---
title: "Understanding Webpacker in Rails 6"
publication: "Ruby Weekly"
issue: 465
published_at: "2019-08-29"
canonical_url: "https://rubyweekly.com/issues/465"
---

This week's Ruby news.       

#465 — August 29, 2019 

[Read on the Web](https://rubyweekly.com/issues/465)   

Ruby Weekly 

[![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/aizqxtwngvdh3ghjyq21.jpg)](https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker)   

[Faker 2 Released: A Library for Generating Fake Data](https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker) — A very long standing and popular library has taken some neat steps forward lately and [v2’s API has introduced some breaking changes.](https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker/releases/tag/2.0) If you want to create ‘fake’ or dummy data, however, this remains the gold standard. 

Faker   

[Ruby 2.6.4, 2.5.6, and 2.4.7 Released](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/08/28/ruby-2-6-4-released/) — Not feature releases, these releases are all about fixing [a jQuery vulnerability in RDoc.](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/08/28/multiple-jquery-vulnerabilities-in-rdoc/) (You’d do well to [disable RDoc and RI generation](https://stackoverflow.com/a/7662245) when installing gems anyway.) Link is to 2.6.4, here’s [2.5.6](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/08/28/ruby-2-5-6-released/) and[2.4.7.](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/08/28/ruby-2-4-7-released/) 

ruby-lang.org   [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/c9472b5f.png)](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/optimizing-postgres-query-performance?utm_source=RubyWeeklyPrimary) 

[eBook: Best Practices for Optimizing Postgres Query Performance](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/optimizing-postgres-query-performance?utm_source=RubyWeeklyPrimary) — Learn how to get a 3x performance improvement on your Postgres database and 500x reduced data loaded from disk in this free pganalyze eBook. 

pganalyze sponsor   

[Understanding Webpacker in Rails 6](https://prathamesh.tech/2019/08/26/understanding-webpacker-in-rails-6/) — If you’re still using Sprockets then this guide will help you wrap your brain around the future that is Webpacker. If not, it’s still a good reference. 

Prathamesh Sonpatki   

▶[Discussing Sorbet, the Ruby Type Checker, with Paul Tarjan](https://devchat.tv/ruby-rogues/rr-427-sorbet-a-type-checker-for-ruby-with-paul-tarjan/) — David Kimura, Andrew Mason, and Stripe’s Paul Tarjan, discuss [Sorbet](https://sorbet.org/), the recently open sourced type checker for Ruby. 

Ruby Rogues podcast  

💻 Jobs  

[Backend Ruby Developer in Portland, OR](https://the-dyrt.breezy.hr/p/13b46b771968-backend-developer) — 🏕 Campground review and bookings site seeks a talented Ruby developer to work on our core API and data integrations. 

The Dyrt   

[Ruby developers are in demand on Vettery](https://www.vettery.com/tech?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=cooper-rubyweekly&utm_term=tech&utm_content=grouped&utm_campaign=ad-77583) — Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. 

Vettery  

📘 Articles & Tutorials  

[A Double Splat (`**`) Operator Cheatsheet](https://jetrockets.pro/blog/ruby-double-splat-operator-cheatsheet) — Less a cheatsheet and more a collection of neat examples. The merge functionality for hashes is pretty neato, as well as being a bit faster than `Hash#merge` 

Ilia Kriachkov   

[How to Store Large JSON Documents in Postgres with the Rails Attributes API](https://jetrockets.pro/blog/how-to-store-large-json-in-postgresql-with-rails-attributes-api) — An interesting example of working with your own datatype in Rails. 

Dmitry Voronov   

[Heroku on Easy Mode](https://railsautoscale.com/ruby-weekly) — Effortlessly autoscale your web and worker dynos. Cut your Heroku bill in half and make timeouts disappear. 

Rails Autoscale sponsor   

[What is Module Autoloading in Ruby?](https://www.rubyguides.com/2019/08/autoloading-in-ruby/) — _Autoloading_ is the concept of letting Ruby automatically load other code files in your project when they’re first needed rather than all up front. 

Jesus Castello   

[Exercises for `curl` Users](https://jvns.ca/blog/2019/08/27/curl-exercises/) — Less a tutorial and more a guide to practicing how to use `curl`, the popular command line HTTP client. Not exactly Ruby, but I use `curl` a ton in my Ruby development. 

Julia Evans   

[Faster Heroku Deploys with Rails and Webpacker](https://dev.to/voter101/faster-heroku-deploys-with-rails-and-webpacker-2ej0) — With a new default asset bundler (webpack) we are back to old problems, like rebuilding it’s not needed and not caching build assets. Don’t worry, it’s easy enough to fix. 

Wiktor Mociun   

[Emoji Driven Development in Ruby](https://medium.com/carwow-product-engineering/emoji-driven-development-in-ruby-2d54264f7b08) — This is more for amusement than for your production code(!) But, yes, you can use emojis in your Ruby code. 

Tom Lord   

[Permitting Nested Arrays using Strong Params in Rails](https://blog.smartlogic.io/permitting-nested-arrays-using-strong-params-in-rails/) — Nested arrays, like nice folks, finish last. 

PJ Frias   

[Ruby 2.7 Adds `Time#ceil` and `Time#floor` Methods](https://blog.saeloun.com/2019/08/20/ruby-2-7-time-ceil-and-time-floor-methods.html) 

Romil Mehta  

🛠 Code and Tools  

[Rein: Postgres Database Constraints Made Easy for ActiveRecord](https://github.com/nullobject/rein) — Validations are great at the application level, but what if you want some database-level data integrity? Now supports Rails 6. 

Joshua Bassett   

[InvoicePrinter 2.0 Released: A Way to Quickly Create PDF Invoices](http://nts.strzibny.name/invoiceprinter-2-0/) — The project has been split into multiple gems so you can use the library and the server independently. 

Josef Strzibny   

[Founders/CTOs: We Upgrade Rails So That Your Team Doesn’t Have To](https://upgraderails.com) 

Upgrade Rails sponsor   

[Bundler-Leak: Find Known Memory Leaks in Your Dependencies](https://fastruby.io/blog/bundler/memory-leaks/introducing-bundler-leak.html) — Inspired by `bundler-audit`, `bundler-leak` checks a moderated database of known, leaky gems. 

Luis Sagastume   

[A Ruby Wrapper Around the Google Places API](https://github.com/qpowell/google_places) — The Places API is a service that returns information about geographic locations or points of interest. 

Quinten Powell   

[Stripe Ruby Library 5: Use Stripe from Ruby](https://github.com/stripe/stripe-ruby) — [v5 came out last week](https://github.com/stripe/stripe-ruby/releases/tag/v5.0.0) and introduced a variety of changes (some breaking) - luckily there’s [a migration guide.](https://github.com/stripe/stripe-ruby/wiki/Migration-guide-for-v5) 

Stripe   

[Moving: A Clean and Minimalist Theme for Jekyll](https://github.com/huangyz0918/moving) — I really love clean this theme for the popular [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) Ruby-based static site generator is (which recently got [a major new version](https://jekyllrb.com/news/2019/08/20/jekyll-4-0-0-released/)). 

Yizheng Huang   

[XGBoost and LightGBM Come to Ruby](https://ankane.org/xgboost-lightgbm-come-to-ruby) — These two libraries bring “gradient boosting” to the machine learning story in Ruby, which is an algorithm that performs well on large datasets. 

Andrew Kane         

Curated by [Glenn Goodrich](https://twitter.com/ruprict) and [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/). 

[Change your email address](https://rubyweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) or[Stop getting this newsletter](https://rubyweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*) 

© Cooper Press Ltd · Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom