Ruby on Rails 8.1 brings active job continuations, structured event reporting and local CI

Ruby on Rails 8.1 is now available, introducing several updates across deployment, testing, and developer workflows. Key among the new features, long-running jobs can now be split into discrete steps, allowing execution to resume from the last completed step after a restart. This enhancement benefits deployments using Kamal, which limits job-running containers to a thirty-second shutdown window.

In parallel, Rails 8.1 adds a new event reporter, enabling structured event logging and improving log post-processing beyond what is possible with the framework’s default human-friendly logger. Responding to performance improvements in modern developer machines, Rails has also introduced a default CI declaration domain-specific language defined in config/ci.rb and executed by bin/ci. This change is driven by the ability to run large test suites locally within minutes, eliminating the need for full cloud-based continuous integration setups for smaller projects.

Following these enhancements, developers can now more easily render Markdown responses directly. Kamal deploys gain flexibility as secrets can be accessed from encrypted Rails credentials and a remote image registry is no longer needed for basic deployments. Additional updates let developers mark Active Record associations as deprecated. Rails 8.1 also delivers further improvements and bug fixes.