We’re happy to announce Rails 5.1.0.rc1 has been released. With the help of the community we polished the Rails 5.1 release with more than 380 commits.

Notably, Stephen Touset helped us up the encryption used for encrypted secrets, so you’ll want to run this script to upgrade your app if you’re already dabbling with the feature. Thanks Stephen!

While we are working to close the last issues, you can check the Rails 5.1 releases notes, or the awesome summary of new features present in the 5.1.0.beta1 blog post.

To view the changes for each gem, please read the changelogs on GitHub:

• Action Cable CHANGELOG
• Action Mailer CHANGELOG
• Action Pack CHANGELOG
• Action View CHANGELOG
• Active Model CHANGELOG
• Active Record CHANGELOG
• Active Support CHANGELOG
• Active Job CHANGELOG
• Railties CHANGELOG

Basecamp 3 is already running this release candidate in production. Our friends at Heroku prepared the platform that is now fully compatible with all those shiny new features.

As per our maintenance policy, the release of Rails 5.1 will mean that bug fixes will only apply to 5.1.x, regular security issues to 5.1.x and 5.0.x, and severe security issues to 5.1.x, 5.0.x, and 4.2.x. This means 4.x and below will essentially be unsupported!

To try out this new release:

gem install rails -v 5.1.0.rc1

Make sure you are using RubyGems 2.6.11 or later before trying to install a pre release, with:

gem update --system 2.6.11

Thank you to Samuel Giddins for releasing this new version of RubyGems just in time for our release.

Please help us test this release candidate version of Rails. It’s always frustrating when we put a lot of work into a new release, betas, release candidates, and then get people report all sorts of issues on week one of the final release. This is an incremental upgrade to Rails 5.0. Please do your community duty and help us land a solid 5.1 without needing an immediate 5.1.1.

Thank you!