This Week in Rails

December 5, 2025

Schema-Enforced JSON Access, Postgres Type Decoding, and more!

Hey! Emmanuel Hayford here. Here’s a look at the highlights from this week’s updates to the Rails codebase.

Add schematized json for has_json
Provides a schema-enforced access object for a JSON attribute. This allows you to assign values
directly from the UI as strings, and still have them set with the correct JSON type in the database.

Only the three basic JSON types are supported: boolean, integer, and string. No nesting either.
These types can either be set by referring to them by their symbol or by setting a default value.
Default values are set when a new model is instantiated and on `before_save` (if defined).

Examples:

class Account < ApplicationRecord
  has_json :settings, restrict_creation_to_admins: true,
                       max_invites: 10, greeting: "Hello!"
  has_delegated_json :flags, beta: false, staff: :boolean
end

a = Account.new
a.settings.restrict_creation_to_admins? # => true
a.settings.max_invites = "100" # => Set to integer 100
a.settings = { "restrict_creation_to_admins" => "false", "max_invites" => "500", "greeting" => "goodbye" }
a.settings.greeting # => "goodbye"
a.staff # => nil
a.staff = true
a.staff? # => true

Add SecureRandom.base32 
Rails adds a new helper to `SecureRandom` in `SecureRandom.base32`, which generates a random Base32, uppercase, human-friendly, case-insensitive string. Essentially allowing:

SecureRandom.base32        # => "PAK1NG78CM1HJ44A"
SecureRandom.base32(24)    # => "BN9EAB8RG9BNTTC9BX7P5JGJ"

ActionText: Validate RemoteImage URLs
`RemoteImage.from_node` now validates the URL before creating a `RemoteImage` object, using the same regex that `AssetUrlHelper` uses during rendering. URLs like "image.png" that would previously have been passed to the asset pipeline and raised an `ActionView::Template::Error` are rejected early, and gracefully fail by resulting in a `MissingAttachable`.

Introduce DevToolsController for Chrome workspaces
Add a new internal route in development to respond to Chromium DevTools GET requests.
This allows the app folder to be easily connected as a workspace in Chromium-based browsers.

Restore missing Postgres type decoding 
Decode PostgreSQL `bytea` and `money` columns when they appear in direct query results.

`bytea` columns are now decoded into binary-encoded `String` values, and `money` columns are decoded into `BigDecimal` instead of `String`.

ActiveRecord::Base.connection
     .select_value("select '\\x48656c6c6f'::bytea").encoding
#=> Encoding::BINARY

ActiveRecord::Base.connection
     .select_value("select '12.34'::money").class
#=> BigDecimal

ActiveStorage immediate variants 
This Pull Request introduces the `immediate` option and follows the existing patterns around `preprocessed`.

has_one_attached :avatar_with_immediate do |attachable|
  attachable.variant :thumb, resize_to_limit: [4, 4], immediate: true
end

Extract ActionText::Editor base class and ActionText::TrixEditor adapter
The introduction of the `ActionText::TrixEditor` class enables the
deprecation of a variety of class and instance-level methods across the
`ActionText` namespace. Action Text benefits from deprecating methods in
order to reduce its public API.


You can view the whole list of changes.
We had 26 contributors to the Rails codebase this past week!

Until next time!

About This Week in Rails

Your weekly inside scoop of interesting commits, pull requests and more from Rails.