6 Things to Do When Inheriting Legacy Rails Apps

Rails version 1.0 is approaching its 15 year anniversary, and there’s reason to celebrate the framework's progress.There have been hundreds of amazing products built with Rails since its creation.Streaming service heavyweight Hulu, project management leader Basecamp, and hospitality service AirBnB were all built using Rails.But for every successful project, there’s dozens if not hundreds of others that are overloaded with technical debt, difficult to manage, or a cumbersome nightmare to improve.As software consultants, we here at NextLink Labs are often tasked with taking over these kinds of legacy Rails apps that have been abandoned by their previous development teams. We’ve been down this road plenty of times before and we understand what a problem they can be for developers.But we’re also developers ourselves so after dealing with several of these projects, we created a step-by-step guide that we use when starting one of these projects. Here’s our roadmap for successfully taking ownership of a legacy Rails project.