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Just to be clear, it was Paris's fault that I missed my flight. The passport line was really long, and I don’t know, they just didn’t want to wait for me.
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As mentioned, I'm Eileen Uchitelle. You can find me anywhere online at the handle 'EileenCodes'. That's on Twitter, GitHub, my blog, which I never write in, and my email.
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I’m an engineer at GitHub. I work on the Ruby architecture team, where our team is responsible for looking at how our application can work better with Rails and Ruby, and how Rails and Ruby can support our application.
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We set standards, consult on other projects, assess the existing system—basically, we deal with technical debt. I’m on the Rails core team. For those of you who are not familiar with how the Rails team operates, the core team is responsible for the future of the framework.
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We decide what’s going to go into the next release, when to release, and all that good stuff that goes along with releasing. Each year I reflect on what I’ve learned, the work I’ve been doing, and what I’d like to share with you all at upcoming conferences.
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When I started writing the abstract for this talk, I originally thought that I wanted to talk about the intimate details of upgrading Rails at GitHub. I had spent a year and a half upgrading GitHub from Rails 3 to 2.5.
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I certainly could talk about it for hours, maybe even days, until you were all bored. But as I started to explore the themes around upgrading, I realized that there was a deeper story that I wanted to explore.
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I began wondering how we ended up so far behind Rails master in the first place. What decisions did we make that caused the upgrade to be so much more difficult than it should have been? What drove us to upgrade when we were so far behind?
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The story that I want to tell you is about the past, present, and future of Rails at GitHub. We've been using Rails at GitHub since day one, and at times, GitHub and Rails have had our differences.
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Many years ago, we forked Rails and practically wrote our own version. We fought against the framework, we deviated from it, and we even wondered if Rails was right for us at all.
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But at the end of the day, GitHub is successful because of Rails, and Rails is successful because of GitHub. Our upgrade didn’t just make for a good blog post for Hacker News to criticize; the upgrade made it possible for us to use and invest in Rails for the long haul.
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We can change and influence the framework for our needs while also benefiting the broader Rails community and open-source ecosystem. This story is partly historical; we'll look back at the beginning and how GitHub ended up maintaining a custom fork of Rails 2.
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It’s also part technical, exploring what compelled us to upgrade our process and why it was so difficult. We’ll look at the costs of not upgrading and how technical debt accumulates in your application until it starts working against your framework.
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Lastly, this story is part forward-looking; we’ll highlight our effort at GitHub to clean up technical debt, our commitment to open source, and our responsibility to support Rails for the long haul.
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Let’s go back to the beginning. In 2004, DHH announced a new Ruby framework called Ruby on Rails. Immediately, Rails caught the attention of the Ruby community.
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At RubyConf that year, DHH talked about Rails—the history of Rails, how it came to be, and of course, why it was better than existing Ruby frameworks. He went on to discuss his philosophy behind building the framework, most notably that many frameworks fail because they are built without an application in mind.
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He stated that frameworks are retrospectives; they should be extracted, not built. Rails was attractive and successful because it was extracted from a real application: Basecamp.
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In the early years, Rails' complexity grew slowly. Rails 1.0 was released in December of 2005, followed by Rails 1.2 two years later. That same year, Tom Preston-Warner, at a Ruby meetup in San Francisco, showed his friend Chris Wanstrath a tool called Grit.
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Grit was a Ruby tool that allowed you to view Git repositories in an object-oriented way and would later become the basis for Git repositories on GitHub. After seeing Grit, Chris was immediately hooked, and a few days later, the GitHub Rails application was born.
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GitHub was created using Rails 1.2.3, and after a brief beta, it was launched publicly in April of 2008. The next day, Rails moved from their own SVN server to GitHub.
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In 2009, Rails 2.3 was released, and in the early days, whenever Rails would release a new version, GitHub would quickly upgrade to take advantage of new features and bug fixes.
