Upgrading a big application to Rails 5
summary
Shopify upgrades a 13‑year monolith with >100,000 model lines and ~2,000 classes to Rails 5 using a dual booting strategy: a shared Gemfile hack then an eval_gemfile approach, a parallel CI running Rails 4.2 and 5, and a gradual rollout with small percentages before a 100% deploy. The work yields ~150 pull requests in three months to remove protected_attributes, thousands of fixed tests, monkey patches for CSRF and YAML params, and a plan to keep CI tracking Rails master.
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chapters (26)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:13Upgrade a big application to Rails 5
- 1:01RAILS Maintainer
- 1:25Started around the same time as Rails
- 3:40It is a big application
- 4:37It is in the latest Rails version
- 4:50Upgrading to Rails 5
- 5:55Dual boot strategy
- 9:34Upgrade our dependencies
- 10:09Contribute to the dependencies that don't support the latest Rails version
- 11:24Fix all the tests
- 15:43Strong Parameters
- 16:48Missing abstractions?
- 17:14Controller Tests
- 21:38Not an ideal solution
- 23:02Road to production
- 23:45Compatibilities Layers
- 26:10Benchmarks
- 27:23Cleanup
- 27:40Remove deprecations
- 28:31Upgrade configurations to match new values
- 28:46Preparation to the next upgrade
- 29:07Avoid monkey patches
- 29:40Keep tracking master
- 30:08Think about backwards compatibility
- 30:18Give back to the community
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