Capistrano 2.4.0 is now available. Capistrano is the deployment tool of choice for many Rails programmers, but can be used for much more, allowing you to automate remote tasks using a simple task-oriented framework in Ruby.
Install it via RubyGems:
gem install capistrano
You can read the entire release announcement on Jamis Buck’s weblog.
Rails 2.1 is now available for general consumption with all the features and fixes we’ve been putting in over the last six months since 2.0. This has been a huge effort by a very wide range of contributors helping to make it happen.
Over the past six months, we’ve had 1,400 contributors creating patches and vetting them. This has resulted in 1,600+ patches. A truly staggering number. And lots of that has made it into this release.
New features
The new major features are:
Thanks to Ryan Daigle for the feature introductions and Ryan Bates for the Railscasts. It makes writing the release notes so much easier :).
As always, you can install with:
gem install rails...or you can use the Git tag for 2.1.0.
Enjoy!
Threat level orange, guys! The release candidate for Rails 2.1 is drawing awfully close, so if you’ve been sitting on a patch that just must make it in now is the time to rise hell or high water to make it so. Once we cut the release candidate, we’ll be loathe to introduce anything but bug fixes to the features already there.
So get in your saddle, cowboy, and make that patch happen. Remember that the party has moved to Github and Lighthouse. Giddiyap!
Capistrano is a utility for managing remote servers and automating remote tasks. It is popularly used to deploy Rails applications (but can do oh, so much more!). Version 2.2.0 is now available (well, it’s released, anyway, you might need to wait for the file to propagate to the gem mirrors).
gem install capistranoVersion 2.2.0 sports the following changes:
FEATURE: Dynamic role definition. The role() method now accepts a block, which should return either a host name, a Capistrano::ServerDefinition object, an array of host names, or an array of Capistrano::ServerDefinition objects. This can be used to describe the servers in a role at runtime.
role :app do hosts = some_method_that_looks_up_the_current_hosts hosts[0,3] end
FEATURE: Alternative server-centric role definitions, using the server() method:
role :app, "server" role :web, "server" # the above is the same as this: server "server", :app, :web
FEATURE: Support for a :max_hosts option in tasks, that restricts the task so that it is only executed in
task :ping, :max_hosts => 100 do # anything here will only run against 100 hosts at a time end # alternatively, you can pass :max_hosts to the run command itself for # finer granularity task :pong do # this will run on ALL hosts at once run "something" # this will run on no more than 100 hosts at a time run "something-else", :max_hosts => 100 end
ENHANCEMENT: Improved Git support!
ENHANCEMENT: Password prompt support in the Mercurial SCM.
ENHANCEMENT: Implement Bzr#next_revision so that pending changes can be reported correctly, and use checkout—lightweight instead of branch.
ENHANCEMENT: Bring back the :p4sync_flags and :p4client_root variables for perforce SCM.
Additionally, there are several minor bugs and typos that have been fixed. You can see the CHANGELOG for all the gory details.
As ever, please report bugs via the Rails trac, at http://dev.rubyonrails.org. And if you aren’t yet subscribed to the Capistrano mailing list, it’s where all the cool cappists hang out.
ActiveMerchant 1.3 has been released. The focus on this latest release was the addition of standardized support for the Address Verification System (AVS) and credit card verification value (CVV2) checks across all gateways which is the latest extraction from Shopify.
AVS information helps reduce fraud by checking the billing address of the customer with the cardholder information on file at the credit card company. CVV2 checks help ensure that the cardholder information has not been stolen from a database of credit card numbers because it is forbidden to record or store CVV2 numbers in any way.
The results of the AVS and CVV2 checks are now available in the response object. ActiveMerchant does all the work of interpreting the information returned from the payment gateways for you and makes the information available in a consistent hash format.
Sample AVS/CVV2 result:
response.avs_result['message'] #=>
"Street address and 9-digit postal code match."
response.cvv_result['message'] #=>
"Suspicious Transaction."
# Details:
response.avs_result['code'] #=> "X"
response.avs_result['street_match'] #=> "Y"
response.avs_result['postal_match'] #=> "Y"
response.cvv_result['code'] #=> "D"
Other notable improvements with the 1.3 release include:
Coinciding with the 1.3 release of ActiveMerchant is the ActiveMerchant PeepCode PDF by Cody Fauser. The PDF goes over the basics of payment processing, making purchases with ActiveMerchant, and security considerations to keep in mind when processing credit cards in your Rails application. The PDF also walks through the development of a sample Rails application that addresses topics such as order pipelines, order state management and the appropriate unit testing a financial application requires. It is definitely a great read if you are curious about payment processing or require payment processing in your application.
