We are in the process of moving our production code from autoki to the shiny new rails 2.1 and thanks to our unit tests/(r)specs we encountered some gotchas and wows we’d like to share.

Here are some things that change in rails you shold be aware of.
If you are using custom callbacks for you rails observer you now have to tell rails about these callbacks first. Simply add a define_callbacks :your_callback, :your_other_callback in models with custom callbacks.

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We just switched autoki over to Rails 2.0.2 in the last days. While the transition we replaced the asset_packager plugin with the new Rails 2.0 :cache => true option in stylesheet_link_tag/javascript_include_tag.

As our assets (public/*) are served from an apache webserver that has its own checkout of the project, we can’t let Rails generate the all.css/all.js files on the fly when the first request comes in. Instead we have to pre-generate them at deployment. For asset_packager we had a capistrano task that did just that. Rails doesn’t have that. Instead the logic to generate the files is built right into the link/include methods in the AssetTagHelper(!). So now we are simply doing this in our capistrano recipe:

Fire up a mongrel, curl the start page, bring it back down. Feels a bit overkill but it works. (at least I hope it will when I’ll first try it later today)