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But sometime between 2008 and 2009, GitHub had forked Rails. I couldn’t find an exact date because we vendored our gems at GitHub, and there weren’t any commits that made it clear when we forked. Personally, I had always thought that we forked Rails for 3.0 because it was very slow—slow enough that many applications couldn’t upgrade.
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But it turns out that had nothing to do with why we forked Rails, and it was long before we even knew 3.0 was a problem. Now remember, this was the Wild West of Rails startups. Nobody really knew what the future of Rails or GitHub was going to be.
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We weren’t yet discussing the importance of upgrading or staying current with Rails master, and honestly, Rails wasn’t as stable as it is today. I don’t want to say that Rails didn’t care about performance at that time, but many app developers felt that way.
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Maybe that was because we were all inexperienced back then, or maybe it was because Rails was good enough for its most important user, Basecamp. Or maybe it was because we at GitHub didn’t contribute enough upstream.
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I'm not criticizing the past, but it's important to examine why we ended up here, so we can learn for the future. The real problem was that GitHub didn’t just fork Rails and add a bug fix here or a performance improvement there.
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It wasn’t just backports from upstream on the fork; GitHub forked Rails with custom code just for GitHub. It was Rails morphed into a different framework built specifically for GitHub, similar to how Rails was built for Basecamp.
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As GitHub doubled down on their fork and added more and more functionality, Rails continued to progress at a rapid pace.
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At this time, nobody could predict or understand the cost that forking Rails would have on GitHub’s application and engineering team. In 2010, Rails 3.0 was released, but many applications couldn't upgrade due to the performance concerns I mentioned earlier.
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The performance issues in Rails 3.0 were a big deal; users saw an unacceptable increase in response times. Some applications experienced request times that took as long as twice as long.
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After it was found that Active Record in Rails 3 was five times slower than Rails 2, despite knowing about these concerns, an engineer at GitHub known as TMM1 started working on upgrading GitHub from Rails 3 to Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.
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GitHub hadn’t just forked Rails before Ruby 2, which made our upgrades even more difficult. The Rails 3 upgrade wasn’t pointing at Rails 3 upstream either; it was still a fork of Rails 3 with custom patches added on top.
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From experience, I can tell you that maintaining a fork while trying to upgrade and simultaneously adding all the new stuff on top of that old version can be enough to make one want to quit programming. I don’t recommend it.
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In 2012, Rails 3.2 was released, and most of the performance concerns were fixed by Iron Ruby and other contributors. In the same year the performance issues were addressed, GitHub’s progress on the Rails upgrades stalled.
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It had been two years since they started the 3.0 upgrade, and the engineering team started questioning whether the effort was worth it at all. They asked each other: Why upgrade when this version isn’t causing us pain? Why upgrade when Rails 3.0 just isn’t that great? Why upgrade when our fork has more features?
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Looking at these questions, the engineering team decided the upgrade wasn’t worth their time and focused their attention on other projects. The truth is that, at that time, GitHub wasn’t yet feeling the pain of being on a fork of Rails.
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It’s really difficult to convince a team to upgrade when they’re still feeling productive. You improve your tests when they feel too slow; you refactor complexity of that class when you need to add functionality. But when do you upgrade? What’s the incentive?
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If the new version isn’t better and your fork is working just fine, if you're not feeling the pain of being on a fork or an old version, you're not going to be compelled to upgrade.
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Eventually, all of these 'why should we upgrade?' questions became suffocating for the engineering team. It became harder and harder to delineate where the framework ended and the application began.
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As GitHub engineers started to fight against the fork, the application security backward compatibility was a nightmare. Each time Rails announced a security vulnerability, GitHub was forced to manually patch that vulnerability.
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Hiring became increasingly difficult; nobody wanted to work on a Rails 2 to 3 application that didn’t resemble Rails 2. It was harder to get up to speed, and you couldn't Google search how to do anything.
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Dependencies were brittle and unsupported as gem authors focused on new versions of Rails; development was slow and painful. Working with an application that’s tied so heavily to a custom fork makes adding features or refactoring code increasingly difficult.
