10 things I add to every Rails app

1. devise_masquerade

   1 3 543 5.9 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.

2. Judoscale

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   Save 47% on cloud hosting with autoscaling that just works. Judoscale integrates with Rails, Sidekiq, Solid Queue, and more to make autoscaling easy and reliable. Save big, and say goodbye to request timeouts and backed-up job queues.

   

3. letter_opener_web

   2 2 752 6.4 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!

4. postmark-rails

   3 1 365 2.5 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.

5. rspec-rails

   4 25 5,214 8.8 Ruby

   RSpec for Rails 7+

   

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

6. Sidekiq

   5 98 13,295 9.5 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.

7. Sentry

   6 295 40,670 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!

8. metamagic

   7 1 441 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.

9. InfluxDB

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   InfluxDB high-performance time series database. Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data to power real-time intelligent systems.

   

10. Rack::Attack

    8 13 5,612 5.8 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.

11. Administrate

    9 11 5,940 9.3 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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