Lucky v1.4.1 has been released

Lucky v1.4.1 has been released. This release focused on a few bugs and compatibility with Crystal up to v1.16.3

Read through the CHANGELOG for all of the changes and read below for a few highlights.

# How to upgrade

See the UPGRADE_NOTES.

You can also view the changes using LuckyDiff.

# Here’s what’s new

# Rate Limiting

Lucky Actions now have a “Rate Limiting” feature that allows you to limit the number of calls to an action within a specified period. To use this feature, you will just need to include the new Lucky::RateLimit module.

class Users::LivePingCheck < ApiAction
  include Lucky::RateLimit

  rate_limit to: 1, within: 1.minute

  get "/users/live_ping_check" do
    plain_text "ok"
  end

  private def rate_limit_identifier : String
    "live-ping-check"
  end
end

This will limit the number of requests to the endpoint to a max of 1 every 1 minute. It will use the rate_limit_identifier key for the lookup which you can customize if you need to set the limit to different amounts on a per user basis, for example.

# No more bash script setups

In order for us to better support Windows, we needed to remove the bash scripts that were used for bootstrapping a Lucky application. While using Powershell would have been an option, this also would have made the code in the LuckyCLI much more difficult to maintain due to having different codebase structures for Windows and non-Windows.

Instead, we decided to just port all of the scripts straight to Crystal. This is now a lot more cross-platform compatible since you will need Crystal on any machine you’re using anyway. You can now generate a new Lucky app on Windows, and bootstrap the app with crystal script/setup.cr.

# Separate Read/Write databases

Avram now supports using separate read and write databases for queries. By default, this will continue to use your single specified database.

abstract class BaseModel < Avram::Model
  def self.read_database : Avram::Database.class
    ReaderDB
  end

  def self.write_database : Avram::Database.class
    WriterDB
  end
end

# Uses the ReaderDB
user = UserQuery.find(1)

# Uses the WriterDB
SaveUser.update!(user, last_active_at: Time.utc)

Currently this will only change the connection between doing queries and saving records through Save or Delete operations. Handling tasks such as fallbacks, or retries based on latency from reading and writing are not supported.

# Table Locking

Table locks control which actions can be performed on a table at the same time. Postgres has eight different table locking modes that allow you to specify the locking behavior. Avram now supports all eight.

The AppDatabase.with_lock_on method takes the model whose table you will be locking, and the locking mode. Then within the block, the lock is applied and all queries made will happen within a transaction.

AppDatabase.with_lock_on(User, mode: :row_exclusive) do
  user = UserQuery.new.id(1).for_update.first
  SaveUser.update!(user, name: "New Name")
end

These are the eight modes:

ACCESS_SHARE
ROW_SHARE
ROW_EXCLUSIVE
SHARE_UPDATE_EXCLUSIVE
SHARE
SHARE_ROW_EXCLUSIVE
EXCLUSIVE
ACCESS_EXCLUSIVE

# Type-safe ENV methods

LuckyEnv got a few updates as well. When you use LuckyEnv, it will generate methods for each of your environment variables and automatically type-cast them depending on the value. The supported types are String, Bool, Int32, and Float64.

CACHE_ENABLED=true
PORT=3000
HOST="localhost"
EXCHANGE_RATE=3.14

With this .env file loaded in, you now have access to these methods:

LuckyEnv.cache_enabled? #=> true
LuckyEnv.port #=> 3000
LuckyEnv.host #=> "localhost"
LuckyEnv.exchange_rate #=> 3.14

# State of LuckyFlow

If you’re not familiar, LuckyFlow is a shard that ships with new browser based Lucky apps that helps with doing Acceptance testing by spinning up a browser and walking through a user’s flow using your site.

We released LuckyFlow v1.4.1 and skipped v1.4.0. This was due to some bugs we found in LuckyFlow that were causing specs to fail randomly on new generated apps. These failures are new and seem to be race conditions that we have yet to find.

Keeping LuckyFlow updated has become quite complex. There are several shards required to make it work which are Selenium, Webdrivers, and Webless. There are two supported browsers, Chrome, and Firefox. Plus the addition of supporting Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

For the time being, generating a new Lucky app will still ship with LuckyFlow, but the specs will be set to “pending” until we can release a new version with the issues fixed. You are still free to use LuckyFlow, but just keep in mind that your specs may randomly fail, and the failure may be unrelated to your code.

Follow along with the discussion on Github

# Parting words

The Lucky community is what makes this framework great. We appreciate all of the new users, and everyone that has been contributing to push the framework forward. If you’re using Lucky in production, and would like to add your application to our Awesome Lucky “built-with” section, feel free to open an issue on the Website or a PR!

# Follow and spread the word

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