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We realized we had to get off of the fork; that fork was going to suffocate the application. In 2014, a team of four full-time engineers, along with a few volunteers, banded together, wrote an upgrade plan, and started to work.
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It took the team six months of full-time coordinated effort to deploy Rails 3.2 to production, and a few months later, they deployed Rails 3.2 as well. It’s important to remember here that 3.0 and 3.2 are still forks of Rails with custom GitHub patches added on top.
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By this time, the Rails 3 series was only receiving security patches, so even though the upgrade was a success, the fork was still very far behind. The effort put into upgrading from 3.0 to 3.2 was massive, and motivation dwindled after that.
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It would be another two years before the full upgrade was started. That same year, Rails 5.0 came out, and it felt as if GitHub was never going to catch up. Rails was constantly releasing new versions, and GitHub was still so far behind.
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In 2017, I joined GitHub. At this point, the Rails 4.0 upgrade wasn’t in good shape; there was no dedicated team working on it, and the upgrade had fallen by the wayside.
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On my first day, I asked Huw to run the Rails 4.0 tests and noticed there were over 4,000 failures. Luckily, Huw can’t count, and the number was more like two and a half thousand—really easy, right?
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After the 3.0 upgrade, GitHub engineers had at least added some tooling to help make Rails upgrades easier. We had a system that allowed us to dual boot the application in multiple Rails versions.
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This means that we don't need to maintain long-running upgrade branches. By adding the ability to dual boot, we can focus only on test failures instead of merge conflicts.
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Unfortunately, this method also requires us to hack Bundler, but I'd rather hack Bundler than use a fork of Rails. With this method, we were able to boot the application server console and run tests in multiple Rails versions.
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It made it easy to compare and contrast behavior between the version we were using in production and the version we were trying to upgrade to. This process allowed us to incrementally upgrade Rails and prevent regressions.
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Once we had an upgraded version, everyone had to write code that worked in both 3.2 and 4.0. When we got the 4.1 build green, everyone had to write code that passed in both versions, and we continued that process until we got to 5.2.
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Now, we do 5.2 and 6 concurrently in the application code. We use helper methods that easily allow us to condition for different Rails versions: we always put the production version in the 'if' clause and the future code in the 'else'.
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That way, when we upgrade to 4.2, we don’t fall into the 3.2 code path; we fall into the 'else' code path. In March of 2018, a year and three months after I started at GitHub, we deployed 4.2 to production with zero downtime and no customer impact.
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After deploying 4.2 to production, I wanted to get started on 5.0 right away because I didn't want what happened with the 4.0 upgrade to happen to the 5.0 upgrade. However, I was really burned out.
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I felt like this Mac over here, just like the blue screen of death. I had been the only engineer working full-time on the Rails upgrade. There were engineers at GitHub helping out when they had time, but it was on a volunteer basis.
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Upgrading Rails was a difficult and lonely task, and I decided there was no way I would do the 5.0 series alone. So, for the Rails 5 series, I led a team of four full-time engineers.
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By this time, we had learned what processes worked and what didn’t, so I used GitHub projects in the tool and our CI to create issues out of the unique failures in the build. This prevented duplicate work and made tracking progress on the upgrade easier.
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Because we had a dedicated team and a streamlined process, the upgrade from 4.2 to 5.0 took only five months. In August of 2018, we deployed Rails 5.0 to production, also with zero downtime and no customer impact.
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We learned a lot from the 4.0 upgrade, so we were less nervous about deploying the 5.0 version. Our test suite is relatively solid, at least for upgrade purposes, and we had a very clear rollout plan.
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This was a huge milestone. It was the first time in ten years that GitHub wasn’t on a fork of Rails; it was the first time in ten years that GitHub was on the most recent version of Rails.
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That's ten years of cumulative technical debt from being on a fork and years of fighting that fork in our application. We had finally started to pay that debt off by upgrading.
