Rails for everything
Published: 2025-01-01
After spending part of my holiday building and deploying a new Rails 8 application, It's clearer than ever that Rails is awesome, and it's especially great for small projects with a single developer.
Guide is good
The latest
Getting Started with Rails
guide is really excellent. There's a bit of hand waving around
installing Ruby (which is still more difficult than it needs to be). But
if you follow it start to finish, you'll have a Rails app
in production. And it isn't just
hello world. Your app will have authentication, caching,
rich text, continuous integration, and a database. That's a real
application.
If you're brand new to Rails, the guide is the best place to start.
SQLite is all you need
SQlite is a great tool, but its focus on backwards compatibility means that it wasn't ideal for a production database out of the box. You had to add some gems to get it ready to perform. However Rails 8 deals with that for you, and SQLite is ready for production.
Now that you SQLite is a more robust choice, you don't have to worry about spinning up a PostgreSQL server. On top of that, with tools like solid cache you don't need to stand up redis either.
Everything is running under Rails and within SQLite. Superb.
Easy CI
After I pushed my initial Rails commit, I got an unexpected email:
Run failed: CI - main. My first thought was actually a
malicious actor, but I was wrong.
Rails 8 comes with basic CI config
and
Github comes with 2000 free minutes per month
of actions usage.
Aside from it being really cool to have CI with no effort, 2000 minutes of run time is a lot for solo developer!
Authentication generator
Devise is the canonical authentication gem. But it hides a lot of complexity and it's not exactly easy to configure correctly, especially for a beginner.
Rails 8 adds a new authentication generator. It add a simple sign in flow for existing users. All you need to do is add a user via the Rails console and boom. You can log in.
The generated code is pretty minimal and easy to read about.
Easy and fast deploys with Kamal
I am more than happy to leave deploys to my very smart friends in the
ops team. To deploy a new Rails 8 app, I just needed to update a few
items in deploy.yml, follow a few directions, and I had an
app live! With SSL!
Honestly it took less time to get a web app up than it took me to get SSL on a Github page.
CI + easy deploys might be the best part about Rails 8. Even just using the getting started guide, it encourages best practices.
Conclusion
Rails is not dead; It's better than ever. Try using it to make something new this year.