Rails Security Update and Typo

So it looks like there’s a security problem with a recent-ish version of Rails (well, anything older than the Edge as of a few weeks ago seem to be at risk). The hole has been described as


This is not like “sure, I should be flossing my teeth”. This is “yes, I will wear my helmet as I try to go 100mph on a motorcycle through downtown in rush hour”. It’s not a suggestion, it’s a prescription.

Fortunately, I’m running an up-to-date version of Typo which quite happily (at least currently anyway appears to) run against the latest Edge Rails (revision 4745).

How to Update Typo Rails

As of a few versions ago, Typo used to use the Rails gem. However, during the Rails 1.1 release a few shared hosts automatically installed the system-wide gem. This seemed to break a few applications, as sites ran code that wasn’t compatible with some breaking changes in Rails 1.1.

The solution was to freeze the version of Rails to 1.0 in the `vendor/rails` directory. Going forward, Typo was brought up-to-date against 1.1, and the repository was also changed to include an svn:externals link to the Rails trunk. The result is that all that is needed to do the update was

$ cd vendor$ svn up ...Updated external resource to revision 4745.

Ahhh, I can breathe easy! Back to the Typo Sidebar hackery (an article will be coming soon)...

UPDATE: I also took the opportunity to upgrade Typo itself, after which, I ran the usual `rake migrate`. Sorry, made a mistake in my original post.