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We don’t eliminate technical debt, but we create breathing room in the application that we hadn’t had in a decade. I hope that learning about our upgrade hasn’t scared you from doing your own.
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The point of this talk isn’t to share horror stories; it’s to show you that there’s a cost to not upgrading, and that cost is cumulative. After hearing about the Rails upgrade at GitHub, many engineers come to me asking how they can convince their leadership team to support an upgrade.
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They often say they don't have the resources, or it's not in their roadmap, or they think it will be too expensive. It’s true that upgrading Rails is expensive and time-consuming; I won’t lie to you.
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But it’s a lot easier to say, 'This upgrade will need X number of engineers at Y number of dollars for Z number of hours.' You can measure that cost and decide whether it’s too expensive.
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At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how expensive or how much it really costs to upgrade your application—because the cost of not upgrading your application is immeasurable.
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Not upgrading your application will cost you more money than any upgrade due to the debt that will accumulate over time. When you don’t upgrade Rails, you have to become a security expert.
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The Rails core team only supports patching security issues in the main current version and major versions of the previous version. This means that once 6.0 comes out, we will only be supporting 5.0, 5.1, and 6.0.
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That means Rails 4.0 won’t be supported anymore after 6.0 comes out, and there’s no grace period—it’s just done. So if you’re using Rails, your team is going to have to patch those security vulnerabilities yourself.
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And it’s really hard to get this right because we try not to reveal how to exploit any vulnerabilities in Rails to protect users. You can’t upgrade; not upgrading means that your team has to know how to patch vulnerabilities.
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When you don’t upgrade Rails, you lose great talent: bootcamp grads, college grads, and engineers who are changing careers. Every engineer wants to work with the latest and greatest tools.
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If you're still on Rails 3.2, they’re not learning that old version, and they're definitely not learning your weird custom fork. Those engineers don’t just not want to work on an old version; they lack the knowledge of how that version even worked.
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Engineers will turn down opportunities to work for you if you're on an old version, because that version doesn't let them contribute upstream. It’s no longer Google-able, and it’s ten years old.
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When you don’t upgrade Rails, some of the gems you rely on will get abandoned or deprecated, which means you’ll either have to live with bugs or fork yet another dependency. New gems may not support old versions of Rails.
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This makes development harder. Every choice that you have regarding dependencies becomes more difficult as you fall further behind. Maintaining old gems on top of your old framework will become tedious and annoying very quickly.
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When you don’t upgrade Rails, you end up building more on top of your fragile application. I've seen this firsthand at GitHub; we have tons of infrastructure code in our app that doesn’t belong there.
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Multiple databases, CI tooling, our own job queue—all of these things complicate our application unnecessarily. Ideally, your application should consist only of the code that makes your application do what it's supposed to do.
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GitHub’s value is not in having code that makes multiple databases work; our value lies in our community, our issues, our data, and our repositories.
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Multiple databases allow us to keep our application up and running, but they are not what customers use our application for. This infrastructure code complicates development and creates pain due to tightly coupling your application to the framework.
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Minor changes can quickly turn into massive multi-week refactorings or even an abandoned project altogether.
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But the biggest consequence of not upgrading Rails is that someday someone at your company will decide that using Rails is just too expensive and that it was a mistake. Then it will be time to carve your application into microservices.
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Now, this isn’t a language war talk, and I’m not criticizing Go or how other people build their apps or services. But we are at a Ruby conference, so I’m going to assume that you at least like writing Ruby.
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I love writing Ruby and I want to keep getting paid to write it. It might seem like an exaggeration, but if we don't upgrade Rails, we don't get to keep writing Ruby.
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The Ruby ecosystem won't improve; our applications will degrade severely, and we’ll be faced with an expensive rewrite. Upgrades might cost a lot, or rewrites have a hefty price tag as well—they might even cost you your job.
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The key to upgrading Rails is to incrementally pay off the cumulative technical debt that you’ve incurred and devise a plan to keep that debt paid down.
