This card shows how to upgrade a Rails 2 application from Rails 2.3.8 through every single patch level up to 2.3.18, and then, hopefully, Rails LTS.

2.3.8 to 2.3.9

This release has [many minor changes and fi...

See our new comprehensive guide for upgrading every Rails 2 version ever.

Specify these gem versions in your Gemfile:

gem 'cucumber', '~> 1.3.0'
gem 'cucumber-rails', '= 0.3.2' # max version for Rails 2
gem 'capybara', '< 2' # capybara 2+ requires Rails 3
gem 'mime-types', '< 2' # dependeny of capybara

...

The way MySQL's FULLTEXT tokenizer splits text into word tokens might not always be what you need. E.g. it splits a word at period characters.

Since the tokenizer has near-zero configuration options (minimum word length and stopwords list), you n...

Webpacker is Rails' way of integrating Webpack, and version 4 has been released just a few days ago, allowing us to use Webpack 4.

I successfully upgraded an existing real-world Webpack 3 application. Below are notes on everything that I encounte...

When upgrading Rails versions -- especially major versions -- you will run into a lot of unique issues, depending on the exact version, and depending on your app.

However, it is still possible to give some generic advice on how you want to tackle...

Add deprecation warnings and their solution or link to available solutions.

Global access to Rake DSL methods is deprecated. Please include Rake::DSL into classes and modules which use the Rake DSL methods.
---------------------------------------...

In this example we assume that not only the storage gem changes but also the file structure on disc.

A general approach

Part A: Create a commit which includes a script that allows you to copy the existing file to the new file structure.
...

1. Run bundle update cucumber capybara cucumber-rails to update to the newest versions.

2. Backup your features/support/path.rb to be able to add your own paths again after the cucumber installation script in step 4.

3. Backup your `features...

We're usually running Ubuntu LTS versions. Sometimes newer hardware requires packages from more recent Ubuntu releases that only come with 6 months of support. If there is really no other way, it's possible to install packages from later Ubuntu re...