---
title: Upgrading a Rails 6.1 application to Rails 7 - clearbnb - Part 7
slug: upgrading-a-rails-6-1-application-to-rails-7-clearbnb-part-7
published_at: 2021-10-21 01:00:21 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:52 +0000
summary: 
description: For part 7, let&#39;s upgrade to... Rails 7! #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript]
views: 5797
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/upgrading-a-rails-6-1-application-to-rails-7-clearbnb-part-7
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmw2ULIMbA8
youtube_id: tmw2ULIMbA8
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/tmw2ULIMbA8
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tmw2ULIMbA8/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Upgrading a Rails 6.1 application to Rails 7 - clearbnb - Part 7

*Published: October 21, 2021*
*Views: 5797*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmw2ULIMbA8)

[![Upgrading a Rails 6.1 application to Rails 7 - clearbnb - Part 7](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tmw2ULIMbA8/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmw2ULIMbA8)

## Description

For part 7, let&#39;s upgrade to... Rails 7!
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

what&#39;s up welcome back you&#39;re watching the seventh part of our series of building clear bnb this vacation rental platform where we&#39;ll allow guests to book listings that hosts are hosting in this seventh episode i thought it would make sense to upgrade from rails 6 to a version of rail 7. so we&#39;ll go through the whole process end to end of upgrading our app this app was just started so we probably won&#39;t run into anything too crazy but i just wanted to go through that process and show you the steps how you might consider upgrading an app and yeah we&#39;ll just talk about upgrading rails so on the edge guides for ruby on rails you can see this guide for upgrading ruby on rails and it will generally start with um in reverse chronological order so the most recent rails versions are sort of near the top and it&#39;ll tell you how to upgrade from the previous miner to the most recent miner so for instance back here you could learn how to upgrade from rails 6.0 to 6.1 and now at the very top we have instructions for upgrading from six point one to seven so general advice here it gives you is to make sure that you have tests set up uh and easily to easily deport that over um i we don&#39;t have any significant tests written yet so it&#39;ll be whatever the next thing is ruby versions so rails each version of rails is going to have like a minimum version of ruby that it requires in this case rails 7 requires 2.7.0 for so the first thing you want to do go in the terminal and write ruby dash v and see which version of ruby you&#39;re on so i&#39;m on 2.6.3 that&#39;s actually not quite enough to get up to rail seven so luckily i&#39;m using our bend here and i can see which our r bend versions are available by running our bend versions our bend versions and right now i actually have tons of different versions installed locally if you don&#39;t already have one installed that&#39;s greater than 2.7 you can say rbm install and then that version number there&#39;s also another ruby version manager um that i or rvm so the instructions are like these steps are going to work a little differently if you&#39;re using the rvm version manager um but i&#39;m just going to set my local ruby version to 2.7.2 so i&#39;m going to say rbn local 2.7.2 that actually will create a file that&#39;s going to create a dot ruby version file that will lock us into 2.7.2 and if we cut this out we can actually see that all it is is a file that has the contents with the ruby version that we need okay so now we&#39;re on 2.7.2 that&#39;s 2.7.0 or newer now let&#39;s talk about the upgrade process so generally you&#39;re going to have a bunch of tests you&#39;re going to watch them pass you will move to the latest version and run your tests again and you&#39;ll go through and fix all the deprecations fix all of the errors and then you&#39;ll move up to the next version so you kind of like work your way towards the most recent version right now we&#39;re on 6.1 so we&#39;re really only going like basically we&#39;re technically going a major but it&#39;s we&#39;re on the most recent miner from the previous major so we should be good to go all right so we&#39;re going to repeat yeah you would just repeat that process until you get to the the latest rails version or the target rails version okay so in order to move between versions the first thing we need to do is change the rails version number in the gem file okay so we&#39;re gonna do that we&#39;ll open up the gem file here and um we&#39;re gonna change the rails version here to seven i think it&#39;s seven um let&#39;s actually see what is the latest rails version uh you can see the versions of rails here so all recent versions of rails okay so we are on alpha 2 still so i&#39;m going to just set my rails version to 7 0 0 alpha 2. the other thing that you&#39;ll notice in the gem file is that there is a ruby version here 2.6.3 so we actually want to change this also to 2.7.2 okay the next step it tells us to do is to change all change the versions for rails javascript packages in package.json and run yarn install so let&#39;s open up package.json and see rails so we&#39;ve got these are all like pointing up at six i think we can change this to seven maybe let&#39;s just see and rails webpacker i think rails webpacker is actually going away so i don&#39;t know if this instruction is very helpful but we&#39;ll we&#39;ll just see what happens here if we run um let&#39;s see we want to run yarn install and okay so we actually do want alpha 2 for action cable and we want active 2 for active storage alpha 2 for ujs and okay so um we got the versions a little bit wrong when we guessed them in here but uh yeah okay so it looks like it&#39;s pinning it to the correct alpha um okay the next thing to do is to run this update task so the update task is just the next step here 1.4 where we run rails app colon update all right let&#39;s do this rails app colon update um you have to do oh we need to