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I won’t stand here and lie to you and say that upgrading Rails will be easy. I’ll leave that to the person on Hacker News who wondered why I couldn’t do it faster because they upgraded in a weekend. Clearly, I must just be doing something wrong.
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The upgrade did take a long time, but it wasn’t all I worked on. I also took time to delete unused features, rewrote our custom test framework, and improved our database handling and development tests.
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It's unfair for someone to look at our upgrade timeline and conclude that because of that, using Rails is too expensive. We made choices at GitHub that made our upgrade take longer.
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You have made choices in your application that will make your upgrade harder, but that doesn’t mean that Rails is a bad choice. Technical debt is real, and you need to decide what debt you’re willing to put up with.
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At GitHub, we’ve decided that being behind Rails master is not a technical debt we’re willing to put up with. You can slowly work on technical debt and upgrade your Rails application to reach a better place.
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There are a few things you should consider when upgrading and mistakes to avoid to prevent a seven-year upgrade like we did at GitHub.
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The most important step is to build a team. Upgrades are difficult, and it's helpful to have a team that can support one another, bounce ideas off each other, and ensure that the momentum keeps up.
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If you have a one-person upgrade team, and that person leaves your company, your upgrade will be stalled or possibly stopped altogether. Create redundancy and support for such a vital project.
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If you have a small team and need to upgrade, consider hiring a contractor to help you get out of the weeds. It’s going to be expensive, but it’s cheaper than not upgrading.
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They can also help you institute best practices to ensure that you don’t fall behind in the future. Another thing that makes upgrades easier is taking time to plan your upgrade.
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Your team should ask themselves if they want to upgrade from 3 to 4, or from 4 to 5, or do they want to go straight from 3 to 5? You may want to incrementally upgrade to see all the deprecation warnings, or you might prefer to just rip the band-aid off.
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Our upgrade was long enough that it made sense to work incrementally so we had a sense of accomplishment and could stay motivated. This same process may not make sense for your team.
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You should also consider whether you want to use a long-running branch or get your application booting in multiple Rails versions. It might not be feasible for you to do either, such as booting the application or setting up extra CI builds.
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These are things to consider before starting the upgrade, because upfront investment may save you time later. You can facilitate your Upgrade by fixing deprecation warnings early instead of ignoring them.
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Some deprecations are related to major changes, and ignoring them can block your application from booting until fixed. One example of this is the deprecated alias method chain change in Rails 5.0.
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If you ignore it, it can stall your upgrade, as only one person will be able to work on it until you address the actual test failures. Once you upgrade to the most recent version, make a plan for future upgrades.
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How often will your team upgrade in the future? Are you willing to test new releases of Rails in the beta or release candidate phases? This will make future upgrades easier because you can provide feedback to the Rails team.
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If you can’t run Rails master in production, you can invest in dual booting CI to test Rails 5.2 and 6.0 simultaneously, like we do at GitHub. If you invest in upgrading, it makes sense to also invest in future upgrade tooling.
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Now that we've looked at considerations to make when upgrading, let's look at things you should not do because you will regret them. There are many choices you may make in your application that will complicate upgrades.
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One thing you’re likely to regret is forking Rails. Avoid this. The decision to fork Rails and deviate from upstream was the single most expensive choice we made regarding our application at GitHub.
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This had a compounding effect on the state of the codebase, which was the reason our upgrade from 2.0 to 5.0 took seven years. If you absolutely must fork Rails, try to at least track upstream as closely as possible.
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Use the fork only to backport bug fixes or features you need. If you add features that you never intend to upstream to Rails, your fork will deviate from upstream, and upgrading will become more challenging.
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Another thing that you may regret down the road is falling behind Rails upgrades until the Rails team no longer supports your version. If you need to stay on an unsupported version of Rails, you should use Rails long-term support.
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At least long-term support will maintain the fork for you and ensure security patches remain accurate. If you fall behind Rails upgrades and end up writing your own patches, you might do it wrong and create an unsecured endpoint.
