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Version 5.2 of the Ruby framework

Ticket to Ride

Article from ADMIN 46/2018

By Stefan Wintermeyer

Ruby on Rails 5.2 was released during RailsConf, which took place in Pittsburgh in mid-April 2018. Although not much has changed for old Rails applications, you'll find a few notable additions for new ones.

Ruby on Rails (RoR) version 5.1 [1] introduced Secrets, a mechanism designed to ensure that a programming team can store encrypted passwords or API keys in a public repository. However, the community's response to this feature proved to be mixed. Many found it useless right from the start, because the team members still had to exchange a secret encryption key. Others found it practical, but still a little too cumbersome to set up and use.

At least for the latter group, Rails 5.2 (Figure 1) is a good thing: The developers abolished Secrets and replaced it with simpler credentials. Thus RoR automatically generates a central master key and stores it in the config/master.key file. Of course, this file must never end up in a repository, which is why it is entered in the .gitignore file by default. The user edits the credentials on the command line with

EDITOR=vim rails credentials:edit

Figure 1: Ruby on Rails 5.2 is ready for users to try out.

in YAML format (Listing 1). The credentials can then be retrieved, as in Listing 2, with the Rails application and console, where the name of the application in the example is

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