Living on the Edge of Rails – Shopify Engineering

At Shopify, we make keeping our dependencies up to date a priority. Having outdated dependencies exposes your project to security issues and contributes towards technical debt. Upgrading a large dependency like Rails can be overwhelming, if you are lost and don’t know where to start, you can read our post explaining our journey to upgrade Rails from 4.2 to 5.0 and you can watch the Upgrading Rails at scale recording from RailsConf 2018.Our Core monolith, used by millions of users, has been running the unreleased version of Rails 6 in production since February 2019. Going forward, our application will continuously run the latest revision of the framework. There are multiple advantages for us and for the community to be living on the Edge of Rails that we’ll cover through this blog post.The Edge of Rails is the Rails master branch which includes everything up to the very newest commit. Living on the Edge of Rails means that anytime a change is introduced upstream it becomes available in our application. We no longer need to wait multiple months for a new release.