Debugging is an important skill to develop as you work your way up to more complex projects. Seasoned engineers have a sixth sense for squashing bugs and have built up an impressive collection of tools that help them diagnose and fix bugs.

I'm a member of Heroku’s Ruby team and creator of CodeTriage and today we’ll look at the tools that I used on a journey to fix a gnarly bug in Sprockets. Sprockets is an asset packaging system written in Ruby that lies at the heart of Rails’ asset processing pipeline.

At the end of the post, you will know how Sprockets works and how to debug in Ruby.

Unexpected Behavior in Sprockets

Sprockets gives developers a convenient way to compile, minify,...

All previously released versions of Sprockets, the software that powers the Rails asset pipeline, contain a directory traversal vulnerability. This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2018-3760.

How do I know if I'm affected?

Rails applications are vulnerable if they have this setting enabled in their application:

# config/environments/production.rb config.assets.compile = true # setting to true makes your app vulnerable 

Note: The default value of this setting that ships with Rails in production.rb is false. By default, Rails apps running in production mode are not vulnerable to this exploit.

How do I fix it?

To remediate this vulnerability, applications can either change the...