Who contributed to Rails on July 15, 2026?

6 developers shipped this update, including seanpdoyle, yahonda, eileencodes, Hartley McGuire, rafaelfranca, and flavorjones.

What were the notable Rails updates?

Introduce `ActionView::Helper::NavigationHelper`, Use NOT ENFORCED toggle in check_all_foreign_keys_valid! on PostgreSQL 18.4+, and Raise for empty shards on `connected_to_all_shards`.

Jul 15, 2026

$ the-wire · showcase

RAILS REWIRES VIEW HELPERS, POSTGRES 18.4 GETS SHARPER FOREIGN KEY TESTS

By RepoJournal · Filed 06:55 UTC on July 15, 2026 · About Rails · Composed from the cited sources · methodology

6 people shipped this

flavorjones @flavorjones 2 cited

seanpdoyle @seanpdoyle 1 cited

yahonda @yahonda 1 cited

eileencodes @eileencodes 1 cited

Hartley McGuire @skipkayhil

rafaelfranca @rafaelfranca

Rails is reorganizing its view layer with a new NavigationHelper module, while PostgreSQL 18.4 users lose their superuser dependency for foreign key validation.

In brief

Rails extracted navigation helpers into their own concern. Cleaner code organization, less view pollution.
Postgres 18.4+ now gets NOT ENFORCED toggle in check_all_foreign_keys_valid! Finer control over constraint validation.
connected_to_all_shards now raises if you hit an empty shard list. Catches config mistakes early instead of silently doing nothing.
Rails sanitizer updated data: URI tests for loofah 2.25.2. Tiny change, big security surface.

The Rails core team split `button_to` and `link_to` into a dedicated `ActionView::Helpers::NavigationHelper` [1], moving related private methods alongside them to keep the view helper architecture cleaner as the framework grows. This is organizational debt paid down before it compounds. In parallel, Rails dropped a significant quality-of-life improvement for PostgreSQL 18.4+ environments: `check_all_foreign_keys_valid!` now toggles constraints with `NOT ENFORCED` instead of requiring superuser privileges to revalidate [2]. That's the kind of friction elimination that saves ops teams hours of permission wrangling. On the sharding front, Rails tightened `connected_to_all_shards` to raise an error when shard_keys are empty, preventing silent failures in apps that aren't actually sharded yet [3]. The devcontainer releases rolled through routine Ruby 4.0.6 updates . Over in rails-html-sanitizer, the team hardened GitHub Actions workflows against supply chain attacks with SHA pinning and continuous linting [5], while also adjusting data URI tests for loofah 2.25.2's WHATWG compliance [4].

Action items

→ Review your view helpers if you override link_to or button_to - NavigationHelper changes the inheritance chain rails/rails [plan]
→ If running PostgreSQL 18.4+, test foreign key revalidation in your test suite before production deploy rails/rails [plan]
→ Verify your sharding setup calls connected_to_all_shards only when actually sharded, or handle the new error rails/rails [monitor]
→ Update rails-html-sanitizer if you're on loofah 2.25.2+ to avoid test noise rails/rails-html-sanitizer [plan]

References

[1] Introduce `ActionView::Helper::NavigationHelper` ↗ rails/rails
[2] Use NOT ENFORCED toggle in check_all_foreign_keys_valid! on PostgreSQL 18.4+ ↗ rails/rails
[3] Raise for empty shards on `connected_to_all_shards` ↗ rails/rails
[4] Adjust `data:` URI mediatype tests for loofah 2.25.2 ↗ rails/rails-html-sanitizer
[5] Harden GitHub Actions workflows ↗ rails/rails-html-sanitizer