bundle update rails did we forget this step somewhere uh oh yeah okay so run bundle update so we didn&#39;t run bundle update so run bundle update we&#39;re just going to run bundle update it&#39;s going to update a bunch of the versions but that&#39;s okay it installed zwork that&#39;s like a new default dependency um okay now we should be able to run rails app update rails app colon update undefined method reference for active support dependencies module okay so this is an error that i have found is because of devise because of the gem device so i believe that&#39;s what&#39;s going on here so if you look at devise uh the the current version the most recent release was released april 29th the the the most recent like official release does not support rails seven but like the bleeding edge version of devise that&#39;s out has support for rails 7. so what i have found is we actually need to point devise the devised gem at a specific commit a specific github commit and the way that we do that is using the gem files get method um to yeah so gemfile github so this is how we can point a gem or tell a gem to be installed from github so here what we want to do is we want to say the gem is coming in from git and then we&#39;re going to give it a specific ref okay so we&#39;re going to say gem we&#39;re going to open up the gem file we&#39;re going to go down to devise and we&#39;re going to say git so we want to pull this from github and the github we want to pull it from is the main github and the ref is going to be the v the specific get sha reference whoops i didn&#39;t need to do that copy and we&#39;re going to paste that in there so that we can use the latest bleeding edge version of devise so we&#39;re going to bundle install again here i don&#39;t know what&#39;s going on with vim i like was messing around with some stuff with brew and this is no longer happy uh error detected while processing this thing complete used without args i don&#39;t know what the deal is with that but i&#39;ll have to deal with that later okay so now let&#39;s try running this update command again some gems are not going to play nicely because they&#39;re still going to be depending on old stuff so when you try to run update it&#39;s going to fail okay so now what it&#39;s going through it&#39;s going to go through and say that there&#39;s a conflict with specific files because the new versions for for version 7 are going to try to replace existing files and if there&#39;s a diff then it&#39;s going to ask you if you want to overwrite that and i&#39;m just going to say yes for all of these and then what i&#39;m going to do is come back and i&#39;m going to look at the get diff and determine whether i believe those changes are good changes or not okay so i&#39;m just saying yes to all of this stuff you&#39;ll notice that at the bottom also there were two migrations that were copied over so one of them was to add service name to active storage blobs the other one was to create an active storage variant records i ran into an issue where i was on 6.1 in another app and i had set up active storage and then i tried to upgrade to rail 7 and i actually had to delete this migration and i tweeted about it and all the reasons but basically like i found that when i&#39;m when i was using active storage on 6.1 it already created most of this stuff for me there was a slight difference in the type but i was able to basically just delete this migration for active storage the one that was copied over as part of this migration and uh and it worked fine so if you if you run into a conflict when you&#39;re running your migrations later consider looking at this active storage file because i think that might be a possible issue okay back to our guides so now it says run your tests so at the end of this you&#39;re supposed to just run your tests so what i&#39;m actually going to do is a git status and i&#39;m going to say we want to add our new ruby version we&#39;re going to look at the diff in the gem file and that should just be uh we changed the ruby version we set our rails version to 7 alpha 2 and then we updated devise to pull from latest so those all look good so i&#39;m going to add those gemfile and gemfile dot lock okay we&#39;ll do another git status here what is the difference on bin rails uh it looks like it is just changing these from single quotes to double quotes uh so that&#39;s fine um so we&#39;ll add uh bin whoops we&#39;ll add bin rails um what&#39;s the difference on rake it looks like we used to load spring or some spring paths but it&#39;s no longer doing that um that&#39;s cool uh bin what is the difference between bin setup um this one looks a little bit more significant we changed the quotes again up here no big deal and then it is again changing a bunch of quotes and then yeah more quotes changes just trying to make him more consistent i&#39;m guessing that&#39;s fine whatever okay so let&#39;s look at the diff for application rb okay so there was a bunch of stuff that we were installing manually before and now we&#39;re just requiring rails all that&#39;s kind of clean and then also at the bottom we are removing system tests don&#39;t generate system test files i&#39;m guessing this is a new default so that&#39;s also fine config application.rb okay so then we want to look at the diff in config boot also quotes the diff in development um okay so this one is changing like the pattern for the actual that that check but it&#39;s also removing some stuff that we set up for action mailer for being able to test like with letter opener and stuff so i actually want to add these three lines back for action mailer config so let&#39;s open up um in environment development go down to mailer and then paste those back in and then save that okay and now we&#39;ll do a diff on production and there were some there&#39;s a lot of stuff that was actually changed in production so now we have um we&#39;re using the purger css compressor uh the asset host these are some of these are again just quote changes from single quotes to double quotes not a huge deal and then it is adding uh report deprecations false don&#39;t log any deprecations this is probably a security thing like you don&#39;t