Update dependencies (gems / Rails / Ruby)

[orenyk]

We're currently one minor version behind (Rails v4.1 vs Rails v4.2), but with the pending release of Rails 5 we might just want to skip ahead after a few patch updates for stability. Any thoughts?

Update 2015/11/22

I'm bundling in all of our dependency updates into this issue, including our gem dependencies, Rails (to v4.2.x), and Ruby (to v2.2.x). This is targeted for a v6.0.0 release.

Update 2015/11/30

• Update configuration documentation / Heroku buildpacks to reflect new static asset configuration variable

[orenyk]

I've started reading through the upgrade guide; there doesn't appear to be too much to change, hopefully. I think if we include an update to the Ruby version as well (while we're updating dependencies) then maybe we'll bump our next release to be a major one (e.g. v6.0.0) with all dependencies updated. Thoughts?

[orenyk]

After some more reading, this might present a problem but ties nicely into #1328, so I think that fits in with a major release as well 😄.

[orenyk]

Ok, updating Ruby didn't appear to break anything 😄. Working on Rails update now to 4.2.5 (had to update Devise simultaneously for dependency reasons).

[orenyk]

Ok, we're going to switch our SERVE_STATIC environment variable with RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES as per the new default production.rb.

[orenyk]

Welp, over 200 failed tests 😞

[orenyk]

ok, most of that had to do with a deprecation in our factory. We still have a bunch of other errors, working through them now

[orenyk]

Ok, dealt with most of the issues, a lot of it had to do with some of the new HTML sanitizers. We're still getting weird errors on "serialized_attributes" deprecations that I have to look into.

Also, one of our UserMailer specs is failing, but I'm actually confused as to how it passed previously - it has to do with our environment variable-triggered logger, using a Mailer Observer (#1127). As far as I can tell, the env_wrapper spec helper doesn't actually reload the Rails environment, so that observer isn't being registered for any test. I'm suspecting that our passing spec has to do with some other logging behavior that is no longer occurring in Rails 4.2.5. I'll have to keep investigating tomorrow...

[orenyk]

So it turns out that we can't test configuration-dependent initializer functionality in RSpec, so I'm going modify the spec so that we always create the Mailer Observer and it only writes to the log if the ENV variable is set.

[orenyk]

Alright, green build! We still have deprecation warnings about serialized_attributes but I think that might be from one of our gems so I'll try updating those and see if it resolves them.

DEPRECATION WARNING: `serialized_attributes` is deprecated without replacement, and will be removed in Rails 5.0. (called from realtime at /home/oren/.rbenv/versions/2.2.3/lib/ruby/2.2.0/benchmark.rb:303)
DEPRECATION WARNING: `serialized_attributes` is deprecated without replacement, and will be removed in Rails 5.0. (called from instance_eval at (eval):8)

[orenyk]

the latest version of permanent_records, v4.0.0, doesn't install due to a dependency issue (see here), so I'm leaving it for now (Gemnasium doesn't say that it's urgent).

[orenyk]

Ok, all dependencies updated, we have a green build and everything should be good to go! Opening PR now.

[orenyk]

Whoops, forgot to update app.json with the new ENV variable name, I'll open a quick issue and update the wiki as well.