Rails reference installs

We’re in the process of upgrading to a current version of Ruby on Rails. To help with the process, we’ve generated base installations for multiple versions and provided diffs between each major version.

Like Rails itself, this code is provided under the MIT license.

How to use

1. Make sure the versions file has all the Rails versions you're interested in (currently 4.2 through 8.0).
2. Run ./install-versions, which runs the rails new command for each version.
3. Run ./diff-versions, which iterates through each version, summarizing the from the previous version.

Notes

Node.js

Some versions of Rails assume Node.js is installed. If you’ve set up asdf on your system, you’ll need to run asdf install so asdf’s node stub has a usable version.

Ruby

• .ruby-version should be kept up-to-date with oldest ‘normal maintenance’ release in the list of supported versions of Ruby (note that ./install-versions modifies the file because some older versions of Rails require older versions of Ruby)

If you’re running macOS, your simplest option is probably to install rbenv and ruby-build using Homebrew. You may need to run brew upgrade rbenv ruby-build to get support for the desired Ruby version, and/or to run rbenv install [version] (for example, rbenv install 3.3.10).