10 things I add to every Rails app

• devise_masquerade

  3 522 2.9 Ruby

  Extension for devise, enable login as functionality. Add link to the masquerade_path(resource) and use it.

Alongside this, devise_masquerade is a fantastic plugin to use with your admin area, allowing you to login as other users. This is helpful for debugging account specific issues etc.

• letter_opener_web

  2 684 0.0 HTML

  A web interface for browsing Ruby on Rails sent emails

This gem makes sure you don’t embarrasingly send emails to real users whilst developing or testing, life-saver!

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• postmark-rails

  1 347 0.0 Ruby

  Official integration library for using Rails and ActionMailer with the Postmark HTTP API

  

Postmark is a service I have been using for years! It’s really easy to integrate into Rails using their postmark-rails gem, plus the product is great, easy to use and very reliable.

• rspec-rails

  19 5,107 8.6 Ruby

  RSpec for Rails 6+

  

For testing I use RSpec, along with shoulda-matchers for easily testing model relations & validations.

• Sidekiq

  91 12,931 8.9 Ruby

  Simple, efficient background processing for Ruby

  

I often don’t set this up right away, but within the first week or two of development comes the time for background jobs. I like to stick with what I know and Sidekiq along with it’s web interface is easy to use and reliable.

• Sentry

  266 36,817 10.0 Python

  Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring

  

Next up is error monitoring with Sentry. Exceptions usually happen in production when real users get a hold of your code, and making sure these are tracked helps a ton in seeing what’s going on and fixing it!

• metamagic

  1 435 10.0 Ruby

  Simple Ruby on Rails plugin for creating meta tags.

This one is a small, but very useful gem. It helps set page titles, meta keywords and even open graph tags for sharing on social sites. This is a must if you have a lot of publicly accessible pages and want to start doing some SEO.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Rack::Attack

  13 5,480 7.1 Ruby

  Rack middleware for blocking & throttling

  

The final gem I like to include in all projects is rack-attack. This is a rate limiting tool which is great for throttling dangerous actions in your app to prevent bot attacks or other malicious users.

• Administrate

  11 5,803 8.9 JavaScript

  A Rails engine that helps you put together a super-flexible admin dashboard.

  

I usually tend to create these from Scratch, but moving forward I’ve started to use thoughtbot’s administrate gem. It sticks to the Rails conventions of controllers and routing, so it’s easy to customise and add new functionality to.

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