One of our most important goals at Heroku is to be boring. Don’t get us wrong, we certainly hope that you’re excited about the Heroku developer experience — as heavy users of Heroku ourselves, we certainly are! But, even more so, we hope that you don’t have to spend all that much time thinking about Heroku. We want you to be able to spend your time thinking about the awesome, mission-critical things you’re building with Heroku, rather than worrying about the security, reliability, or performance of the underlying infrastructure they run on.

Rails 5 has been brewing for more than a year. To take advantage of new features, and stay on the supported path, you'll need to upgrade. In this post, we'll look at the upgrade process for a production Rails app, codetriage.com. The codebase is open source so you can follow along. Special thanks to Prathamesh for his help with this blog post.

How Stable is the Beta?

In Rails a beta means the API is not yet stable, and features will come and go. A Release Candidate (RC) means no new features; the API is considered stable, and RCs will continue to be released until all reported regressions are resolved.

Should you run your production app on the beta? There is value in getting a...

If your application is successful, there may come a time where you’re on an unsupported version of a dependency. In the case of the Heroku Platform API, this dependency was a very old version of Active Record from many years ago. Due to the complexity involved in the upgrade, this core piece of infrastructure had been pegged at version 2.3.18, which was released in March 2013. We're happy to announce that we've overcome the challenge and are now running Active Record 4.2.4, the latest version, in production. In this post, we'll describe the technical challenges we faced in the upgrade process and take a look at how your organization could benefit from upgrading legacy software...