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Rails partials have many lesser known features. From counters to spacer templates! Learn all there is to know about partials.

Implement friendly URLs by scratch and using the FriendlyId for your Rails application and improve SEO and user experience

In this second part of the series, let's explore nested attributes how they work and why they are so complex.

Today, I’d like to share my journey while working for a client on implementing an efficient mailing...

Today I want to take a break from the election news and write about something that's been on my mind recently, ViewComponents.

Build, deploy and manage your applications on any cloud or your own servers.

Nearly everyone uses a chat application to send messages and stay connected.

Spoiler: Things wait. A lot. A tale of efficiency, but for whom?

Learn how to serve static assets using a CDN in Rails with a custom subdomain and improve your app's performance and UX.

Learn how to use a CDN to serve Active Storage uploads and improve your application's performance and user experience

Learn how to upload files to AWS S3 with this complete guide: S3 configuration, regular and direct file uploads plus integration with S3 compatible services.

Querying your database across associations can become a bottleneck in your Rails application. Julian Rubisch, our first guest author, explains why and suggests an efficient solution.

I was always curious to see real 37signals code. When they released their first ONCE product, Campfire, I was tempted to buy it but I was not willing to spend US$ 299,00, the release price, and now it’s US$ 399,00. For me, it was too much money.

Time: 10-15 min Level: Intermediate Code: Application Revision: Oct 30, 24

An embedded Web Push demo and deep dive recipe for Web Push notifications for a Ruby on Rails application in advance of Rails 8 Action Notifier.

Rails Way is a software development paradigm that implies sticking to the framework architectural defaults as much as possible. Everyone starts with the Rails Way, but how far can you get without derailing from it? Let's talk about the Rails Way core principles, how they evolved over time, and how you can embrace and enhanced it using the layered design techniques.

What are tooltips, exactly? There's two kinds and the one you use has implications on the user experience, as Zell illustrates in this explainer on best practices.

Hint: you need more than good intentions

Someone asked on Twitter yesterday about the how to add TailwindCSS to a Rails 8 project the easiest way and having hot reload. This is how I believe it is to do so in a few minutes.

Interacting with third-party APIs is common practice in applications. This is where the structural design pattern called facade comes into play.

Learn how to use SQLite to do a full-text search with FTS5 and Rails 8 By:Sergio Alvarez

There are many platforms offering visual page builder. For example, website builders like Wix, Webflow; fundraising platforms like Raisely…

Meeting-free days means more productivity, right? More time for focused work. When should, or should you not, press that big ‘+’ button on your calendar?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Cloud applications can feel...

Paul shows you how to easily load JSON into Postgres relational format with JSON_TABLE, just released in Postgres 17.

This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.

Sick of flaky Rails system tests? Try blaming Selenium and swapping it with Playwright! I did and it's going great. Here's how

Wondering how Solid Queue works on the inside? Read this article to follow a Solid Queue job from enqueue to completion.

Add custom behavior to turbo:before-stream-render listener to add smooth transitions to turbo stream when adding and removing elements.

Let's explore everything that Rails 8 has to offer.

Lessons from GitLab, Doist, PostHog, and more.

We've all been there: you're working on a website and need to display a row of logos—clients, partners, sponsors—you name it. However, logos come in all shapes and sizes, and making them look good together can be quite challenging. How do you get...

Kevin Andrews shares some useful snippets of markup with handy explainers to help you deliver more accessible components.

ActiveStorage’s DirectUpload feature allows files to be directly uploaded to your Cloud’s storage without touching your app’s server.

The Decide, Evolve, React pattern in Ruby, explained step by step

Ruby is a language that consistently evolves to make code more expressive, concise, and readable. With the release of Ruby 3.4, one of the exciting new features introduced is the use of it as a shortcut for the first parameter in a block. This enhancement aims to simplify code, especially in situations where blocks are used extensively, reducing the need to explicitly declare block parameters.

While we are waiting for the Rails World 2024 conference to start and Kamal 2 to be released, I decided to make some preparations for the upcoming changes in the Rails ecosystem.

A from-scratch breakdown of how Rails' Propshaft system serves up static assets automagically and quickly, with graphics and stories to boot!

Morphs, Presence and Typing Indicators

Explore an easy way to drag & drop images using Stimulus while using the Outlets API to preview the dropped image.

Radan here: this is another guest post by Miha. He was so excited about it that he interrupted my weekend with a brand new post to review. I still found it interesting, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Back to Miha now.

A question as old as human civilization - when developing on a feature branch, should I rebase or should I merge changes to keep it in sync with the main branch?

The catalog of annotated code examples of all design patterns, written in Ruby.

Why we are excited about PostgreSQL 17 for our Rails applications.

An update to How to Build a Twitter Clone with Rails and Hotwire

How two lines of code made everything smooth

Junior engineers are foundational to whether a team can collaborate and innovate

Over 2,700 members of the Rails community from 92 countries kindly contributed their thoughts on tools, frameworks, and workflows in their day to day development lives. From these responses we hope to get an understanding of where Rails stands as a framework in 2024.

Kamal 2 is coming with a brand new custom proxy that’s replacing Traefik. Let’s have a look at why is that and what it means.

Rails 8 will support Progressive Web Apps (PWA) out-of-the-box but you have all the tools you need to make your Rails app installable today.

Secure your Rails app with Action Policy and Rabarber for effective user roles and authorization. Simplify admin access and permissions

This article demonstrates a short-coming with using RSpec mocks in code which accesses objects out of a database.

In this post, you’ll learn a recipe that you can use to “shrink” a large table. This is a good fit when only a portion of the data is accessed, the big table has become unwieldy, and you don’t want a heavier solution like table partitioning.

A button is arguably the most likely component to find itself in your codebase so I’m going to show you how I approach building one.

Designing Web Components For Morphing and techniques to deal with reflecting attributes

The power of Rails with Turbo and Stimulus.

