Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails 14,565 is a full-stack web framework written in Ruby. Ruby is to Rails what Python is to Django 7,143 or PHP is to Laravel 2,157 . Rails is built on two ideas: convention over configuration (name a model Post and Rails expects a posts table, a PostsController and views in app/views/posts, with no mapping files) and don't repeat yourself.

Rails 8.1, released on October 22, 2025, is current and requires Ruby 3.2 or later (Ruby 4.0 is the latest stable series). Rails 8.0 set the direction with the slogan "No PaaS Required": new apps include Kamal 2 984,495 to deploy containers to any Linux server, the Thruster 1,158 proxy for compression and file serving, and database-backed Solid Queue 2,496 , Solid Cache 1,037 and Solid Cable 344 , which replace Redis 2,763 and let SQLite 4,756 serve in production. Rails 8.1 added resumable background jobs (Active Job Continuations) and a local CI runner configured in config/ci.rb.

Installing Ruby and Rails on Ubuntu 24.04 (or Ubuntu in WSL) and generating a blogShell

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y build-essential rustc libssl-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev libgmp-dev git
curl https://mise.run | sh                       # mise installs and switches Ruby versions
echo 'eval "$(~/.local/bin/mise activate)"' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc
mise use -g ruby@3
gem install rails
rails new blog && cd blog                        # SQLite, Hotwire and Kamal preconfigured
bin/rails generate scaffold Post title:string body:text
bin/rails db:migrate
bin/rails server                                 # http://localhost:3000/posts

On Windows, the Rails guides recommend installing Ubuntu 225 under the Windows Subsystem for Linux 6 (WSL) and following the same steps. The scaffold generator writes a migration, a Post model, a controller with the seven RESTful actions (index, show, new, create, edit, update, destroy), HTML views, tests and the route line resources :posts, so /posts is a working create-read-update-delete interface a minute after rails new.

Rails fits start-ups, internal tools and content-heavy products where developer speed matters more than raw throughput. It trails the JavaScript and Python frameworks in developer surveys (5.9% in Stack Overflow's 2025 survey), yet W3Techs 13,241 detects Ruby on 7.1% of websites, ahead of Python.

MENU