Ruby 1.8.7 and REE End of Life

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” - Dr. Seuss

In the open source world the projects we hold dear become a part of us. When I started hacking on Ruby projects five and a half years ago 1.8.6 was the new kid on the block. Then, I remember cheering on 1.8.6 as Kirk Haines took over maintenance. But had to say goodbye to that dear friend when we announced last year that 1.8.6 was being phased out of support.

We’re reaching that turning point again with Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby Enterprise Edition.

In the announcement for Ruby 1.8.7’s end-of-life, core Ruby committer Shyouhei wrote that Ruby 1.9 has, “Rich features. Faster execution. Rubygems integrated. [And] Rails works perfectly … Everyone please, use 1.9.” He wanted users of 1.8.7 to understand that “it will be shut down. Please be ready.”

The Phusion team writes about the end-of-life for Ruby Enterprise Edition. The main reasons that inspired the creation of REE have now or will be migrated to upstream Rubies.

• A copy-on-write patch has recently been checked into Ruby 2.0.
• Many of the patches in Ruby Enterprise Edition are simply not necessary in 1.9.

We are grateful to Ninh, Hongli and Tinco and all the contributions that any others have made over the years to made to make REE a great option to deploy Ruby applications. We wish Team Phusion luck as they concentrate their firepower on other projects.

No action is immediately required but the sooner you begin evaluating your migration to Ruby 1.9 the better. Engine Yard will be contacting customers who currently have environments running a flavor of 1.8 in order to discuss options and timelines. At a high level, the three different options for customers are:

• Perform the migration yourself by following [these step-by-step instructions](https://support.cloud.engineyard.com/entries/21214371-migrate-to-latest-ruby-version).
• Contact Engine Yard [Professional Services](http://www.engineyard.com/services) in order to have the migration performed on your behalf.
• Take no action, acknowledging that no new patches or updates will be available to your environment.

When considering your migration strategy, it will also be important to keep in mind that Ruby 1.8.7 will be downgraded to support-only maintenance in the summer of 2012 and will reach end-of-life during the following summer in 2013.

Ruby 1.9.3 GA!

We are also happy to announce that today we are releasing Ruby 1.9.3 as GA (generally available). This new default adds to an impressive array of options available on the Engine Yard Cloud platform that includes JRuby in GA, and Rubinius which will be available through the Early Access program. Although there’s more than one way to move to Ruby 1.9, we think you’ll enjoy the benefits that Ruby 1.9.3 has to offer.

We strongly recommend you test your application and environment with Ruby 1.9.3 in a staging environment first before upgrading your production environment. Please review these step-by-step instructions for upgrading your Ruby version.