Release Notes

This page contains combined release notes for major and minor releases of all AnyCable libraries.

1.3.0

Features

Common

  • Configuration presets (aka sensible defaults).

    AnyCable now automatically detects known platforms (Heroku, Fly) and tunes configuration accordingly. Right now, Fly.io support is the most comprehensive and allows you to automatically connect Ruby and AnyCable-Go apps to each other (by setting correct RPC and broadcasting URLs).

    See documentation for AnyCable and AnyCable-Go.

AnyCable-Go

  • Added adaptive concurrency support.

    Users of AnyCable had to scale and balance resources on two sides: RPC and AnyCable-Go. Now AnyCable-Go can adjust its concurrency limit automatically to minimize errors (ResourcesExhausted) and maximize throughput (thus, reduce the backlog size) if possible. This means, you only have to scale the Rails application, and AnyCable-Go will balance itself alongside automatically.

    See documentation.

AnyCable-Go

  • Embedded NATS support.

    Now it's possible to run a NATS server within an AnyCable-Go process, so you don't need to deploy a pub/sub engine yourself.

    See documentation.

  • StatsD and metric tags are now generally available (dowstreamed from PRO).

    See documentation.

  • Added support for WebSocket endpoint paths.

    Now you can specify wildcards and placeholders in a WS endpoint for anycable-go:

    anycable-go --path="/{tenant}/cable

    This could be helpful to differentiate between clients or even different Action Cable Connection class instances at a Ruby side.

  • Added grpc_active_conn_num metrics.

    Now you can monitor the actual number of gRPC connections established between a WebSocket server and RPC servers.

AnyCable Ruby

  • Added experimental support for grpc_kit as a gRPC server implementation.

    Add grpc_kit to your Gemfile and specify ANYCABLE_GRPC_IMPL=grpc_kit env var to use it.

  • Added mutual TLS support for connections to Redis.

AnyCable Rails

NOTE: Changes below are for v1.3.7 of the anycable-rails gem.

  • Added Rails 7+ error reporting interface integration.

    If your error reporting software supports Rails built-in error reporting (e.g., Sentry does), you no longer need to configure AnyCable.capture_exception { ... } yourself.

Changes

AnyCable Ruby

  • A new configuration paramter, rpc_max_connection_age, has been added to replace the previous rpc_server_args.max_connection_age_ms (or ANYCABLE_RPC_SERVER_ARGS__MAX_CONNECTION_AGE_MS).

    It comes with the default value of 300 (5 minutes).

    NOTE: The rpc_max_connection_age accepts seconds, not milliseconds.

For full list of changes see the corresponding change logs:

1.2.0

Features

  • Add fastlane subscribing for Hotwire (Turbo Streams) and CableReady.

    Make it possible to terminate subscription requests at AnyCable Go without performing RPC calls.

    See documentation.

  • Add JWT authentication/identification support.

    You can pass a properly structured token along the connection request to authorize the connection and set up identifiers without peforming an RPC call.

    See documentation.

1.1.0

tl;dr Housekeeping and internals refactoring, prepare for non-gRPC RPC, minor but useful additions.

See also upgrade notes.

Features

  • Added ability to embed AnyCable RPC into any Ruby process.

    When using anycable-rails, set embedded: true in the configuration to launch RPC along with rails s (only for Rails 6.1+).

    For any other Ruby process, drop the following snippet to launch an RPC server:

    require "anycable/cli"
AnyCable::CLI.embed!(*args) # args is a space-separated list of CLI args

  • New metrics for anycable-go:

    • server_msg_total and failed_server_msg_total: the total number of messages sent (or failed to send) by server.
    • data_sent_bytes_total and data_rcvd_bytes_total: the total amount of bytes sent to (or received from) clients.

  • New configuration parameters for anycable-go:

    • --max-conn: hard-limit the number of simultaneous server connections.
    • --allowed_origins: a comma-separated list of hostnames to check the Origin header against during the WebSocket Upgrade; supports wildcards, e.g., --allowed_origins=*.evl.ms,www.evlms.io.
    • --ping_timestamp_precision: define the precision for timestamps in ping messages (s, ms, ns).