Now that we have the big Rails 2.0 release out the door, it’s a lot easier to push out smaller updates more frequently. So that’s what we’re going to do. Rails 2.0.2 contains a bunch of smaller fixes to various bugs, no show-stopping action, just further polish. But it also contains a few new defaults.
Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that’s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We’ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean.
What a milestone for Ruby on Rails as well. I’ve personally been working on this framework for about four and a half years and we have contributors who’ve been around for almost as long as well. It’s really satisfying to see how far we’ve come in that period of time. That we’ve proven the initial hype worthy, that we’ve been able to stick with it and continue to push the envelope.
Before jumping into the breakdown of features, I’d just like to extend my deep gratitude towards everyone who helped make this release possible. From the stable of merry men in the Rails core to the hundreds of contributors who got a patch applied to everyone who participated in the community over the year. This release is a triumph for large-scale open source development and you can all be mighty proud of the role you played. Cheers!
With the touchy-feely stuff out of the way, let’s dig into the feast and look at just a sliver of what’s new:
After another batch of fixes, tweaks, and buckets of polish, we’ve prepared the hopefully last step before 2.0 can go final: Release Candidate 2. If nothing major pops up, expect the final version to land within the next week or two at the most.
As usual, we got the latest gems on the gems.rubyonrails.org server and there’s a RC2 tag as well. Please put this final test through the ringer so we can get a clean 2.0.0 final release.
If you haven’t kept up to date on what’s new in 2.0, have a look at the original preview release announcement. The gem version for this release is 1.99.1. Enjoy!
We’ve been taking our sweet time, but now it really is almost there. We’ve just pushed new beta gems to gems.rubyonrails.org and created the rel_2-0-0_RC1 tag. So this is shaping up to be the last chance to raise concerns for Rails 2.0 before we go final in oh-so-shortly.
So please give it a spin. First, upgrade to 1.2.5 if you haven’t already. Fix all the deprecation warnings you see. Then try to jump on Rails 2.0 and see if it runs. If it doesn’t, and you think it’s not because of something you did wrong, please create a ticket.
We’re going to be running this release candidate phase over the next couple of weeks, give or take depending on how many issues are raised.
You can read all about why you should actually care about Rails 2.0 in the original preview release announcement.
The gem version for this release is 1.99.0.
New versions of the JavaScript libraries that ship with Rails, Prototype 1.6.0 and script.aculo.us 1.8.0, have been released. You can find out about the numerous changes on the Prototype blog and on mir.aculo.us. If you’re running Edge Rails, just svn up and run rake rails:update:javascripts to install the latest versions into your application automatically.
Also of note: Christophe Porteneuve’s Prototype & script.aculo.us book is now out of beta and available for purchase from the Pragmatic Programmers. It’s up-to-date with all of the new features in both libraries, so be sure to check it out if you’re using Prototype and script.aculo.us in your applications.
After a much larger delay than I would have liked, Capistrano 2.1 is now available! (Capistrano is a utility for executing commands on multiple remote machines in parallel, and is the tool of choice for many Rails developers for automating deployment.) There is a lot going on in this release, including some pretty exciting changes. As ever, install it via RubyGems with:
gem install capistrano
Here’s what’s new, roughly in order of magnitude:
No default PTY. Prior to 2.1, Capistrano would request a pseudo-tty for each command that it executed. This had the side-effect of causing the profile scripts for the user to not be loaded. Well, no more! As of 2.1, Capistrano no longer requests a pty on each command, which means your .profile (or .bashrc, or whatever) will be properly loaded on each command! Note, however, that some have reported on some systems, when a pty is not allocated, some commands will go into non-interactive mode automatically. If you’re not seeing commands prompt like they used to, like svn or passwd, you can return to the previous behavior by adding the following line to your capfile:
default_run_options[:pty] = true
Disable sh wrapping. Some shared hosts do not allow the POSIX shell to be used to execute arbitrary commands, which is what Capistrano has done since 2.0. If you’re on such a host, you can add the following line to your capfile:
default_run_options[:shell] = false
Capistrano will then run the command directly, rather than wrapping it in an “sh -c” command. Note, though, that this means that your own user shell on the remote hosts must be POSIX compatible, or you’ll get cryptic errors.
Git SCM support. Many thanks to Garry Dolley, Geoffrey Grosenbach, and Scott Chacon for their work on the new Git SCM module for Capistrano. If you’re a user of Git, you can now do:
set :scm, :git
Accurev SCM support. Thanks to Doug Barth, all you Accurev users can now enjoy Capistrano, too. Just do:
set :scm, :accurev
Rails’ Plugin Support. Capfile’s generated via the “capify” utility will now include a line that will autoload all recipes from vendor/plugins/*/recipes/*.rb. If you want this feature and you’ve already got a Capfile (and you don’t mind losing any changes you might have made to your Capfile), you can delete the Capfile and re-run “capify .”. Or, you can just add the following line to your Capfile, before the line that loads ‘config/deploy’:
Dir['vendor/plugins/*/recipes/*.rb'].each { |plugin| load(plugin) }
Windows-safe reads. Any time Capistrano needs to read a file’s contents, it will now use the “b” flag, so that binary reads on Windows do not corrupt the file.
