czarneckid/Rails 4 Upgrade Notes.md

## Rails 4 Upgrade Notes.md

      
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              Rails 4 Upgrade Notes.md
            
          
    Rails 4 Upgrade Notes

I recently completed our upgrade to Rails 4. Below are various notes and links that may help you if you are upgrading your application to Rails 4. YMMV.
Overview

There is a good Rails Guide on upgrading, with a specific section on upgrading from Rails 3.2 to Rails 4.0. First, a bit about our specific application and the technologies used, pre-Rails 4 upgrade:

Rails 3.2.14
Ruby 2.0.0-p247
Unicorn
MongoDB w/ Mongoid
Redis with Sidekiq for worker jobs
Haml, Sass, Zurb Foundation, CoffeeScript, jQuery
Devise, Devise Invitable, OmniAuth
Stripe
Mailchimp
Capistrano

Starting Out

As noted in the Rails Guide on upgrading, you will probably want to make sure you have tests, that you are using Ruby 1.9.3 (although Ruby 2.0.0 is better) and that you are on Rails 3.2.x. The first step for me was deciding on a way to mark Rails 4 issues that I needed to address as I was doing the upgrade. I decided a comment of # RAILS4: would be straightforward and easily searchable in our project.
All of this work was done in a rails-4-upgrade branch.
Upgrading rails Requirement

The next step for me was upgrading the rails gem requirement in our Gemfile.
gem 'rails', '~> 4.0.0'
Gems via GitHub

After that I ran bundle update rails and it was all aboard the Failboat for a 3 hour tour. In reality, it wasn't that bad. The main issue with updating the rails gem were requirements from other gems on specific items such as activemodel. The gems in our application that required going against GitHub versions as of now are:

plataformatec/simple_form
mongoid/mongoid
scambra/devise_invitable
mongoid/kiqstand

The one gem in our application that I could use an alpha release gem was:

compass-rails, '~> 2.0.alpha.0'

Addressing Application-Specific Issues

Once I was able to get bundle update rails to successfully run and there were no issues running bundle install, I ran guard and made adjustments to the application to address specific issues in the code and/or tests. Those items were as follows:

Added the protected_attributes gem to continue to use attr_accessible in a few of our models.
Added the actionpack-page_caching gem to be able to use the caches_page method. This is used in our
application wherein we pre-cache our error pages to be able to use our application's stylesheets.
A few places in our application used Mongoid's #set method on models and this changed from being able to set
a single attribute to being able to provide a Hash of attribute/value pairs.
Adding the appropriate config.eager_load = false or config.eager_load = true to the various
environment configuration files, e.g. config/environments/production.rb.
Ensuring the match-style routes in our routes.rb file added the appropriate allowed
HTTP methods, e.g. via: [:get].
As observers have been removed from Rails 4 and moved to a gem, Mongoid had
removed observers as well. The 4 observers we
had in our application were refactored to use callbacks on the model class. All the observers,
and subsequently the callbacks, were doing was to put jobs into Sidekiq.

Deploying the rails-4-upgrade Branch

We have staging and shadowed environments for our application. The staging environment goes against a separate backend and has limited access based on location and user while the shadowed environment goes against the production backend, but has limited access based on location and user. I deployed the rails-4-upgrade branch to our shadowed environment. As we use capistrano for deploying our application, I came across a capistrano wiki page on capistrano, Rails 4 and the Asset pipeline. The gist of that being that I only had to remove the Rails 3.x manifest.yml file.
Once I had successfully deployed and used the application in the shadowed environment, I deployed the rails-4-upgrade branch to production and let the application be used by everyone for an afternoon. Towards the end of the day I merged the Rails 4 upgrade pull request.
Updates Post-Rails 4 Deployment

I only made 2 updates after our Rails 4 upgrade was deployed to production. Those fixes were as follows:

Although the Rails upgrade guide mentions, "Rails 4.0 requires that scopes use a callable object
such as a Proc or lambda", there was one model with a scope that did not use a lambda. However,
the tests ran fine and the one part of the application that exercised that scope did not error out.
We had a partial with a - in the name, not a _ and the application threw an error. I renamed that
partial to use a _. However, the partial with the - in the name was allowed under
Rails 3.2.x. The specific error I received was:

  ActionView::Template::Error: The partial name (header-pro) is not a valid Ruby identifier; 
  make sure your partial name starts with a lowercase letter or underscore, and is followed 
  by any combination of letters, numbers and underscores.

Fin

So far so good. I should also note that all of this was done with zero downtime.
Happy Rails 4-ing! I'd be glad to address any comments and/or questions.