Rails partials have been around for years, but now strict locals have entered the scene to make things easier for us.

cache_key_with_version is a method used in Ruby on Rails to generate a cache key for a model object that includes its version number. This method is helpful for ensuring cache consistency, as it combines the object’s unique ID, updated timestamp, and a version number to create a unique cache key.

Explore the key differences between sprockets and propshafts in rail systems. Understand their functions, applications, and how they contribute to the efficiency of rail operations.

Explore semantic search with filters and learn how you can implement it with pgvector and JavaScript.

Embracing the digital experience

Embracing the digital experience

Upgrade Ruby using dual boot

Automate your next workflow.

Avoid mixing targetless controllers with those attached to a target.

The browser has some nice built-ins for building a microphone recording component, so you don't have to use third-party libraries!

Learn how to use container units and container queries to enhance an already flexible sidebar layout with some extra design control and full width breakout elements.

What is OpenID Connect?

Guidelines for Maintainable Tests

It's not always clear how to make the most of partials and helpers in Rails and know when to put what code where. Regardless of the methods, we all still...

In episode #95 we focused on parsing text and converting hashtags and mentions into links. Now let's add an @ mentions dropdown to any text field, so that you can select a user that you want to men...

You must have used concerns in Rails. Did you know you can also use concerns for your routes? They allow you to declare common routes to be reused in other resources and routes. This post covers the basics of routing concerns, including what they are, how they work, and when you might need them.

Paul Ramsey has some great examples of Postgres network analysis and graph theory in this sample code for playing the Kevin Bacon game. Both pgRouting and recursive CTE are used to solve graphing relationships.

Since the dawn of computing, humans have sought to estimate how long it takes to build software, and for just as long, they've consistently failed. Estimating even medium-sized projects is devilishly difficult, and estimating large projects is virtually impossible. Yet the industry keeps insisting that the method that hasn't worked for...

Premature returning from a controller action is a common idiom in Rails applications. I asked my followers in Twitter about whether they know or know how to do this correctly, and I am glad to see that most of them gave the correct answer. Let’s dive into the details.

As Rails developers, we often focus on writing clean, efficient Ruby code. However, as the application grows optimizing database performance is equally crucial for creating responsive applications. One of the most powerful tools in our arsenal for database optimization is indexing. Here I will talk about PostgreSQL indexing from a Rails developer’s perspective. The query plan generated by EXPLAIN will help us to make informed decisions about index creation, ensuring our database queries run as efficiently as possible.

Performance issues in the PostgreSQL layer usually start to manifest only when your app reaches a certain scale. In this blog post, I'll discuss easy-to-miss database config tweaks and common problems that I've encountered in multiple Rails projects.

Let's look at a few readily available techniques and tools to gather and investigate issues in your Ruby or Rails app.

Migrating the Miru app from Sidekiq to SolidQueue eliminated the dependency on Redis, reducing costs by utilizing database for job storage.

Rails 7.2 uses the foreman gem for process management, which has serious limitations when it comes to interactive debugging. The run-pty Node package is an excellent alternative.

We'll explore the basics of HTTP caching, cache layers, configuration, and how to cache in Rails.

This article introduces the Ruby test profiling toolbox called TestProf.

Nested forms with Rails can now be done without using any third-party gem! Turbo Stream’s is all you need to add nested fields to any form you want.

Staff+ engineers have years of technical knowledge stored away, but often have their skills overlooked or undermined.

I’ll explain the differences and benefits of Turbo Streams vs Turbo Frames in this HTML-first, test-driven tutorial. Only one line of JavaScript needed!

Snake was one of my favorite games to play on my Nokia cell phone circa 2007, so I decided to rebuild it with modern frontend web tooling.

How to upgrade Ruby on Rails from 7.1 to 7.2, including the deprecations, required configurations, application code changes, and webpacker API changes.

Find out how to test accessibility in your Rails app to make it usable for everyone. Learn simple tools and methods to improve your app’s inclusivity and user experience.

A place to learn Ruby on Rails

Read about the tools, techniques, mindset that got our client 5X faster tests.

We explore several solutions to a common Hotwire problem.

The inspect method on Active Record models returns a string including the model’s class and a list of all its attributes and their values. In Rails 7.2, you can configure which attributes are included in the output of inspect. In this post, I’ll discuss the performance issue that led me to implement this feature. I’ll also talk about how this feature can be used to improve developer experience.

Handling remote data state is one of the most common things we do in React apps, so it makes sense to carefully consider how we model it.

Learn about JavaScript’s FileReader interface to preview user images before they are upload with Hotwire/Stimulus.

After searching for a simple, interactive, and easy-to-use tool to document the APIs I build with Rails, and not finding the right one, I decided to create my own: OasRails.

The daily stand-up was intended to help teammates remove any blockers to commitments. But at many companies, stand-ups have devolved into tedious one-sided status reports.

Rails added the filter option to in_order_of to prioritize the specified values without filtering the results

Rails 8.0 adds a generator that streamlines the process of adding basic authentication to Rails applications

Test doubles likes mocks and stubs can help us with isolating code under test with the rest of the system. Here’s how to mock in Minitest.

A conversation with the CTO and Co-founder of Clara, a recent thoughtbot client, about the strategy behind their decision to build their startup product with Rails and Hotwire.

Discover how to automate the releases and publication of your gems on RubyGems using release-please and GitHub Actions.

The convenience and power of Active Record allows you to interact with your database in a more Ruby-like way, making it easier to write efficient and readable code. However, as with any complex system, performance can sometimes take a hit when using Active Record. One common scenario where performance may suffer is when counting records in your database. In any Rails app, A simple count method call can quickly become a bottleneck, especially for larger datasets. In this post, we’ll dive into some optimization techniques for using Active Record’s count method in your Rails app.

