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---
layout: post
title: "This week in Rails: 4.2.0 Final, autoload explained, deep_munge and more!"
categories: news
author: chancancode
published: true
date: 2015-01-09 14:04:54 -0800
---

Welcome to _This week in Rails_, your weekly inside scoop of interesting commits, pull requests and more from [Rails](https://github.com/rails/rails).

It's [Godfrey](https://twitter.com/chancancode) again!

This is going to be the last issue in 2014 as we are closing for the holidays in the next two weeks. On behalf of the editorial team ( [join us!](mailto:godfrey@brewhouse.io)), I would like to thank you for your interest in our work. It was a real pleasure to curate this newsletter for all of you lovely readers.

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy Happy New Year. Looking forward to be back next year with more exciting news and updates from Rails-land!

## Featured

### [Rails 4.2.0 final released](http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2014/12/19/Rails-4-2-final/)

The Rails team has officially released Christmas the final version of Rails 4.2.0 today. Since the first beta, we have logged over 1600 commits! Big thank you to [everyone who contributed](http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/releases/4-2-0/contributors) to this release!

### [Rails-autoload explained](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/constant_autoloading_and_reloading.html)

The [Rails Guides](http://guides.rubyonrails.org) just gained an in-depth walkthrough about how constant autoloading works in Rails. If your constants are not working the way you expected, this guide will help you out!

### [This week's Rails contributors](http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/contributors/in-time-window/this-week)

This week, almost 30 contributors have helped to take Rails to the next level, 5 of them are a first-time contributors! Welcome!

## New Stuff

### [Container-based Travis builds](https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/85990220ab021129bfb5ce15586ea02d2acff92c)

This resulted in faster test runs and more predictable build environment for Rails tests. Check out [this pull request](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/18085) and [the Travis CI blog post](http://blog.travis-ci.com/2014-12-17-faster-builds-with-container-based-infrastructure/) for more details.

### [RAILS\_SERVE\_STATIC\_FILES](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/18100)

You can now configure the `serve_static_files` option (was `serve_static_assets`) from an environment variable, making it easier for platforms like Heroku make your applications as expected work out of the box. (For normal deployment you'd probably want to serve the those files from your web server directly.)

## Fixed

### [`deep_munge` will stop munging empty arrays](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/16924)

In Rails 5, `deep_munge` will no longer muge `[]` in your params into `nil`, solving one of the [most complained issue in Rails](https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/13420)!

### [Loading `schema.rb` without purging the database](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/18082)

Previously, `rake db:schema:load` and `rake db:structure:load` would attempt to first purge the relevant database. This was problematic on environments like Heroku, so it was reverted in favor of a less intrusive option.

## Wrapping up

That's all for _This week in Rails_. As always, there are more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to [check them out](https://github.com/rails/rails) yourself!

P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, why not [share it with your friends](http://rails-weekly.goodbits.io)? :)