Friday, June 5, 2026

Better guides, better framework

Posted by Claudio Baccigalupo

Hi, it’s Claudio. Let’s explore this week’s changes in the Rails codebase.

The revamped Active Job guide is live
Check out the new Active Jobs Basics guide to learn everything about background jobs in Rails, from Solid Queue to bulk enqueueing, from testing to debugging.

The API-only guide is ready for community review
Using Rails for API-only applications? Leave your feedback on this PR which is bound to update the existing API-only guide.

Update Active Storage for ImageProcessing 2.0
The new version requires adding ruby-vips and/or mini_magick gems to the Gemfile and blocks untrusted formats by default on libvips 8.13+ (BPM, PSD and ICO among others).

Reimplement Action Cable redis adapter with redis-client
This allows Rails to no longer depend on the much larger redis gem, and the subscription API in redis-client is much simpler.

Add sql_notifications connection config option
Instrumentation for SQL notifications can now be disabled per connection:

    cache:
      adapter: postgresql
      database: myapp_cache
      sql_notifications: false

Replace US/Eastern timezone with America/New_York
US/Eastern was removed as a valid PostgreSQL timezone causing errors on systems with updated PostgreSQL builds. America/New_York is the canonical IANA name and is universally supported.

Reverse default_order in reverse_order instead of discarding it
On a relation ordered only by default_order, reverse_order was dropping the default order entirely:

Model.default_order("name ASC").reverse_order.to_sql # => "... ORDER BY \"models\".\"id\" DESC" (before — order dropped)
Model.default_order("name ASC").reverse_order.to_sql # => "... ORDER BY \"models\".\"name\" DESC" (after — order reversed)

Make Action Cable unsubscribe idempotent
Action Cable previously raised a RuntimeError when a client attempted to unsubscribe from a subscription that no longer existed on the server.

Make Active Record more Ractor-safe
Changes various Active Record modules to freeze and constantize as much as possible so that they can be used in Ractorized context.

Resolve attribute aliases in update_attribute readonly check
update_attribute is documented to raise an error when the attribute is marked as readonly, but the readonly check was previously not resolving attribute aliases.

Clear Postgres warnings as they get handled
The warnings were only cleared in plain execute, so a series of other queries could generate warnings, report them, and leave them to be seen again by the next query.

Clear the type column when removing a polymorphic has_one
Replacing or clearing a polymorphic has_one (owner.thing = otherowner.thing = nil) previously nullified the foreign key but left the polymorphic type column to its old value.

Enable per-pool query log tags formatter
A query_log_tags_format key can now be added in database.yml so different databases can emit either :legacy or :sqlcommenter formatted comments.

Fix MessagePack serialization of records with a time column
Serializing any record with a populated time column through ActiveRecord::MessagePack previously raised undefined method ‘to_msgpack’ error for an instance of ActiveRecord::Type::Time::Value

Fix in_order_of dropping nil elements when filter: false
Enumerable#in_order_of with filter: false is documented to keep elements that aren’t named in the series, but a stray compact was silently removing nil elements:

[3, nil, 1, 2].in_order_of(:itself, [1, 2, 3], filter: false)
# => [1, 2, 3]        (before — nil dropped)
# => [1, 2, 3, nil]   (after  — nil preserved)

Respect PostgreSQL schema_search_path in rails dbconsole
rails dbconsole will now respect custom search path sets rather than ignoring them.

Skip Proc and Regexp filter_attributes when syncing to filter_parameters
filter_attributes (added in #55251) accepts Procs and Regexps. Stringifying them produced filters that could never match a parameter key:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  self.filter_attributes += [:token, ->(key, value) { value.reverse! }]
end

Rails.application.config.filter_parameters # => ["user.token", "user.#<Proc:0x000000010a3c5d68 ...>"]

Fix nested attributes :limit miscounting a single-record hash
accepts_nested_attributes_for ..., limit: N was raising a spurious TooManyRecords when updating a single record through a bare id-keyed attributes hash.

Fix find returning [] for composite primary key ids passed as strings
For a composite primary key model, calling find with two or more ids whose components are strings wrongly returned an empty array.

class Book < ApplicationRecord
  self.primary_key = [:author_id, :id]
end

Book.find([[1, 10], [1, 20]])         # => # integers work: [#<Book...>, #<Book...>]
Book.find([["1", "10"], ["1", "20"]]) # => # strings did not: []

Parse all HTTP-date formats in If-Modified-Since
If-Modified-Since carries an HTTP-date, which RFC 9110 §5.6.7 requires to accept in three formats (IMF-fixdate, RFC 850, and asctime). Action Dispatch only parsed the IMF-fixdate format correctly swallowing the remaining parse failures.

Rate limiting calls cache_key on by: if the object responds to it
Changes the to: argument of rate_limit to allow any kind of object to be returned. If the object responds to cache_key, the rate limit will call that method when constructing the cache key.

You can view the whole list of changes here.
We had 28 contributors to the Rails codebase this past week!

Until next time!

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