Cap shell and sudo. The Capistrano shell now properly recognizes sudo commands and prompts for the password correctly.
Use `match’ to check dependencies. There is a new remote dependency method for deploy:check: “match”. You can now look for arbitrary regular expressions in the output of various commands to see if things are set up correctly:
depend :remote, :match, "rake -V", /version 0\.7/
Namespaces#top. Sometimes you’ll find yourself wanting to execute a task from within another task, but the parent namespace of the target task is conflicting with a similarly-named namespace, and things are breaking. You can now use the “top” method to jump to the top of the namespace hierarchy:
namespace :apache do
namespace :deploy do
task :restart do
run "restart apache"
top.deploy.restart
end
end
end
Other changes. There are lots of other, smaller bug fixes and changes, too:
Enjoy! And please report any bugs on the Rails trac, with the component set to “Capistrano”.
This release closes a JSON XSS vulnerability, fixes a couple of minor regressions introduced in 1.2.4, and backports a handful of features and fixes from the 2.0 preview release.
All users of Rails 1.2.4 or earlier are advised to upgrade to 1.2.5, though it isn’t strictly necessary if you aren’t working with JSON. For more information the JSON vulnerability, see CVE-2007-3227.
Summary of changes:To upgrade, `gem install rails`, set RAILS_GEM_VERSION to ‘1.2.5’ in config/environment.rb, and `rake rails:update:configs`.
This release contains additional deprecation notices, security fixes and some minor performance improvements. All users of 1.2.3 are advised to upgrade.
Deprecation Notices
If you intend to upgrade to 2.0 you should run your tests to and fix any errors that are displayed. The warnings will become errors with the release of 2.0.
If you’re using RESTful routing, pay special attention to the changes to route generation and recognition. The previous use of the semicolon in URLs has been replaced with a regular /. For instance /person/1;edit has become /person/1/edit. This change was made as several libraries, including mongrel, mistakenly treated semi-colons as query string seperators and some browsers and http libraries misbehaved.
Your old ;-based URLs will be continued to be recognized, though. They’re just no longer generated.
Security Enhancements
1.2.4 fixes several potential security issues:
Upgrade with the standard gem install rails command. Rails 1.2.4 serves as a drop-in replacement for 1.2.3.
Update: please see the latest 1.2.5 stable release
Behold, behold, Rails 2.0 is almost here. But before we can slap on the final stamp, we’re going to pass through a couple of trial release phases. The first is this preview release, which allows you to sample the goodies in their almost finished state.
We might change a few things or add something else, but by and large, this is how Rails 2.0 is going to look and feel. After this release have had a chance to be tried out, we’re going to move to a release candidate or two (or three, depending on how many we need). Then, the final release.
Before the release of 2.0, we’re also going to be putting out 1.2.4, which will include a variety of bug fixes and the last deprecation warnings to get you ready for upgrading an existing application to 2.0 standards.
Enough about process. Let me tell you a little bit about what’s new in Rails 2.0:
Capistrano 2.0 is real. (What is Capistrano?)
Install it thus:
gem install capistranoIt’s been through four preview releases, and has seen significant changes since 1.4.1. If you’re currently using 1.4.1, be sure to check out the upgrade documentation at http://www.capify.org. If you’re altogether new to Capistrano, you might like to read about getting started.
Since the last preview release (number four, version 1.99.3), the changes are primarily bug fixes, but the following featureish modifications snuck in, too:
Also, some people reported SFTP uploads were hanging for them. If this happens to you, try adding the following line to the top of your recipe file:
set :synchronous_connect, trueThat will cause connections to the servers to be established serially, rather than in parallel, so if you’ve got a lot of servers that you are connecting to, it might make things a bit time-consuming. However, this appeared to work around the hanging SFTP issue.
You can read the complete changelog here. If you are using Capistrano at all, please also consider joining the mailing list, it’s a great place to share tips and report issues.
KNOWN ISSUES
Yes, there are a few of these. Two are of immediate significance:
Ruby on Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals,
then extended and improved by a core team of committers and hundreds of open-source contributors.
Rails is released under the MIT license. Ruby under the Ruby License.
"Rails", "Ruby on Rails", and the Rails logo are trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson. All rights reserved.
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