Rails 6

[benjaminfaure]

Hello everyone,

According to Rails maintenance policy, Rails 5.2 we'll reach its end of life in June 2022
https://guides.rubyonrails.org/maintenance_policy.html

Seems like yet another Rails upgrade is on the horizon.

Rails 7 is already out, I guess they switched to yearly release for major versions of the framework. Hopefully upgrading won't be such a big step anymore

[briri]

Just discovered today that Rails is no longer supporting the Webpacker gem. I learned this after running yarn upgrade and noticing that all of the Karma tests would no longer run due to a mismatch in dependencies for webpack.

Rails 7 moves away from Webpacker and provides 3 new options for how to manage JS

We should also consider upgrading:

• Bootstrap (we are 2 major versions behind) - this will require significant work
• TinyMCE - we tried upgrading but the editors stopped loading
• JQuery - we might want to consider moving away from JQuery and just using vanilla JS (depending on how much work will be involved to upgrade)

[benjaminfaure]

I took some time and tried to upgrade the roadmap code to Rails 6.1.

It went fairly well. I tested some of the feature and with some minor corrections I managed to get the roadmap code to run.
I'm not sure how we could start to share the work done on the migration. Should we create a new branch and commit it ?

[briri]

Hi @benjaminfaure I think that's probably the best course of action. Just create a rails_6 branch off of the development branch and push it up to this repository. We can all then work from that branch as we move forward with any upgrade work.

@raycarrick-ed and I will need to remember to keep that new branch up to date if we merge any PRs into dev/master.

[pherterich]

Tagging @gjacob24 here as she wanted to give this an initial look for the DMPonline team

[briri]

Thanks for getting this started @benjaminfaure and for creating the rails_6 branch. We can all begin to work from there (or branched that stem from rails_6).

I was able to get the code up and running but had to add a minor change to the various config/environments/[env].rb files. The change will allow us to add a DMPROADMAP_HOST environment variable so that the new Rails middleware that was introduced to mitigate DNS rebinding attacks will allow us to access the website.

I also ran rspec and am seeing lots of Deprecation warnings and failing tests (although those failures could be due to changes in the rspec framework and not the app itself). I don't think these are too bad though, probably only a few updates needed to fix most of the warnings/errors. For example:

> rspec spec/controllers/answers_controller_spec.rb 

Randomized with seed 30811
DEPRECATION WARNING: Calling `<<` to an ActiveModel::Errors message array in order to add an error is deprecated. Please call `ActiveModel::Errors#add` instead. (called from validate at /home/ec2-user/environment/roadmap/app/validators/template_links_validator.rb:23)
F
...

Failures:

  1) AnswersController POST /answers/create_or_update fails due to Plan not found
     Failure/Error: template = create(:template, phases: 1, sections: 1, questions: 1)
     
     ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid:
       Validation failed: Links A hash is expected for links
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/factory_bot-6.2.1/lib/factory_bot/evaluation.rb:18:in `create'
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/factory_bot-6.2.1/lib/factory_bot/strategy/create.rb:12:in `block in result'
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/factory_bot-6.2.1/lib/factory_bot/strategy/create.rb:9:in `tap'
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/factory_bot-6.2.1/lib/factory_bot/strategy/create.rb:9:in `result'
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/factory_bot-6.2.1/lib/factory_bot/factory.rb:43:in `run'
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/factory_bot-6.2.1/lib/factory_bot/factory_runner.rb:29:in `block in run'
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/factory_bot-6.2.1/lib/factory_bot/factory_runner.rb:28:in `run'
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/factory_bot-6.2.1/lib/factory_bot/strategy_syntax_method_registrar.rb:28:in `block in define_singular_strategy_method'
     # ./spec/controllers/answers_controller_spec.rb:9:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'
     # /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/webmock-3.14.0/lib/webmock/rspec.rb:37:in `block (2 levels) in <main>'

We're going to need to go through the upgrade docs:

• https://guides.rubyonrails.org/upgrading_ruby_on_rails.html#upgrading-from-rails-5-2-to-rails-6-0
• https://guides.rubyonrails.org/upgrading_ruby_on_rails.html#upgrading-from-rails-6-0-to-rails-6-1

And then fix any failing tests and deprecation warnings.

Once all of that is squared away we can look into upgrading Ruby and individual gems where applicable.

[briri]

Added a new wiki page to record upgrade notes: https://github.com/DMPRoadmap/roadmap/wiki/Rails-Upgrade-Notes

The intended audience would be developers who manage their own instances and may need to upgrade their own cutomizations