Good software design is - in part - realized by the capability to introduce changes in a way that isn’t painful. (If you’d like to read up on code smells that violate this principle, take a look at this list of change preventers.)

Do you have a web application deployed with Kamal, but want to know how to set up secure HTTPS connectivity to it? In this video, you’ll learn how easy it is...

A hidden Rails feature that can level up your debugging game.

The first professionally designed UI components for Rails. Built with ViewComponent, designed with Tailwind CSS and enhanced with Hotwire.

Learn how to implement semantic search in Ruby on Rails using the Neighbor gem, Anthropic's Claude API for summarization, and OpenAI for text embeddings. Enhance your app's search capabilities with meaning-based results.

Learn how to implement a Todoist-style task creation feature in your Rails app using Hotwire and Stimulus. This step-by-step guide shows you how to create a seamless, JavaScript-free UX for adding new tasks with auto-focus functionality. Perfect for Rails developers looking to enhance their app’s user experience.

GitHub Staff Engineer Sarah Vessels discusses her philosophy of code review, what separates good code review from bad, her strategy for finding and reviewing code, and how to get the most from reviews of her own code.

Adds additional postgres functionality to an ActiveRecord / Rails application - GeorgeKaraszi/ActiveRecordExtended

What is row pattern recognition feature? Row pattern recognition (RPR) is a feature defined in the SQL standard. It allows to search for a s...

A practical guide to understand the new accessibility requirements and get started with your plan to comply.

Event sourcing is a jargon filled mess, but we can build a lean version with just ActiveRecord, callbacks, and a bit of boring code. Learn how to create simple, yet powerful event-driven systems in Rails.

Ruby is such an expressive language. You can often do surprisingly much with just a few lines of code. It’s why I find it so satisfying to think about how to accomplish the same thing in fewer lines of Ruby1. If we accept the claim that that number of bugs correlates with number of lines of code this is not just a fun exercise. There’s real business value in accomplishing a feature with less lines of code. ↩

The only Ruby on Rails newsletter you will ever need!

Hello Devs 👋 I hope everyone's doing great. The landscape of web development is constantly...

This post explores where to access request headers by looking at the Rails source code after unexpectedly accessing the response headers.

When I'm starting a new Ruby on Rails project, these are few snippets that I find helpful

Matthias Ott is an independent user experience designer and developer from Stuttgart, Germany. Besides design practice he teaches Interface Prototyping at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel.

This post details a proof-of-concept for optimistic UI. If you want to just browse the source, check out the optimistic-ui-hotwire-rails GitHub repository.

If you want to try this at home, here's a GitHub link to a demo application that follows the blog post below. Each commit corresponds to a section in the post.

Sometimes you need a custom, semantic order for things, usually statuses, types. Oftentimes this is...

How to use Kamal to backup and restore your Postgres database

Efficiently manages database connections by promptly returning them to the pool after use, enabling immediate reuse rather than holding onto connections until the end of the request cycle.

By default, Rails adds comments to some attributes like `id` (`not null, primary key` for instance.) But now, I can add comments to my own attributes.

Cassidy's current "stack" of task-tracking, calendar, and note-taking apps

For a long time, I thought that using React with Rails was an “all-or-nothing” proposition. I’m now realizing that the two can be integrated on a spectrum.

Learn how to add the “Save and add another” feature in your Rails app

Got a Rails API that needs some love? Learn how to version your API endpoints so that you can introduce new features while maintaining backward compatibility!

A few months ago, Planet Argon kicked off a Rails 2.1 to Rails 3.0 / Ruby 1.8.7 to Ruby 1.9.3 upgrade for one of our clients. The monolithic Rails app contai...

If you’ve been following the changes in Turbo 8, it looks incredibly promising for improving the perception of speed and interactivity on our web apps. A lot of the Stimulus Tutorials could use an update since they were first written, so I thought it would be good to over existing tutorials and rethink them withContinue reading "Hotwire Tutorial: How Do I Drag and Drop Items in a List?"

Undoing an action, like archiving, deleting or even sending an email, is straightforward with Rails and Turbo. Let’s learn how to do it.

The Architects Choice

Ruby and Rails have several features to make your code more performant using async programming. Here’s a list of these tools and how to use them.

Unlock the potential of Rails with multi-database configurations, exploring setup for multiple database settings, whether horizontally or vertically.

Is your testing strategy too top-heavy? Here are some techniques to spread coverage down the testing pyramid.

Practical tips to optimize your web performance by using HTML and CSS instead of JavaScript for common tasks like state management, responsive design, and UI elements.

Modern Web Weekly #18 One area in which developers have always wanted to customize elements is forms. Historically, it has often been hard to style form controls to give them the look and feel you want. The styling options are often limited and to this day, form controls like date

SQL seems like a data science underdog compared to Python and R. However, it’s far from it. I’ll show you here how you can use it as a data scientist.

I've been toying around with Kamal for some time now, and I believe I have come up with a nice setup for a reasonably robust deployment. It includes two servers, one for the application and another for database and caching, a firewall to expose only the ports we need (e.

Work alongside the thoughtbot team as we collaborate with each other and our clients, live. Ask us anything, we're live right now!

The N + 1 problem is common performance issue. Ruby on Rails provides tools and methodology for preventing it from happening in you applications.

I will walk through the steps my team followed to set up a pretty nice Rails development environment using Docker and VS Code Dev Containers.

We need to build a better web. A web by and for humans.

Mandatory AI generated image Introduction Litestack, and its Litedb component in particular, provides powerful and flexible full text search capability via the Litesearch module. Any context that u…

Judoscale's guide to architecting a perfect Sidekiq setup, easily!

If you’re migrating to AWS from another cloud like Heroku, or starting a new project and want to build your infrastructure on AWS, this guide is for you!

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely available and easily accessible and are increasingly a part of business. Whether you’re interacting with an LLM via the provided interface or connecting via an API and integrating it into other systems, it’s helpful to understand how to get the best possible results out...

