Since writing up the first seven parts of this “Hello World” tutorial series within a series a few weeks ago, a few notable things have happened:

First, Rails 6.1 has been released. We’ll walk through the steps in this post to upgrade our app from 6.0.3 to 6.1, and the post will be used as a reference for when we upgrade Rails versions in the future. If you haven’t yet started the course, then you’ll be starting off with Rails 6.1 and will upgrade to other versions later through 2021 and beyond.

Second, Ruby 3.0 was released on December 25th (what a gift! Check out these features). We’ll plan to upgrade our Ruby version together later this week for those following along. Since we haven’t even begun writing the core of our app together yet, this will be a suitable time (and relatively simple time!) to upgrade. If you are just starting out, then you’ll be installing Ruby 3.0.0 and going from there.  

And finally, an interesting complement to StimulusReflex and CableReady was launched this week called Turbo, which is part of a suite of “HTML over the wire” tools called Hotwire, which includes Stimulus, which we discussed previously here. For most of 2020, @dhh (the creator of Rails) has been hinting at an upcoming “New Magic” to be open-sourced that powers the email service Hey.com. Hotwire came with the release of 13 repositories on Github that will give us (those in this course, and also the general Rails developer community) plenty to explore together.

For now, we’ll start with a quick upgrade, and then we’ll dive into this Hello World tutorial with Hotwire using Turbo.