Today, Shopify runs on Rails 5.0, the latest version. It’s important to us to stay on the latest version so we can improve the performance and stability of the application without having to increase the maintenance cost of applying monkey patches. This guarantees we would always be in the version maintained by the community; and, that we would have access to new features soon.

Upgrading the Shopify monolith—one of the oldest and the largest Rails applications in the industry—from Rails 4.2 to 5.0 took us nearly a year. In this post, I’ll share our upgrade story and the lessons we learned. If you're wondering how the Shopify scale looks like or you plan a major Rails upgrade, this post is for you.

Kir Shatrov