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Programming

Migrate to Ruby on Rails 5.x using RocketPants

At Sparta, we’ve been using a Gem called RocketPants since day 1 (roughly three years now) to easier maintain, version and develop our internal API. The Gem has since then lost a decent chunk of its community and it looks like less people are using it.

I would guess that since the Rails API Gem was merged into Ruby on Rails with the 5.0 release, the need for a Gem such as RocketPants shrunk.

Anyway, I’ve been doing some work on making the Gem support Ruby on Rails 5.0 and 5.1, and it seems like some other people were stuck on the 4.x branch of Rails because they were unable to upgrade.

RocketPants with support for Ruby on Rails 5.0 (and 5.1) : https://github.com/Sutto/rocket_pants/pull/143/files

I’ve been using it myself on Ruby on Rails 5.0 for the last year without any issues, so the whole Gem feels fairly stable.

This is not a permanent solution as the Gem has lost a big part of its community and we want to avoid getting stuck on a Gem that will not be developed any further, I will follow up in another post on how we at Sparta will migrate to another solution. Most likely we will be using the built in Rails API.

In addition, my colleague Yi got the rocketpants-rpm (provides support for making RocketPants::Base work with RPM) gem up and running for Rails 5 as well. It’s available under our Github organisation here.