The flexibility of JavaScript and React means there are lots of ways to achieve the same result. Let's consider why we might choose one way over another when it comes to React. Specifically, when to choose a more verbose solution with composition over the DRYest code possible.

Simple Form helps you to build and manage forms in Rails. Let's examine what Simple Form is, why we might need it, and some real use cases.

Want to write a Rails API controller test and make sure it includes exactly what your Jbuilder serializer returns? Set `render_views`. Learn why in this post.

We took our Suspenders to the tailor and made some alterations.

Check the health and security of your Rails app with these quick guide to Ruby on Rails Code audits. These are the steps to take to review your ruby on rails...

Ruby pattern to connect multiple APIs to your project more easily with async requests approach

All new applications using Rails 8 will have Kamal by default.

In order to master our craft we need to master our tools. Slack is one of those tools. Here are my tips for Slack.

Learn how we discovered what was slowing down large database queries, and what we did to make Postgres queries 1000x faster.

Note: This is part of the Production vs Tutorial Code Series.

We're making improvements to the way users of assistive technology can interact with and navigate lists of issues and pull requests and tables across GitHub.com.

Thruster is a new zero config proxy from 37signals. Here’s how to add it to an existing Rails projects deployed with Kamal.

Many applications feature cmd+k search modals. This includes documentation websites like Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS, as well as applications I use every day, such as GitHub and Basecamp. I recently had to build one, and it was so easy thanks to Hotwire that I wanted to share how I built it with you. Imagine we have a documentation websi...

All new applications using Rails 7.2 will have GitHub CI workflow by default.

There's a very specific reputation I want to have on a team: "Nat helps me solve my problems. Nat get things I care about done."

The database is often the bottleneck in our application, both in terms of performance and developer velocity. Changing the database is a lot harder than changing the code.

The Ruby ecosystem offers a wide range of tools for building an audit trail, each with its pros and cons. So, which one is the best choice?

Recently I wanted to set up nightly backups of my Postgres databases hosted on Neon.tech. Yes, they have backups and PITR but I knew I’d feel better if I had backups just in case. My business…

All slide content and descriptions are owned by their creators.

The problem Within my 10 years of developer experience, over and over again I see an...

Since Rails 7, there's more and more tooling that enables us, developers, to roll our own...

HotwireCombobox is at an early stage of development. It's nearing a beta release, but the API might change and bugs are expected. Please continue to use the library and report any issues in the GitHub repo.

For a long time, and probably still today, the reference for authentication in Rails is using a gem like Devise. Thing is, you’ll probably end up customizing it a lot: views, emails, onboarding flow, etc. Since Rails 7.1, we have access to several new features that make it easier to...

Turbo Refreshes update the entire current page in place while keeping some UI state e.g. the page’s scroll position. This might seem like overkill in some cases and they’re slower that Turbo Streams, but they can really simplify response code (and the performance hit may not matter anyway).

With the introduction of authenticate_by in Rails 7.1, we can now prevent enumeration attacks based on response times.

Delegated types are a modelization pattern introduced in Rails in 2020. And developers have mostly been scratching their head for a few years trying to use them in their applications. Today, I want to share a real-world use case. I'll walk you through my pre-existing domain architecture, my initial requirements, my mistakes, how I eventually used delegated types, what I learned and my open questions.

How can we use the Dual-Boot technique efficiently to upgrade our Ruby or Rails application when the workflow involves using Docker? Let's see 2 approaches.

As a software engineer, you may consider having a professional email account along with your own website, like "[email protected]". But this may cost a certain amount that you'll not be willing to pay. But do you know you can do it for free? There is actually a way to do

After instantiating your rails application, we have codes generated for us. Let’s focus on a particular section. Focus on the environments…

We examine approaches to API documentation, with a case for why the documentation-first approach is beneficial, plus, we'll not only introduce a new Ruby gem, Skooma, that will be a revelation for those who are ready to follow this path, you can also read on for practical tips and advice for jumping in.

The Rails robots that comprise Active Record do their best to be helpful by keeping your db/schema.rb file up to date — and tend to create pesky unwanted changes in your schema. Here’s an easy fix.

Learn how to optimize model auditing in your Rails application using the PaperTrail gem by setting up separate audit tables for each model, enhancing performance and organization in the auditing process

If you like fast CI builds, hate having to wait for an eternity for CI to complete a build after you open a PR, and love reducing infra costs, read on.

In this part, I want to shortly explain, what partitioning actually is and how you can implement this mechanism for newly created table as partitioned table in Rails application. In the second part, I'll demonstrate an approach to migrate an existing table. So, let’s dive into the topic.

A whimsical (but useful!) code style guideline

Why would you spend your cognitive capacity on useless choices?

This post covers almost everything you need to know about HTTP cookies in the context of Rails. We'll explore what a cookie is, why we need it, how to set & get a cookie, how to restrict cookies to a particular domain/path, prevent JavaScript access, how to sign & encrypt cookies, and much more.

In this video, CJ shows hands on examples of when and where you can start using docker in your apps. He shows usage of the docker CLI, Docker Desktop, docker...

It's a myth that more developers will speed up delivery. You can achieve more with less with simpler processes, simpler communication and fewer cross-team dependencies – which is why smaller teams …

This article reviews the new normalizes feature in Ruby on Rails 7.1 and shows how to increase reusability by creating normalizer modules.

Rollup and Esbuild can both handle JavaScript files in a Rails app. I made some little experiments, both locally and in-production.

Using Ruby on Rails and Turbo 8 to create a sortable table that maintains scroll position and page content as it sorts

Legacy codebases are often like tangled mazes, with convoluted logic, outdated practices, and patches upon patches. Here's what you need to know about rewriting vs. refactoring a legacy codebase.

A short post where I share how I migrated Visualizer from Sidekiq to Solid Queue now that the latter supports scheduling.

