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Ruby on Rails

A full-stack Ruby web framework with strong opinions.

Ruby on Rails introduced "convention over configuration" to web development and reshaped how teams build database-backed web apps from the mid-2000s onwards. It bundles ORM (Active Record), templates (ERB or Haml), routing, asset handling (Webpacker / esbuild integration), background jobs (Active Job with Sidekiq or similar backends), websocket-style real-time (Action Cable), and many other features in a single coherent framework.

David Heinemeier Hansson extracted Rails from the Basecamp codebase at 37signals in 2004. The framework has gone through major version bumps roughly every two to three years, with substantial backward-compatibility shifts at each one. Rails 7 brought "Hotwire" (Turbo + Stimulus) as a first-class way to build SPA-style interactivity without a separate JavaScript framework.

Rails powers GitHub, Shopify (one of the largest Rails apps in the world), Basecamp itself, Coinbase, Airbnb (substantial parts), and countless smaller sites. Despite the rise of newer frameworks, Rails remains the dominant choice for "I want to ship a CRUD-heavy web app fast" in the Ruby ecosystem.

gem install rails