Hey everyone, Happy Friday!

Vipul here with the latest updates for This Week in Rails.

Before we start, a small update - I am happy to share that my team at Saeloun is joining the Rails Foundation as a contributing member. Read more about the reasons why we decided to join here, and why you should too!

Colorize console prompt on non standard environments
Currently, the Rails console prompt is colored according to the following rules: blue for dev and test, red of prod. On non-standard environments (like staging), the prompt is not colored. With this change, it will now be set to Magenta, for these environments.

Fix running individual app:update commands
This change fixes a regression, where the individual app:update commands (like app:update:configs or app:update:bin) could no longer be run on their own, as they require the app to be loaded and it no longer was.

Fix backtrace of ArgumentErrors raised during template rendering
Before this fix, any argument error in a template with strict locals would be swallowed and be replaced by an exception with unrelated backtrace, which made debugging templates difficult. With this change, any ArgumentError unrelated to strict locals is re-raised, preserving the original backtrace for developers.

Fix local variable access in layouts
Layouts now have access to local variables passed to render. This fixes a very old regression introduced in Rails 5.1!

Sort table columns by name when dumping schema
The table columns inside schema.rb are now sorted alphabetically. Previously they’d be sorted by creation order, which can cause merge conflicts when two branches modify the same table concurrently.

Update NotificationAssertions’s assert_notification to match against payload subsets and return matched notification ActiveSupport::Testing::NotificationAssertions’s assert_notification now matches against payload subsets by default.

Previously the following assertion would fail due to excess key values in the notification payload. Now with payload subset matching, it will pass.

assert_notification("post.submitted", title: "Cool Post") do
  ActiveSupport::Notifications.instrument("post.submitted", title: "Cool Post", body: "Cool Body")
end

Additionally, you can now persist a matched notification for more customized assertions.

notification = assert_notification("post.submitted", title: "Cool Post") do
  ActiveSupport::Notifications.instrument("post.submitted", title: "Cool Post", body: Body.new("Cool Body"))
end
assert_instance_of(Body, notification.payload[:body])

Load configured Active Storage plugins during boot
Previously, the parts of Active Storage using ruby-vips, mini_magick, or image_processing would try to load gems only when used. This strategy works well because it allows apps that don’t need these features to easily ignore them and not have to depend on gems they don’t need.

However, the downsides to this strategy was that it requires loading code during requests and that it moves potential error messages into request logs instead of those errors being immediately visible on boot.

Introduce RAILS_MASTER_KEY placeholder to CI template
The existing CI templates do not work as expected if custom credentials are utilized, or if config.require_master_key is enabled. This change introduces RAILS_MASTER_KEY placeholder in generated ci.yml files, to address this issue.

Don’t load ActiveStorage::Blob when validating the service
For tasks like assets:precompile that don’t need it, we should not be loading the entire ActiveStorage code, and instead just relevant parts.

Use the given form in html_options for the hidden field in collection_check_boxes
Respect html_options[:form] when collection_checkboxes generates the hidden <input>.

Deprecate String#mb_chars and AS::Multibyte::Chars
These APIs are a relic of the Ruby 1.8 days when Ruby strings weren’t encoding aware.

Deprecate ActiveSupport::Configurable
This was only used once internally by Rails, and is now deprecated going ahead.

You can view the whole list of changes here.

We had 30 contributors to the Rails codebase this past week!

Until next time!

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