Intro

This article was originally published at Rails Designer. Flash has been a feature of Rails since...

Exploring Turbo 8’s morphing page refreshes and refresh broadcast Turbo Stream actions in a Ruby on Rails application

Our nine month journey to horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability.

Posted on 19 September, 2020 at 00:00 UTC by Gentaro "hibariya" Terada

In the second and final part of our series, let's turn to another method used to make modals accessible in Rails: Turbo Streams.

Artificial intelligence hasn't replaced us yet, but how does it handle the boring parts of our jobs?

As I am always on the look out for useful mental models, protocols and habits to improve the quality of dialogue, I spotted this little…

Honeybadger recently added support for logging and event monitoring. It's one feature that I've been waiting for a while now, and I recently stumbled upon it randomly yesterday. This post shows how you can log events from your Rails apps to Honeybadger.

How we migrated to Solid Queue from Sidekiq

JavaScript is in the vogue now, but Ruby on Rails can become your startup’s secret competitive advantage.

Imagine that you have a classic has_many :through relation where you need to select several records out of thousands. Your form should be using an html select tag which would prove problematic if you had to select, say 5 records, out of 50.000 or mor...

Learn how to integrate a Kafka consumer into a Rails application

I upgraded a bunch of sites to Rails 7.1 recently and the ones deployed on Heroku started to show some massively increased memory usage: How could my app that was using ~128mb of memory be using four times as much with Rails 7.1? Well, its turns out that there was a change made to the default Puma config to make use of all available co...

Learn to use View Transitions in Ruby on Rails with Turbo Frames and Real-Time updates from Turbo Streams.

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

For many years Nginx has been a default solution to serve as a reverse proxy for Rails applications. However, with the release of Kamal, the Rails community opened Traefik as a new reverse proxy solution. Within my 15 years of experience with Rails, I created an almost perfect configuration for Nginx that migrated through all my projects. With Traefik, I had to start from scratch.

One of the goals of Pika, the happy blogging software that we recently launched, is to help you find your own place on the internet. Along with a nice place on the internet, when you share links to your blog we want them to represent your internet home, which you've likely taken a little time to make just so. Sharing your blog on social networks, text messages, Slack, or wherever should be an experience that makes you smile, and that's why we built custom social preview images for your blog. But how did we do it?

Or, a proposal on how to structure JS code for simple web apps.

This is the first post in the Campfire deep dive series where we explore the first ONCE product from 37signals to learn and extract useful patterns, ideas, and best practices. This post explores the direct method in the Rails Router that lets you define custom URL helpers for your application.

Outcomes are end goals you try to achieve (often referred to as “product impact”), whereas outputs are the means to achieve these outcomes.

A lovely little improvement to your life when upgrading Ruby

Authentication is almost part of every modern web application these days, even the not-so-useful apps...

Rails' Active Record library is full of methods you can use to streamline queries, reduce memory bloat, and avoid excessive database calls.

To obtain good performance and low latency for any user accessing our site, we often use CDNs to serve our static assets. This article shows how to do the same for ActiveStorage attachments.

Exceptional Creatures is Honeybadger.io's documentation of Ruby's exception system, with a twist. Collect them all!

Efficient email courses tech stack: Ruby, Rails, SQLite, litestack, Avo, Tailwind, ERBs, Phlex, Minitest, Sitepress, Debug, Propshaft, Hotwire, direnv...

In this blog post, we'll explore steps you can take when you aren't going to upgrade Ruby on Rails right away but want to get ready for an upgrade.

Streamlining Database Backups with Kamal: A Guide to Efficient and Secure Data Management in Containerized Environments.

In this article, we will look at the different strategies that you can apply to improve the performance of the application while not focusing on where to apply these strategies.

Using a scale to find that vertical rhythm

The link_to helper in Rails creates an anchor element with the given URL and options. Although the helper has a simple task, it can be used in quite a few ways, and in this article, I will try to cover most of them. Let’s start with creating a simple link:

In Rails 7.1 .with query method makes it super easy to build and chain complex Common Table Expression CTE queries.

This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.

Observability is becoming a standard. Cloud observability providers deliver a high-end solutions for the storage and visualization of the telemetry data. Yet, application owners may consider an entirely in-house approach. Here is how you can achieve it for a Ruby on Rails app.

Learn how to authorize requests at the routing layer to improve security and ergonomics.

Over-communicating is key, over-reacting is not. It’s important to find the balance on when to respond to messages and when to keep still.

Comprehensive guide to automating Ruby on Rails web app deployments using Kamal and GitHub Actions. Includes installation guide and sample GitHub Actions configuration.

Learn how Kamal simplifies web app deployment with features like zero downtime, incremental rollouts, and flexible configuration. Ideal for developers.

I am writing this for the senior engineer or tech lead that is deciding whether to use Hotwire or a Frontend framework (e.g. React, Vue, Svelte …) for the frontend portion of the next Rails project. If this is you, read on. The key factor You have already gone over the usual list of factors that you consider for every new project no matter what tech stack it is on: the expertise of your team members, technologies used on existing projects at your company, available libraries or ready solutions. These are table stakes, you’ve considered them like you always do and for this project, they’re not pointing either way. I will make a case that, once those fundamental questions are cleared, there is one that is specific to this decision and stands above all others: How is the complexity of the project distributed between shared state management and visual interactions? Most of the cost of software is in maintenance and most of the cost of maintenance comes from the complexity of our solution. Picking a tech stack that is well suited for managing the kind of complexity you are facing will make it easier to keep the complexity under control. The point will become clearer once we consider the two extremes.

Rails comes with default BigInt IDs for your primary keys since version 5.1 (replacing regular Int) and offers UUID v4 as an supported alternative since version 6. But what are the alternatives and what to use in your next app?

