[Spike] - Rails 6.1 has reached End of Maintenance and needs to be upgraded to 7.2

[jupiter007]

There was some info shared on the #dmptool Slack channel that the Merritt team discovered Rails 6.1 has reached End of Maintenance.

Ruby on Rails, https://rubyonrails.org/2024/10/15/new-maintenance-policy-and-eol-annouments, announced that Rails is providing one last security release for 6.1, and that it's crucial to upgrade to a supported version, 7.2, as soon as possible.

[briri]

DMPOpidor has upgraded their fork of the DMPRoadmap codebase to 7.1. There is an outstanding PR in the shared repo we can use as reference: https://github.com/DMPRoadmap/roadmap/pull/3426/files

[bofstein]

This ticket is just investigation of what's needed for now, will make additional tickets for the work once that's done

[briri]

Did some reading of the official Rails upgrade guide for 6.1 to 7.0 and noted the following:

• We will need to update a few occurrences of button_to
• We may possibly need to add sprockets-rails to the Gemfile. See if its necessary by running rails assets:precompile without it first
• may need to implement a cookie rotator due to a change from SHA1 to SHA256 See the docs
• Update the ActiveSupport cache support config
• Thoroughly test logo uploads and PDF generation. There are a lot of ActiveStorage changes. Nothing jumps out in the docs but we should be thorough when testing these
• The DB Schema file format has changed, so run a rails schema:dump and review

The 7.0 to 7.1 docs:

• Add new secret key base file for dev/test
• Changes to how the autoloader paths are handled, so make sure all modules in the lib and app/services directory load properly
• Update the way @rails/ujs is imported for both the standard Rails JS and the React pilot project pages
• ActiveRecord encryption changed form SHA1 to SHA256. Verify that the user passwords are ok

[briri]

I think a reasonable plan of attack for the upgrade will be to:

• Phase 1
  • Update the Gemfile to Rails 7.2 and then run bundle install
  • Review Gems locked to a specific version in the Gemfile and determine if that is still necessary
  • Run bundle update and yarn upgrade to update all dependencies
  • Fix any errors, deprecation messages or security issues
• Phase 2
  • Run through the upgrade guides and make necessary changes
  • Review the DMPopidor PR for DMPRoadmap and make corresponding changes in our codebase
  • Startup the app
  • Address any issues that arise on startup
  • Run rails assets:precompile to make sure the assets can build
• Phase 3
  • Deploy to stage
  • Manually test everything in the UI