Turning the page on some of our Open Source projects

After auditing our Open Source projects, we have decided to archive some of them.

Although deprecating a library might seem like a bad thing, it’s not actually. The languages/frameworks are evolving, and they implement most of these features nowadays. This is a great thing! Less dependencies to maintain in your app. It’s also part of a project lifecycle: sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to keep it anymore.

We love Open Source and still maintain many other libraries such as FactoryBot, Clearance, Administrate, along with other newly created libraries such as Belt, Superglue, CapybaraAccessibilityAudit, and more.

The decision of archiving the following projects was a combination of:

  • the problems they fixed are now built-in by frameworks/languages
  • we no longer use the library in our client projects
  • the library is no longer relevant

Here’s a summary of the recent archivals.

Paul Revere gem is archived

Paul Revere was a library for “one off” announcements in Rails apps. We now use the noticed for sending announcements.

fake_stripe gem is archived

fake_stripe was a Stripe fake so that you can avoid hitting Stripe servers in tests. It has been deprecated in favor of stripe-ruby-mock. They are also looking for more contributors, so go check out and see how you can help.

Croutons gem is archived

Croutons was a library to easily add breadcrumbs for Ruby on Rails web applications. This StackOverflow discussion shares options for either implementing breadcrumbs in Rails, or using other gems.

Griddler and its dependencies are deprecated

Griddler was a gem to simplify receiving email in Rails. It has been deprecated in favor of Action Mailbox, which is now built into Rails. Griddler related projects have been deprecated as well.

Expandable RecyclerView library is deprecated

Expandable RecyclerView was a library to add custom Android RecyclerViewAdapters that collapse and expand. If you use the library, we recommend forking it.

Looking for contributors

Oh, before you go! We’re also looking for maintainers to either transfer the following libraries to, or become their codeowner:

  • Curry - Swift implementations for function currying
  • Parity - Shell commands for development, staging, and production parity for Heroku apps
  • StaticAssociation - ActiveRecord-like associations for your static data
  • Bamboo.Phoenix - Bamboo library to use Phoenix for rendering emails

If you’re interested in either becoming a codeowner or having one of these libraries transferred to you, please reach out.

Thank you for contributing to Open Source

We want to thank all of the people who contributed their time to create, maintain, and lead these libraries 🧡 And to the users as well, who trusted us when adding these libraries to your projects.

Contribute to Open Source with thoughtbot

We encourage you to contribute to Open Source with us by checking out our Open Source Maintainers Sync notes and to support us by sponsoring our Open Source initiatives.