Work on Rails 8 is starting, so I dug through the official GitHub milestone to break down all the upcoming goodies for you. There's plenty coming, including Solid Queue, Solid Cache and Kamal becoming defaults, better support for PWAs, an official LSP, and more!

Rails 7.1 added a validate option for enums, which will allow developers to validate the passed enum values before saving it.

Exploring new ways of approaching CSS by querying custom properties and their values.

Originally published on my blog: https://bogr.dev/blog/react-testing-intro/ This article assumes a...

In the previous post, How to deploy Rails with Kamal and SSL certificate on any VPS, we saw how to deploy a simple Rails application with Kamal and Docker. But it was intentionally very simple and even if it might be enough for some applications like…

Work on Rails 8 is starting, so I dug through the official GitHub milestone to break down all the upcoming goodies for you. There's plenty coming, including Solid Queue, Solid Cache and Kamal becoming defaults, better support for PWAs, an official LSP, and more!

GitHub SDKs: software generated meets hand curated.

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

Deploying an HA Postgres cluster using Zalando w/ K8s.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework!

Everything you ever wanted to know about Turbo 8's Page Refreshes, Morphing, and its design style

Can we deploy a Rails monolith with audience-based scaling without breaking it up?

Who knew grouping things could bring so many benefits.

Reliably automate custom domains at any scale

Imagine you’ve been tasked to implement a crucial new feature in the product you’re working on....

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

Need to do some HTML sanitization, but Rails ActionView Sanitize Helpers are not good enough? Read this post to learn how to do it with Loofah.

A look at the Postgres array type and good old join tables, each with their advantages and disadvantages.

Last week, while creating a small Rails app for myself, I had to import data from an XML file. I wanted to add a command line task for it. I could’ve used rake for this, but I needed to input the path to the file through a command line parameter, and rake isn’t ideal for that. Fortunately, there’s another tool that’s better suited for this task: Thor.

If the role of a good cloud architect is to design and build cost-effective software, is there a formula to achieve that goal every time?

A hash merge, but backwards for readability

It is sometimes impossible to render HTML directly in Rails, for example, when you need to procedurally generate HTML from JavaScript. There are some approaches, but one sticks out: Template tags && t...

This is an update to Securing User Emails in Rails with a number of improvements: Works with Devise’s email changed notifications Works with...

Rails security best practices. Contribute to ankane/secure_rails development by creating an account on GitHub.

Check our eight top PostgreSQL extensions, along with sample queries and instructions.

Intro

Animation and accessibility are often seen as two separate powers at odds with one another. How is it possible to strike a balance between elements that move and the possible negative effects they expose to users who are sensitive to motion? Oriana García explains how her team at Mercado Libre tackled the challenge by creating guiding principles for applying animation to user interfaces and incorporating them into the team’s design system.

Today, we are excited to launch Angular.dev — the future home for Angular developers.

In today’s technical landscape, deep expertise in niche areas is often celebrated. However, the value of being a versatile 'Jack of all trades' should not be overlooked. Technical fields have grown increasingly divergent, with a clear split between front-end and back-end development leading to a surge in specialization

Choose a scalable and maintainable real-time solution today to stay happy and productive tomorrow. Consider an open source service you can run on a modern cloud with one command as an alternative to expensive PaaS.

How we improved project organization in Basecamp using Hotwire to build on top of a legacy drag-and-drop interface.

Let's discuss how we use Kafka in Smily, how we got where we are now, and how the overall architecture has evolved over time.

A 3 part framework for saying "no" + how to apply it + examples

The query_constraints config introduced in Rails 7.1 is helpful for pre-setting the DB query constraints on the ActiveRecord models.

Let's say you're fed up of the state of screen recorders' paywalls and limitations and want to go on...

Here’s one way of a cloud-independent deployment of Rails, Sidekiq, PostgreSQL, and Redis on single virtual server with Kamal.

Read this the next time you need to build a complicated form.

A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view. It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant…

In this post we are going to set up a custom domain in Netlify using Cloudflare. We will also install a self signed Cloudflare certificate on Netlify to ensure end-to-end encryption.

We are excited about some of the Active Record updates with Rails 7.1! Chris reviews some of the notable new features for working with Postgres including async queries, composite primary keys, native support for ctes, unlogged tables, and syntax normalization.

This article explains what rails app:update is, why you might not want to run rails app:update when upgrading Rails applications, and what you can try instead.

Rails performance audits and tuning have been my main occupation and source of income for over a year now. In this blog post, I'll share a few secrets of my trade. Read on if you want to learn how I approach optimizing an unknown codebase, what tools I use, and which fixes are usually most impactful. You can treat this post as a generalized roadmap for your DIY performance audit with multiple links to more in-depth resources.

Learn more about how we use GitHub to build GitHub, how we turned our guiding communications principles into prescriptive practices to manage our internal communications signal-to-noise ratio, and how you can contribute to the ongoing conversation.

In this article, I share tips for writing Rails ViewComponents, based on my experience building RailsNotes UI, and other projects. If you use ViewComponents in your Ruby on Rails apps, read this article!

This documents my methodology of taking an accepted talk proposal and building the slides and content around it.

Today, Postgres’ native full text search, which uses the tsvector type, has two main problems:

ActiveRecord PostgreSQL Partitioning. Contribute to rkrage/pg_party development by creating an account on GitHub.

Tailwind CSS has become a very popular CSS framework, and it can speed up development. But using it without proper caution can add mayhem to your code. Learn best practices to avoid getting swept away!

Some Do’s and Don’ts to keep in mind while coding in ruby on rails 1. Fat Model, Skinny Controller It is a commonly used phrase when talking about rails best practices.It basically means placing mo…

The use of feature flags for development and release process can provide multiple benefits that reduce risk related to new functionality or large releases.

Or how to retain the vanilla Rails feel beyond the early stages.

Turbo 8 is coming with smoother page updates and simpler broadcasts.

