Happy Holidays and welcome Lucky 0.29

Lucky 0.29.0 is now out, and a few apps in the wild have already upgraded!

This release mainly focused on quality of life. Lots of bugs have been fixed, and many UI/UX updates to round out and polish the overall feel of the framework. There are a few new features as well, so let’s cover some of the highlights.

# How to upgrade

See the UPGRADE_NOTES.

Or you can view the changes using LuckyDiff. This tool helps see what has changed between versions and will be included in upgrade notes from now on.

# Here’s what’s new

# Squashed bugs

No software is without its share of bugs, but we’ve put a big focus on fixing many of the rough edges.

Lucky no longer writes to the body on HTTP HEAD calls. (oops 😅)
The Lucky ecosystem development dependencies (like Ameba) are no longer installed on every app.
HTML boolean attributes use valid markup. (e.g. <input checked /> VS <input checked="true" /> )
The 404 error page no longer returns a 200 response.
You can now define a model named Status.
Migrations are sorted in the correct order when using Breeze.
lucky dev no longer clashes with Elixir development via the mix command.

# Improved developer experience

Lucky tries to focus on the development experience by catching bugs and issues while you’re developing your application. Here’s a few items to make that nicer.

Pending migrations will stop your app and show you a more noticable banner.
Using attributes in operations will catch many of the common misuses like calling to_s instead of value.to_s.
The file watcher is a lot less greedy. Compilation between file changes goes a bit quicker now.
lucky routes looks nicer, and provides extra flags to see which params are used in your actions.
You don’t have to name your asset manifest file mix-manifest.json. This makes using other asset bundlers (like Parcel) easier.
Lots of additional escape hatches for when you need to get a bit more custom than what Lucky provides.

# Lucky cache

This is a large step forward in our goal to be a solid 1.0 framework. A new shard LuckyCache has been created that allows you to add caching at the application level. It’s a low-level cache you can use to do fragment cache on your pages, or cache specifc queries that you need access to, but don’t need to on every single request.

# example usage
mobile_ad = LuckyCache.settings.storage.fetch("your_key", expires_in: 24.hours) do
  AppSettingsQuery.new.ad_banner("mobile").first
end

iframe(src: mobile_ad.source_url)

In addition, we’ve also added in Query Caching. The query cache can be enabled/disabled in your config/database.cr by changing the query_cache_enabled setting accordingly.

The query cache mechanism is designed to store your ModelQuery results in to memory over the duration of an HTTP request.

# this hits the database
UserQuery.new.first

# this is pulled from cache in-memory
UserQuery.new.first

# More with validations

We’ve also made some improvements with validations. Each validation method now returns a Bool value if it succeeded or not.

before_save do
  if validate_required(code)
    run_super_complex_validation
  end
end

There’s also a new validation method validate_format_of. Use this validation to test if an attribute meets a specific format.

before_save do
  validate_format_of pin, with: /^d+$/
end

As you may know, non-nilable attributes are automatically ran through required validations. Since they can’t be nil, we need to ensure they have a value. To go along with these default validations, we also have a new macro called default_validations.

The default_validations macro allows you to specify your own custom default validations that you need to run. These validations are ran after all of the before_save blocks have completed allowing you to do any necessary setup before hand.

before_save do
  code.value ||= "1234"
end

default_validations do
  validate_required code
end

In some instances, you may need to just skip all of the default validations , including the ones Lucky runs for you. To do this, we’ve added the skip_default_validations macro. Place this in the operation you wish to skip those validations.

class SaveCode < Code::SaveOperation
  skip_default_validations

  # ...
end

Lastly, the validations are all now compatible with I18n. You have many choices for shards that can handle translations for you. Create a struct and inherit from Avram::I18nBackend to override the defaults.

# config/i18n.cr
struct I18n < Avram::I18nBackend
  def get(key : String | Symbol) : String
    # do your lookup here
  end
end

# config/database.cr
Avram.configure do |settings|
  # ...

  settings.i18n_backend = I18n.new
end

Read the PR for more details.

# Parting words

We want to acknowledge and thank the community members for sticking with the Lucky Framework. Lucky has set a goal to be a solid and stable choice for a Crystal based web-framework and in most cases, we feel we have hit the mark.

At this point we had hoped to be closer to the 1.0 release, but due to life outside of open source, that has been pushed back. The core team wants to be open and transparent about the state of things and keep everyone in the loop.

A discussion thread has been opened with more details on our release schedule. With this release, we’re now even closer to our goal. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out any time.

# Follow and spread the word

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