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Colin Soleim
Colin Soleim

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6 Steps to Take When Inheriting Legacy Rails Apps

Intro

I started a new job back in June and my first project was taking over and making updates to a big legacy Rails app. Taking the project over was pretty much a worst-case scenario because the project had no tests and nobody who had built the website was still contactable.

Luckily I've been working with Rails for 6 years, and most of the decisions on this project ended up being the Rails standard, so I was able to setup the project, add some tests, and figure out deployments to staging/production.

Along the way I kept notes of my process, and wrote this blog post which gives the 6 steps I take when starting a project like this.

https://nextlinklabs.com/insights/six-tips-for-inheriting-a-legacy-rails-app

I'd love to hear any feedback on the blog post! Also, have any of you had a situation like this where you had to take over an existing project after the original developers have disappeared?

Top comments (3)

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Christopher Wray

I think the post on your website is great!

In the future, I would recommend writing the whole post here on DEV as well. I like to bookmark posts to read them later, and you can add a sentence at the top stating that you originally published your post on your website, for SEO.

I do this on my post, and after a couple weeks, google will rank my website’s post in place of the post on DEV.

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Colin Soleim

Thanks for the recommendation, it's a great idea and I'll definitely do that with my future posts!

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Christopher Wray

Sweet! I really enjoyed that post, and super helpful to see what you do with legacy code like that.