Hello Everyone!

This is Vipul from Pune, where it’s the Gudi-Padwa – or the Marathi New Year! Surrounded by garlands of sweets, lets head on to see, whats exciting this week.

P.S. Happy New Year!
P.P.S. Isn’t it a New Year, everyday somewhere around the World?

Featured

This week’s Rails contributors

36 people contributed to make Rails awesome this week. If you haven’t already, go ahead and watch Rails on GitHub to follow the discussions and find your first opprtunity to help out!

Rails 4.2.1 and 4.1.10 have been released!

After four release candidates, Rails 4.2.1 and 4.1.10 have finally been released! Thanks to all the contributors, for tons of fixes. Check out the full changes for 4.2.1 and 4.1.10 respectively.

New Stuff

bin/rails test runner

A new test runner – bin/rails test – has landed on master. This is the successor to the rake-based test runner, and includes a few rspec-inspired features that are not part of minitest, like running by line number, rerun snippets, or logs displayed with unicorns filled with rainbow colors.

Added rake initializers

Need to see all those initializers scattered in you application? Worry no more. Just run rake initializers! Did I mention they are sorted?

Improved

Use fullpath from Rack request

In Rack, request#fullpath returns the full path including the query string. This change uses fullpath from rack to avoid doing the same thing again in Rails. As a result, we also reduced some object allocations!

Fixed

Materialize subqueries by adding DISTINCT to suport MySQL 5.7.6+

In MySQL 5.7.6+, the default value for optimizer_switch has changed to derived_merge=on, which causes some issue with the subqueries generated by Rails. This change fixes that by adding a DISTINCT to the subqueries.

Don’t cast nil to string in postgres enums

Previously, nil values in PostgreSQL enums were casted to an empty string, which causes an error somewhere down the chain. But worry no more – this has now been fixed!

Summer Opportunities

Google Summer of Code 2015

Are you a student, or know someone who would love to contribute to Rails? Our GSoC students application is now open! Check out our ideas page and join us on the mailing list for discussion.

Rails Girls Summer of Code

Rails Girls Summer of Code is also accepting application! You can also consider submiting your open-source project to be included.

Wrapping up

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself!

P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, why not share it with your friends? :) If you wish to be part of this project please don’t hesitate to contact Godfrey – there’re a lot of ways you could help make this newsletter more awesome!