The Rails Upgrade Series

Welcome to our series of Rails upgrade miniguides. Here you’ll find links to all of the relevant posts to help with an upgrade.

First, if you or your boss are unsure whether an upgrade is a good idea then we have a pair of articles covering the technical and business reasons:

• Why Is It Important to Upgrade Your Rails Application? opens a new window
• How to Pitch a Rails Upgrade to Your Boss (Without Any Tech Speak) opens a new window

Laying the groundwork

Before jumping into updating gems and other actions, it is important to assess your codebase and lay the groundwork for your upgrade.

We would recommend that you assess your codebase before making changes, both to understand the work required and to find potential hotspots that might cause issues. You can learn our recommended approach here:

• How to Lay the Groundwork for Your Rails Upgrade opens a new window

A guide for each version jump

We recommend upgrading to the next minor or major version in individual steps instead of taking big jumps, e.g. upgrading from 4.1 to 4.2 to 5.0.

To help you with each step, we have written a series of guides:

• 2.3 to 3.0 opens a new window
• 3.0 to 3.1 opens a new window
• 3.1 to 3.2 opens a new window
• 3.2 to 4.0 opens a new window
• 4.0 to 4.1 opens a new window
• 4.1 to 4.2 opens a new window
• 4.2 to 5.0 opens a new window
• 5.0 to 5.1 opens a new window
• 5.1 to 5.2 opens a new window
• 5.2 to 6.0 opens a new window
• 6.0 to 6.1 opens a new window
• 6.1 to 7.0 opens a new window
• 7.0 to 7.1 opens a new window
• 7.1 to 7.2 opens a new window
• 7.2 to 8.0 opens a new window

You can also download these as a collection in The Complete Guide to Upgrade Rails.

Want specialist help with your upgrade?

You hopefully have the information you need to get started on your Rails upgrade.

If you want to upgrade your application without delaying your product development, then hire FastRuby.io opens a new window . We have upgraded over 80 applications since 2012 and specialize in upgrading large applications without interrupting the development team.

We typically start projects with an audit to generate The Roadmap opens a new window , a report about the work required along with a time and cost estimate.