Rails 6 Roundup: Everything We’ve Read about Rails’ Newest Version
Reading time: ~ 2 minutes
The beta version of Rails 6.0 was released on January 15th, 2019, with the stable version of Rails 6 coming soon on April 30 (just in time for RailsConf!) We’re excited for Rails 6.0 as it comes with some notable new features. Many developers have started to test this beta version of Rails, so we’ve rounded up all of the helpful information we’ve found so far about Rails 6.
Here’s everything you need to know about Rails’ latest update.
New Feature Overview
What’s coming to Rails 6.0?
Guy Maliar read through all of the Rails Changelogs to analyze the new features coming to version 6.0. His summary is full of in-depth analysis on what these changes will mean for Rails developers.
Drifting Ruby: What’s New in Rails 6
If you’re more of a video learner, Drifting Ruby put together a helpful tutorial clip that highlights the notable features new in Rails 6. You’ll get an overview of all of the new changes in ~11 minutes.
Bogdan: What is new in Rails 6.0
Bogdan’s blog is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to all things Rails. This article from October is another great summary of the major changes coming to the framework with the newest version. He included a giant collection of links at the bottom of this post that detail specific changes.
ActionText
Back in October, DHH announced Action Text for Rails 6, “an integration between the Trix editor, Active Storage-backed file and image processing,” tied together with a text-processing flow. Here are a few tutorials and summaries from around the web on ActionText.
A Quick Look at Action Text for Rails 6.0
Arum Mathew Kurian breaks down Action Text by demonstrating it in a small Rails application. You can see the rich text editor in action.
[Video] Using Action Text in a Rails 5.2 Application
Dave at Drifting Ruby put together a video on using Action Text on a Rails 5.2 application while we wait for the official release of the feature in Rails 6.
For further research on Action Text specifically, you can read the Rails Guides Action Text Overview or watch the demonstration in action from DHH himself.
Adrien Poly also put together a tutorial to demonstrate how to create the same example that DHH shows in the announcement video.
This is one of the more controversial changes that you’ll find in Rails 6. For many developers, the action text addition isn’t necessary in Rails core by default. You’ll find a lot of opinions that this qualifies as bloat for the framework, and should be an opt-in instead of an opt-out. One of our Rails developers wrote about the drawbacks of this feature on legacy applications using file upload methods outside of ActiveStorage (like Carrierwave).
Action Mailbox
Introducing Action Mailbox for Rails 6
Here is Rails’ official announcement for Action Mailbox from back in December. The announcement includes the motivation for Action Mailbox, explaining that, though Rails had an “anemic way of receiving emails using Action Mailer,” the solution was poorly structured and implemented.
This framework was, like many other major pieces of Rails 6, extracted from Basecamp 3. While beta versions often sound like risky business, it’s encouraging to hear that this code has been in use by Basecamp's large userbase for a few months now. Here’s the full Action Mailbox Basics guide from RailsGuides.
Additional Rails 6 Features
Rails 6 Unnoticed Features
There are many small updates beyond the headline-making features of Action Text, Action Mailbox, etc. We could curate a list of them here, but Alexandre Ferraille from Drivy’s Engineering team has already done a stellar job of putting that together. Here are his observations of a dozen-plus changes that are found in the newest version of Rails.
For some thorough and not-so-light reading, you can check out the the complete 6.0.0beta1 changelog to view everything that’s changed in version 6.0 of your favorite framework.
What are you most excited about in Rails 6? Are you taking part in the Rails 6 beta? Or, have you written about Rails 6 and think we should include your takeaways in this post? Leave a comment below and let us know!