The Ruby community is famous for fast development of greenfield projects and quick acceptance of new concepts. However, it’s worth noting that a lot of mature projects such as GitHub, Shopify and Basecamp also operate with Ruby at their core. Every year we take the opportunity to check which versions of Ruby are used for building real-world applications. The data is based on private projects which are tested and deployed on Semaphore’s hosted CI/CD service.

Ruby 2.4.0 was released on December 2016 and as in our last year’s report, the trend of moving to newer versions is still present. Over 85% of people use Ruby version 2.0 and higher, so it seems that as soon as teams move from 1.9.3 to 2.x, it gets easier to move to newer versions.

As the overall number of versions grows, the fragmentation of versions in use is steadily increasing, as you can see in the chart below. This year, a smaller percentage of users went for the newest version, which wasn’t the case in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

An important thing to note is that versions 2.0 and 2.1 have reached their end of life, and EOL date for Ruby 2.2 is scheduled for the 31st of March 2018. We highly recommend upgrading to newer versions, since the older versions don’t receive any security updates. If you’re not familiar with the maintenance status of Ruby branches, you can find it here.

Another thing to note is that Rails 5 supports only versions 2.2.2 and higher, while Rails 4 supports versions 1.9.3, and prefers 2.0.

Semaphore CI/CD continues to provide all versions mentioned in this report preinstalled on its default platform.

How do you keep up with new Ruby releases and keep your application up to the industry standards? You might want to check out Rails Testing Grader — a tool which compares your Rails test suite to the industry to find out where you stand.

At Semaphore, we’re on a mission to make continuous integration fast and easy. If you’re new to Semaphore, learn more about our hosted continuous integration and delivery service.