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What is Rails?

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.
Rails is a tool in the Frameworks (Full Stack) category of a tech stack.
Rails is an open source tool with 54.7K GitHub stars and 21.2K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Rails's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Rails?

Companies
3480 companies reportedly use Rails in their tech stacks, including Airbnb, Shopify, and Twitter.

Developers
14410 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Rails.

Rails Integrations

Ruby, Sentry, Rollbar, Strapi, and Bugsnag are some of the popular tools that integrate with Rails. Here's a list of all 85 tools that integrate with Rails.
Pros of Rails
856
Rapid development
652
Great gems
606
Great community
484
Convention over configuration
417
Mvc
348
Great for web
343
Beautiful code
310
Open source
270
Great libraries
261
Active record
108
Elegant
90
Easy to learn
88
Easy Database Migrations
82
Makes you happy
75
Free
62
Great routing
54
Has everything you need to get the job done
41
Great Data Modeling
38
MVC - Easy to start on
38
Beautiful
35
Easy setup
26
Great caching
25
Ultra rapid development time
22
It's super easy
17
Great Resources
16
Easy to build mockups that work
14
Less Boilerplate
7
Developer Friendly
7
API Development
6
Great documentation
5
Easy REST API creation
5
Quick
4
Intuitive
4
Great language
4
Haml and sass
4
Easy to learn, use, improvise and update
2
Metaprogramming
2
It works
2
Jet packs come standard
2
Easy and fast
2
Legacy
1
It's intuitive
1
Convention over configuration
1
Easy Testing
1
Cancan
Decisions about Rails

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Rails in their tech stack.

Simon Bettison
Managing Director at Bettison.org Limited · | 8 upvotes · 745.8K views
Shared insights
at

In 2012 we made the very difficult decision to entirely re-engineer our existing monolithic LAMP application from the ground up in order to address some growing concerns about it's long term viability as a platform.

Full application re-write is almost always never the answer, because of the risks involved. However the situation warranted drastic action as it was clear that the existing product was going to face severe scaling issues. We felt it better address these sooner rather than later and also take the opportunity to improve the international architecture and also to refactor the database in. order that it better matched the changes in core functionality.

PostgreSQL was chosen for its reputation as being solid ACID compliant database backend, it was available as an offering AWS RDS service which reduced the management overhead of us having to configure it ourselves. In order to reduce read load on the primary database we implemented an Elasticsearch layer for fast and scalable search operations. Synchronisation of these indexes was to be achieved through the use of Sidekiq's Redis based background workers on Amazon ElastiCache. Again the AWS solution here looked to be an easy way to keep our involvement in managing this part of the platform at a minimum. Allowing us to focus on our core business.

Rails ls was chosen for its ability to quickly get core functionality up and running, its MVC architecture and also its focus on Test Driven Development using RSpec and Selenium with Travis CI providing continual integration. We also liked Ruby for its terse, clean and elegant syntax. Though YMMV on that one!

Unicorn was chosen for its continual deployment and reputation as a reliable application server, nginx for its reputation as a fast and stable reverse-proxy. We also took advantage of the Amazon CloudFront CDN here to further improve performance by caching static assets globally.

We tried to strike a balance between having control over management and configuration of our core application with the convenience of being able to leverage AWS hosted services for ancillary functions (Amazon SES , Amazon SQS Amazon Route 53 all hosted securely inside Amazon VPC of course!).