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In general, the best way to apply a security patch is to rely on Rails upstream. Ensuring your application tracks the most recent version of Rails can help reduce surprises when applying security patches.
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If you’re using old unsupported gems, your upgrade will be more difficult because you will be required to upgrade those gems before you can upgrade Rails. Ensure that you upgrade your dependencies often to align with Rails requirements.
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This will also prevent you from relying on a gem that gets abandoned by its maintainer because we at the Rails team aren’t going to keep recommending or adding unsupported gems.
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You may also regret using private Rails APIs. Private APIs are code that’s purposely undocumented or under the private namespace. We reserve the right to change these APIs without deprecation.
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If your application relies on the behavior of these APIs, they can be removed or deprecated without warning. It’s always best to use public documented methods in Rails.
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All of these choices can compound the cost of your upgrade; it’s easy to see how these decisions contribute to accumulating debt in our applications.
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I hope that by now you’re feeling more confident that you can tackle an upgrade. I know it’s going to be hard; you might cry, you’ll definitely get angry, and you may even curse past engineers who no longer work at your company.
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I definitely did, and I apologize to all of those engineers. But I want you to know that you can do it; I have faith in you.
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You might think, 'Well Eileen, maybe it wasn’t easy for you because you are on the Rails core team and work at GitHub, but I just don’t have the talent to pull off this upgrade.'
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Let me tell you something that I have shared with many, and they have seemed surprised by it: before the Rails 3.2 to 5.0 upgrade at GitHub, I had never accomplished a major multi-version upgrade and deployed it to production.
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If I can do it, you can do it! I’m not smarter than you, and I’m not better than you. Upgrading isn’t going to be easy.
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But especially if you carry the cumulative costs we've discussed, it’s essential while you work on your upgrade to remember a few key things.
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Firstly, you don’t have to solve all of your technical problems tomorrow. You can pay down your debt incrementally. Start with that one class that uses a private Rails API, remove it or document your monkey patches, and identify which Rails dependencies are out of date.
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Rails upgrades are not a sprint; they’re a marathon. If you and your team incrementally pay down the debt you’ve incurred, the upgrade will eventually be possible and completed.
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Also, remember that you’re not alone. Many before you have navigated an upgrade, and many will do it after you. Find other companies that are upgrading alongside you and lean on each other for support.
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When I did the upgrade at GitHub, I knew that Shopify had just finished their Rails upgrade, and I felt comfortable asking them for advice and support.
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Lastly, remember that the payoff is worth it. Upgrades take time and are difficult, but being afraid of upgrading won’t make it go away. When you upgrade your application, it will be in a better state.
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In addition to better security, easier hiring, and more manageable dependencies, doing the hard work of upgrading will provide you with improved APIs.
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Major version upgrades allow the Rails team to rethink how previous features were designed and if we can improve them in the next version. In Rails 6, we improved APIs for handling multiple databases.
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Before Rails 6, managing multiple databases in a Rails application was very painful; you had to write a ton of code yourself. But in Rails 6, we added new APIs for establishing and handling connections, along with improved Active Record database configurations.
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Without upgrading, you won't have access to these improvements. Upgrading to new versions of Rails also enhances security.
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Besides making security upgrades easier, each Rails version adds new features to protect your application from bad actors. In Rails 5, we introduced perform CSRF tokens, and Rails 5.2 added encrypted secrets.
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Rails 6 will ship with improved security features around potentially dangerous URL methods. These features help keep your application secure.
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And since these are security features and not vulnerability patches, the only way to get them is to upgrade your application. Although Rails 3.0 was plagued with performance issues, newer versions have focused on better performance.
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The Rails team is always looking for ways to make Rails faster in all environments. Rails 6 is shipping with fixed memory leaks for view loading in development and faster Active Support notifications.
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Upgrading Rails also grants you access to new libraries. Rails 6 is shipping with brand new frameworks like Action Text and Action Mailbox.