Changes

  • Ruby 2.6+ is required for all Ruby gems (anycable, anycable-rails, anycable-rack-server).

  • Rails 6.0+ is required for anycable-rails.

  • Dropped deprecated AnyCable RPC v0.6 support.

  • The anycable gem has been split into anycable-core and anycable.

    The first one contains an abstract RPC implementation and all the supporting tools (CLI, Protobuf), the second one adds the gRPC implementation.

  • BREAKING Middlewares are no longer inherited from gRPC interceptors.

    That allowed us to have real middlewares with ability to modify responses, intercept exceptions, etc. The API changed a bit:

    class SomeMiddleware < AnyCable::Middleware
-  def call(request, rpc_call, rpc_handler)
+  def call(rpc_method_name, request, metadata)
    yield
  end
end

  • Broadcasting messages is now happening concurrently.

    Now new broadcast messages are handled (and re-transmitted) concurrently by a pool of workers (Go routines). You can control the size of the pool via the --hub_gopool_size configuration parameter of the anycable-go server (defaults to 16).

For internal changes see the corresponding change logs:

1.0.0

tl;dr API stabilization, better Action Cable compatibility, Stimulus Reflex compatibility, improved RPC communication, state persistence, HTTP broadcast adapter, Rails generators.

Read more about the first major release of AnyCable in Evil Martians chronicles.

See also upgrade notes.

Features

  • Configure AnyCable for Rails apps via rails g anycable:setup.

    This interactive generator guides you through all the required steps to make AnyCable up and running for development and production.

  • Channel state, or state_attr_accessor.

    Similarly to connection identifiers, it is now possible to store arbitrary* data for subscriptions (channel instances). Using state_attr_accessor :a, :b (from anycable-rails) you can define readers and writers to keep channel state between commands. When AnyCable is not activated (i.e., a different adapter is used for Action Cable), this method behaves like attr_accessor.

    * GlobalID is used for serialization and deserialization of non-primitive objects.

  • Rack middlewares support in Rails.

    You can use Rack middlewares to enhance AnyCable request object. For that, add required middlewares to AnyCable::Rails::Rack.middleware using the same API as for Rails middleware.

    By default, only session store middleware is included, which allows you to access request.session without any hacks.

    A typical use-case is adding a Warden middleware for Devise-backed authentication.

    See documentation.

  • Underlying HTTP request data in now accessible in all RPC methods.

    That is, you can access request object in channels, too (e.g., headers/cookies/URL/etc).

  • Remote disconnects.

    Disconnecting remote clients via ActionCable.server.remote_connections.where(...).disconnect is now supported.

  • Rails session persistence.

    Now request.session could be persisted between RPC calls, and hence be used as a per-connection store. Originally added for Stimulus Reflex compatibility.

    NOTE: This feature is optional and should be enabled explicitly in anycable-rails configuration.

    See documentation.

  • HTTP broadcast adapter.

    Now you can experiment with AnyCable without having to install Redis.

    See documentation.

    NOTE: Supported by anycable gem and anycable-go.

  • Unsubscribing from a particular stream.

    See the corresponding Rails PR.

  • Redis Sentinel support.

    Both anycable gem and anycable-go now support using Redis with Sentinels.

    See documentation.

  • New metrics for anycable-go:

    • mem_sys_bytes: the total bytes of memory obtained from the OS
    • rpc_retries_total: the total number of retried RPC calls (higher number could indicate incorrect concurrency configuration)

  • New configuration parameters for anycable-go:

    • rpc_concurrency: the limit on the number of concurrent RPC calls (read documentation).
    • enable_ws_compression: enable WebSocket per-message compression (disabled by default).
    • disconnect_timeout: specify the timeout for graceful shutdown of the disconnect queue (read documentation)
    • disable_disconnect: disable calling disconnect/unsubscribe callbacks.

Changes

  • New RPC schema.

    Check out the annotated new schema.

  • Ruby 2.5+ is required for all Ruby gems (anycable, anycable-rails, anycable-rack-server).

  • Docker versioning changed from vX.Y.Z to X.Y.Z for anycable-go.

    Now you can specify only the part of the version, e.g. anycable-go:1.0 instead of the full anycable-go:v1.0.0.

For internal changes see the corresponding change logs:

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