This week I will show you another Rack Attack trick.

We often think of shadows in CSS as something to reach for when we want to add depth to a design. But shadows can be used for more than depth. Let’s experiment with different shadows — two CSS properties and a filter — to make interesting hover effects, different text styles, and even casting shadows on other shadows.

An opportunity solution tree (OST) is a discovery tool that helps product teams visualize the best path to achieve a desired outcome.

Turns out the question of which identifier to use as a Primary Key is complicated -- we're going to dive into some of the complexity and inherent trade-offs, and figure things out

Learn how to scale large postgres tables in place and increase query performance.

Instead of leaning into heavy social sharing widgets, you can create a truly user-friendly social sharing component that works for everyone, using built-in APIs and progressive enhancement.

It's 2023, and it's time for a totally new way to run your tests. Here's how the new TLDR test runner can save you from a life of avoiding your slow tests

You can hear my home country from my first sentence. And so what?

In this series of articles, we will share our experience with adding Packwerk to a large, fast-growing codebase.

Kyle Keesling is an Indianapolis-based Ruby on Rails developer. He enjoys coding, cargo bikes, and playing hurling.

Optimize your Ruby on Rails application's performance by identifying and rectifying missing or inefficient Postgresql indexes through insightful SQL queries.

Within almost 15 years of our history we collected a quite vast collection of tools and techniques that help us to provide the best performance to our clients projects.

Better Specs is a collection of best practices developers learned while testing apps that you can use to improve your coding skills, or simply for inspiration.

In this article, I break down the difference between system specs and feature specs in RSpec and Rails, and walk you through refactoring your feature specs to system specs.

The only Ruby on Rails newsletter you will every need!

A few months ago in June, I attended a local-first meetup in Berlin organized by Johannes Schickling, formerly the founder of Prisma. An…

A first look at Strada, the last missing piece of Hotwire. Let's explore how it unlocks native components driven by the web in Turbo Native apps.

This article explores a dynamic nav component I built using the current_page? helper method, plus Rails' conditional class helpers. The result? A simple, dynamic navbar component, with different styling based on current page. Plus I threw in the ViewComponent version too 😉

This week I want to tell you about the form_with Rails helper. It was introduced in Rails 5.1, and the goal of this helper was to unify the form_for and the form_tag helpers. form_for requires a model instance or a scope and puts the attributes into a hash, so usually when you needed a form in the past where you didn’t want to put them scoped into a hash, you used form_tag.

Introduction Postgres queue tech is a thing of beauty, but far from mainstream. Its relative obscurity is partially attributable to the cargo cult of “scale”. The scalability cult has decreed that there are several queue technologies with greater “scalability” than Postgres, and for that reason alone, Postgres isn’t suitably scalable for anyone’s queueing needs. The cult of scalability would rather we build applications that scale beyond our wildest dreams than ones that solve real problems beyond our wildest dreams.

This is an updated version of the post I wrote about MRKS in the past.

Here’s an important distinction to make in life.

Introduction Hey there, fellow web adventurers! 😄 Building web applications can be a wild...

How I used artificial intelligence and async programming to transform interesting conversations into blog posts.

Syntactical sugar to avoid comparison operators

Career changers have a lot more to offer than meets the eye—especially in tech!

How to plan and execute the refactoring of you Ruby application

Choosing the right web framework for your project is a crucial decision. In this article, we'll take a look at Ruby on Rails and three pros and cons for the framework from a developer's perspective.

Building out a basic Ruby API client using the http gem, tested with webmock.

Recently for RelationKit.io I wanted to build a system to help show other users on the same account if another person is on the same page as them to avoid embarrassing duplicate replies on support tickets. While thinking about how to build this, I wondered if I could use Turbo to build it without any custom JavaScript and the answer is a resounding yes.

How to help your team discover the right product using your technical know-how.

Are you tired of writing clean, maintainable code? Do you yearn for spaghetti code that's...

You don’t need a sophisticated caching mechanism to improve your application’s performance. All you need is a basic understanding of the HTTP specification.

This week I will show you how to make dependent dropdowns with Hotwire! I will use a toy app as an example. This app will have a page where addresses can be created. The address will consist of a country, a state, a city, and a postcode. Except for the postcode, we will have a list of options coming from the database and when the user selects the country, we load the states for the selected option. When the user selects the state we will load the cities in that state. Let’s start by generating a Rails app, the necessary models and a scaffold for the address:

Upgrade your Ruby or Rails application confidently, even with low test coverage, by implementing the strategies and best practices outlined in this blog post.

Here is one strategy to move a client from providing your team with a list of requirements to working on the root problem together.

In this article, I share a handy Stimulus controller for adding tabs to your Rails apps. I also show you a different variation of the controller, and how to add it to your views. Plus, I've included a handy tip to avoid the annoying "flashing in" effect that can happen if you're not careful.

Before you settle on basing design decisions on a handful of strict breakpoints, make sure you consider the vast fragmentation of screen sizes and browser viewports.

This week, I will show you how to make data imports blazing fast with Active Record.

Explore the four broad categories of CSS sizing units, how to apply them in your layouts, and how to choose the best ones in each scenario.

In many Rails based systems we can find models that should not be destroyed but should be tagged as...

Many moons ago, RSS was all the hype. With fewer publication engines like Medium, Substack, and other newsletter-style engines, most people would create thei...

Rails 7.1 adds the picture_tag helper method that renders the HTML picture tag for handling responsive images.

Rails 7.1 adds rename_enum, add_enum_value and rename_enum_value commands to DB migration extending support for PostgreSQL enums.

“Rails Magic” is one of the terms I have heard a lot. Rails indeed is a magical framework as it does a lot under the hood. Yet, it can feel “too magical” for a new Rails dev.

Optimizing Performance and Robustness with Locking, UUIDs, Fulltext Search, Database Views, and Geospatial Data

Hi there,

Hotwire and Turbo are great for very quickly and easily adding real-time updating of webpages without requiring the browser to reload the whole page.

