is used by factory_girl_rails and would be used if you’re using factory_girl outside of Rails.  If you want to use factory_girl with Rails 2 you can continue to use the base factory_girl gem.

Clearance

We just released Clearance 0.9.0.rc1.  This is a release candidate for Clearance 0.9.0.  This new version adds support for Rails 3 but drops support for Rails 2.  Don’t fret, if you won’t be upgrading to Rails 3, you can use a previously released version of the gem (0.8.8).  We’re doing this one as a release candidate because of the dropping of backwards compatibility and the fact that we haven’t had a chance to test the new version in a variety of Rails 3 apps using clearance.

Please flex this release candidate with your Rails 3 apps and let us know how it goes.

Suspenders

Suspenders is currently at 2.3.5 (we haven’t been able to upgrade to 2.3.8 because of bugs we’ve seen with mongrel, webrat, and rack).  We anticipate that Suspenders will be upgraded to Rails 3 a little after Rails 3 final comes out.  But to be honest, we’re actually not sure yet what the upgrade path will look like for applications that are currently tracking Suspenders.  It may be impossible to do without so many conflicts that its not worthwhile.  We’re going to have to work on this more and keep you posted.  Additionally, we’re in the process of making some fairly dramatic changes to Suspenders.  Watch it on github and stay tuned here for more.

High Voltage

Fire in the Disco! We’ve also released High Voltage 0.9.0 which supports Rails 3 and is now a gem (it was previously just a plugin).  The new version also drops support for Rails 2.  If you need the previous, Rails 2 plugin there is a rails2 branch you can retrieve it from.

Pacecar

We also just released Pacecar 1.3 which supports Rails 3 and drops support for Rails 2.  As in the other cases where we’ve done this, you can use the previous version of the gem, version 1.2.0 with Rails 2, or track the rails2 branch.

Squirrel

Squirrel was born out of a desire to make a new query syntax that was dynamic while being clean and simple.  With Rails 3’s introduction of the New Active Record chainable query language, that goal has now been achieved in Rails.  As a result, we’ll no longer be maintaining Squirrel.  It was a fun ride.

Mile Marker

Over time, our workflow slightly changed for how we built applications and we haven’t used Mile Marker ourselves for some time now.  As a result, we’re taking this opportunity to cease maintenance of this plugin and bid it farewell.

Moving on down the road

We’ve gotten more and more familiar with Rails 3 during moving all these gems to it.  Many of the new features it offers are great, and existing features have been improved and cleaned up.  We’re looking forward to Rails 3 finally being released in the coming weeks.  Now that our plugins are up and running it should help us all to transition smoothly and quickly.

Thanks to the core team and various other railsconf attendees for spending time with us this week working on some of this - we’re looking forward to the final version of rails3!