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By upgrading, you can rely on fantastic new features in Rails without having to build your own infrastructure tooling into your application. If your application needs to send mail, it shouldn’t need to implement how to send mail; Rails should take care of that for you.
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Upgrading Rails helps maintain a clear separation between where your Rails application concludes and your custom application begins.
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Lastly, upgrading your application gives you a chance to contribute upstream. It’s challenging to fix bugs, add features, and influence the future of Rails from an old unsupported version.
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While it’s not a requirement to contribute if you’re on a new version, it definitely opens doors that are otherwise closed. As DHH said in 2004 and has repeated many times since, frameworks are extracted.
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If those needs are stuck back in Rails 2.3, it’s hard to make a case for extraction. GitHub needs all of these reasons to upgrade.
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This is the most important reason that kept me going; it was why I spent a year and a half on the Rails upgrade—so that GitHub could influence the future of Rails.
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This is the biggest and most important reason to upgrade: by absorbing features, fixing bugs, and supporting Rails' future, we support our own future as well.
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When I look back at the 3.2 to 5.2 upgrade, the thought of being on a modern version of Rails and actively contributing felt like an unachievable fairy tale.
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We were so far behind that I often wasn’t sure we’d finish it, at least not while maintaining my sanity.
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But now, regularly contributing to Rails and supporting the future of Rails is GitHub's present and future state. Since upgrading, GitHub engineers have submitted over 75 pull requests that improve performance, fix bugs, and add major functionality.
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Before we upgraded, we were often forced to add a monkey patch or find overly complex workarounds for bugs. Using Rails 5.2 has allowed us to not only contribute upstream but to make choices that improve our application instead of hinder it.
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All of you benefit from those changes as well. In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, we've extracted major functionality from GitHub.
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We don’t have time to discuss technical details, but we've extracted our handling for multiple databases in Rails 6. We used our knowledge and experience in database handling to create an easy-to-use, robust new API.
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By upgrading, we’re reducing complexity in our application. Our goal is to never fall behind again. We’re investing in our application and Rails.
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Every week, we bump our Rails gem and run all of GitHub's tests against that new version. This allows us to find regressions and fixes before we release that version.
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It also lets us test GitHub code in Rails 5.2 and 6.0 simultaneously. Because we did the difficult work of upgrading major versions, we hope we'll never fall behind.
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Upgrades won't be easy, but doing continuous upgrades and our contributions to Rails show that for the first time in GitHub's history we’re not just using Rails.
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We are pioneering the future of Rails. We’re extracting code from GitHub, building new features into Rails that will help you scale your applications, and giving back to open source.
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It makes good sense for us to do this. Not only do we give back to the community, but it also helps keep our application focused on our product.
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We can reduce complexity while improving resilience, all whilst contributing to the future of Rails. At GitHub, we need to do this for our application, but we also have a responsibility to support Rails.
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We owe part of our success to the Rails framework, and we have the influence, expertise, and application to push Rails forward.
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Upgrading Rails was a huge investment; it wasn’t cheap, but it was absolutely worth it. Upgrading Rails opens up a ton of opportunities for the future, and we have a bright path ahead.
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We’re building features faster, we’re more confident our code base is stable, and we’re improving the scalability of Rails. All while giving back to the open-source community.
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At a minimum, by upgrading, we transitioned from being crushed by Rails and the decisions we made to building up our application, building up Rails, and focusing on strengthening our community.
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Upgrading Rails has given us the freedom and flexibility that we didn’t have before, enabling our engineers to build more and build better.
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In 2007, GitHub was born, and eleven years later, we are finally at a position where we have caught up with Rails master. It took seven years from when the 3.0 upgrade began to complete the 5.2 upgrade.
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The future is bright, and I can't wait to see how the next ten years allow us to extract from GitHub, build in Rails, and watch the community thrive.
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At GitHub, we will continue to contribute to and invest in the future of Rails and our community—because we have to, because we want to, and because we need to.
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We'll keep investing in the future because GitHub and Rails are in this together for the long haul, and I hope you are too. Thank you!