Development, Test and QA SMTP server for all of your email needs. Mailsnag lets you build resilient SMTP integrations while protecting you from spamming customers during testing.

We’ve released PGMQ, a packaged extension for message queues on Postgres.

Explore Rails Components for improved, aesthetic frontend in Ruby on Rails apps, offering shareable, encapsulated functionality like React Components

Kevin Newton

Overview In this article, we are going to discuss the usage of database triggers in Ruby...

Rails Concerns are a great way to keep your code DRY by making it easy to share code across Modules and Classes. The post will be going through some of the in-and-outs of Concerns, why they’re useful and how to use them.

RicherText is a Rich Text Editor based on TipTap for Ruby on Rails - GitHub - afomera/richer_text: RicherText is a Rich Text Editor based on TipTap for Ruby on Rails

Getting started with PostgreSQL can be both exciting and challenging. It's more than just another database—it's a system packed with features that can change how you handle data. Every Friday, Michael (pgMustard) and I discuss these features on our podcast, Postgres.FM (there is also a video version on YouTube). We've been at it for 55 weeks straight since July 2022, and we're not stopping anytime soon. Our latest episode was all about helping newcomers to PostgreSQL. After seeing the huge response to my tweet, which got over 200k views, 1200+ likes, and 200+ retweets, I wanted to dig deeper and share more about these essential tips. Here are those 10 tips (+bonus) Michael and I have discussed... continue reading »

Learn JSON interactions including manipulating, querying, saving, and optimizing a simple object structure.

Explore some of the fundamentals of metaprogramming in Ruby.

Using variable fonts and color fonts with @font-face.

Inspired by a desire to understand why more engineers weren't using Ruby for their machine learning (ML) projects, I embarked on a journey to determine if I ...

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

1. Introduction In my company, we lucked out that Rails 5.2 (and Active Storage) was released just before we needed to implement user uploads. This means that we’ve been using it in production for over 5 years, across 3 different hosts (Heroku, AWS, and GCP) and 3 different storage providers (S3, GCS, and R2). Our primary use case is image galleries, either of products we sell, or user-uploaded images for their wedding/birthday/baby shower websites. This means that we rely heavily on image tran...

Marco Roth - marcoroth.dev

Supavisor is a scalable, cloud-native Postgres connection pooler. We connected a million clients to it to see how it performs.

In a project I'm working on right now I've been using a Rails nested form and a couple of things caught me off guard.

Build a drag-and-drop ActiveStorage S3 Direct Uploader using Rails and Direct Uploads. Follow instructions for model, S3, and view setup

Let's dive into some advanced usages of Devise, including the use of OmniAuth, API authentication, and Authtrail.

An overview of our own hiring process and how we weave in inclusive hiring best practice throughout.

Discover beginner Ruby & Rails projects: Meal Planner, Lists Share, Habit & Symptom Trackers, SWOT Analysis; learn by problem-solving

In this article, we’ll look at how a developer’s mistake caused GitLab to lose six hours of data from...

Simply trying to tackle the issue as it happens is not a sustainable solution, says new research.

Rails writes a new cache entry based on the first request. But what happens when that request is from an admin?

Introduction Ruby is a beautiful expressive programming language. Like many other...

What makes great interactions feel right?

Learn how relative CSS colors enable color manipulations.

A quick step-by-step guide on implementing deep linking in React Native application, enabling users to seamlessly access specific screens or content within the app.

Learn how rate limiting works from real life examples, what are limitation of traditional rate limiting and why adaptive rate limiting is needed.

An overview of what the options provided by the pull request merge button on GitHub do and how to make the best out of each strategy.

N+1 queries are not always a problem, but I have seen that most of the n+1 queries that are really a problem are when we need to fetch data to compute something. Here I will try to share some examples of posible expensive computations candidates to...

All engineers are good writers... of code. But I believe that in order to a become better engineer–you should improve your writing skills.

Release blog post for the 12.0 release of the Citus extension to Postgres. Dive into new Citus 12 features such as schema-based sharding for multi-tenant SaaS applications (and microservices) as well improvements in the Citus support for the Postgres 15 MERGE feature.

In simple words, Ruby Struct is a built-in class that provides useful functionalities and shortcuts. You can use it for both logic and tests.

Learn how to improve the interface of your existing Active Record Models with this underutilized API.

Rails 7.1 adds before_deliver and after_deliver callbacks to ActionMailer to hook into the lifecycle events of the mail delivery.

The danger of an extra equals

This post describes different ways of testing inherited behavior, including duplicating the tests, not testing the inherited behavior, and using a shared example.

I’m going to try to help out by giving you a quick overview of what these things are, and where they fit in to the bigger picture. I’ll assume you’re familiar with the “basic” Rails stack - DB -> Models -> Controllers -> Views. Then, I’ll point you to some resources which you can use to dive deeper.

Full-stack Ruby on Rails engineer. Blogs about programming topics.

Defending the humble Shoulda Matcher for Ruby on Rails functionality testing. A junior's perspective.

Hi there, I am working on a newsletter tool(Pombo) and this week, I want to share how I solved a problem I came across last week while working on it. The...

Is it possible to have ActiveRecord automagically create boolean methods for DateTime columns in your models?

While all Rails developers are familiarized with the routes DSL less or more, some fewer known features make the routing configuration even more flexible.

In this second part, we are building a turbo native app to use native authentication

Integrating Web Push with Rails

Learn how to implement pattern matching on Ruby objects.

It’s easy to ask for, and even want, feedback in a sort of theoretical sense. But soliciting and responding to feedback are, themselves skills.

How to group data by specific date interval using DATA_TRUNC(), EXTRACT(), or TO_CHAR() functions in PostgreSQL.

Start at dstart and reoccur every month on same day of month for five occurences.