Whilst there is some compromise here with potential vendor lock in, the tasks being performed by these ancillary services are no particularly specialised which should mitigate this risk. Furthermore we have already containerised the stack in our development using Docker environment, and looking to how best to bring this into production - potentially using Amazon EC2 Container Service

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Cyril Duchon-Doris
Shared insights
on
RollbarRollbar
at

After splitting our monolith into a Rails API + a React Redux.js frontend app, it became a necessity to monitor frontend errors. Our frontend application is not your typical website, and features a lot of interesting SPA mechanics that need to be followed closely (many async flows, redux-saga , etc.) in addition to regular browser incompatibility issues. Rollbar kicks in so that we can monitor every bug that happens on our frontend, and aggregate this with almost 0 work. The number of occurrences and affected browsers on each occurence helps us understand the priority and severity of bugs even when our users don't tell us about them, so we can decide whether we need to fix this bug that was encountered by 1k users in less than a few days days VERSUS telling this SINGLE user to switch browsers because he's using a very outdated version that no one else uses. Now we also use Rollbar with Rails, Sidekiq and even AWS Lambda errors since the interface is quite convenient.

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Yonas Beshawred
Shared a protip
on
StripeStripe
at

We've been using Stripe for a while to charge our customers (mostly for the ads you see on StackShare), but we only recently realized that you can actually invoice and charge customers all through Stripe's UI 😱

You just need a customer's email address, then you add them as a customer and create a new invoice and send it to the customer- all via the Stripe dashboard. The customer then gets an email with a link to the pay the invoice (via credit card, ACH, or wire transfer). Once the customer clicks the link in the email to pay they're taken to a page hosted at pay.stripe.com where they can download a PDF of the invoice and pay via credit card, or ACH/wire transfer.

Nevermind the fact that we built an entire Rails app to do all this 😒 We'll be sunsetting our payments app soon. I wish someone had told us about these features sooner! I doubt they had this when we first built the app but we could have stopped using/maintaining the app a while ago. Stripe is amazing. That is all.

#invoicing #payments

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Shared insights
at

I'm working as one of the engineering leads in RunaHR. As our platform is a Saas, we thought It'd be good to have an API (We chose Ruby and Rails for this) and a SPA (built with React and Redux ) connected. We started the SPA with Create React App since It's pretty easy to start.

We use Jest as the testing framework and react-testing-library to test React components. In Rails we make tests using RSpec.

Our main database is PostgreSQL, but we also use MongoDB to store some type of data. We started to use Redis  for cache and other time sensitive operations.

We have a couple of extra projects: One is an Employee app built with React Native and the other is an internal back office dashboard built with Next.js for the client and Python in the backend side.

Since we have different frontend apps we have found useful to have Bit to document visual components and utils in JavaScript.

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Shivam Bhargava
AVP - Business at VAYUZ Technologies Pvt. Ltd. · | 22 upvotes · 697.5K views
Needs advice
on
Node.jsNode.jsPythonPython
and
RailsRails

Hi Community! Trust everyone is keeping safe. I am exploring the idea of building a #Neobank (App) with end-to-end banking capabilities. In the process of exploring this space, I have come across multiple Apps (N26, Revolut, Monese, etc) and explored their stacks in detail. The confusion remains to be the Backend Tech to be used?

What would you go with considering all of the languages such as Node.js Java Rails Python are suggested by some person or the other. As a general trend, I have noticed the usage of Node with React on the front or Node with a combination of Kotlin and Swift. Please suggest what would be the right approach!

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Max Loua
FullStack Dev at Nouvelles Donnes · | 3 upvotes · 364.6K views
Needs advice
on
Node.jsNode.jsRailsRails
and
Rails APIRails API

Currently working on my company's new saas, the main goal is to manage content and user. I'm familiar with the rails framework and how it is easy to code and deploy. The thing is I'm the only dev on the project, and in terms of the tech stack, there is no preference. However, because Node.js is everywhere and there is enough dev on the market, I am stuck between choosing Rails or Node.js. I don't mind implementing Vue.js or React on the frontend, but I need a solid argument to explain to people that aren't necessarily tech-savvy as to why we should choose Rails over Nodejs.

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Blog Posts

Jun 6 2019 at 5:11PM

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Rails Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Rails?
Django
Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
Ruby
Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
Sinatra
Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
Laravel
It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.
See all alternatives

Rails's Followers
13396 developers follow Rails to keep up with related blogs and decisions.