want to log deprecations in production so whatever that&#39;s fine so production looks good let&#39;s look at any diff for oh i guess like now our development one should be good we didn&#39;t actually ever change anything about tests so we&#39;ll just assume that comes in good um assets this one is changing quotes here and it&#39;s removing the import for node modules um that seems safe and then in the content security policy this was removing something else this i think again is like a default now um and then it now has config initializers new framework defaults for seven so um let&#39;s yeah let&#39;s just finish this out okay this is all just quote changes um okay there were there was like a dependency module thing that thing that caused the error for devise um was a module that was removed so anything that&#39;s using those modules anymore will need to be updated i think it had something to do with active support and flector or something okay let&#39;s take a look at these migrations so the first one here is checking to see if there is active storage blobs then it&#39;s trying to do like an update on them and setting the service the other one is trying to create tables for variant records um there&#39;s a bunch of really cool new tools in rails 7 for working with image variants so that you can automatically say like show me the 100 by 100 variant and if it didn&#39;t exist then it will like create variants for you and stuff and that&#39;s all handled by um or it&#39;s all stored in database tables that are managed for you by active active storage uh which is so nice that they&#39;re that rails is figuring all of that out for you so that you don&#39;t have to like mess around with migrations as we did with like paperclip or carrier wave or one of those you know the older integrations okay so now i&#39;m going to say rails db migrate to run those new migrations that were copied over and okay so it looked like yeah okay so i&#39;m actually getting the same error here so this active storage variant record already exists so i keep having this problem where this migration um is trying to create a table that already exists so we can do railsdb console and we can take a look at what&#39;s in the database so here we can say select or maybe i can do just slash d to look at the schema for active storage variant records and this will give us the table so this shows us the table and we can see in here that it has an id and that id is bigint and it has a blob id and that blob id is bigint and then we can also look at the migration for this which is creating the active storage variant records and yeah i&#39;m pretty sure that we already have all of this stuff active no okay so i&#39;m just going to remove this migration for creating active storage variant records and then rails db migrate and we&#39;re good okay so rails server fire up the rail server it looks like it started okay uh localhost 3000 and we might also need to run split pane vertically okay so we&#39;re still running webpack dev server um but we no longer i mean it&#39;s like not not really like required anymore for real seven so like the upgrade seemed to work well but a lot of people are moving away from webpack into something like es build or something like that um so maybe in the future we&#39;ll talk about doing that sort of migration also but for now it looks like um our page is up and running so we&#39;ve got this is all working on rail seven so yeah that&#39;s how you upgrade from uh 6.1 to seven not not uh not too painful um and yeah if you wanted to go through like all of the changes in detail you can look for the you can look through those here and so there&#39;s some information about this active support dependencies module that was removed again the error that we saw was similar to this the fix again was to to update devise to use the latest um there was also uh in the previous version it had it used to use classic mode and now we have to use zeit work mode that again is something that i think is default for the version that we were already on so we didn&#39;t actually have to change anything the autoloader was changed if you had it set to zeit work just remove it dependencies api has been deleted yeah so this is i think this is the thing that we keep uh running into issues for right so this was the the thing that devise was using that were no longer that&#39;s no longer supported and i think the private api was being used or something um okay auto loading during initialization not sure what that does you can configure once passed so that just loads it one time when when something loads instead of reloading every single time files are changing um content type is now returned in the uh the header as it is sure uh previously it did not contain the char set part huh okay today we learned we&#39;re not actually using this anywhere so it doesn&#39;t impact us key generator digest is going from sha 1 to sha 256 so it gives you this code to like roll the keys and the cookies and stuff but i don&#39;t think we&#39;re going to need that since we&#39;re not actually live we&#39;re just going to kind of like depend on the new the new default the digest class is also going from sha1 to 256. uh cache serialization we don&#39;t we didn&#39;t have to change any of these things it was just updated for us uh as part of application rb when we kind of just accepted the new version of application rb there&#39;s some stuff that happens with ffmpeg and then there&#39;s a whole bunch of new image processing with this vips image processor i wasn&#39;t able to get this installed locally so we&#39;ll have to play around with this later um and we might just use mini magic or some other like image magic thing but there&#39;s a lot of new cool stuff that you can do with variants for images so yeah you can crop it to certain spots you can clamp you can mess around so uh yeah really cool stuff going on with images and then that&#39;s it so this is where you can upgrade from six to six point one so this is like everything above three number three here is all four six point one to seven so hopefully that was useful and uh yeah we&#39;ll see in the next one [Music]

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