InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now. Learn more →
Top 23 Rails Open-Source Projects
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Project mention: Unlocking Opportunities: How to Thrive as a Ruby Engineer in Today's Tech Landscape | dev.to | 2025-05-07
Ruby on Rails open source projects. Contribute and learn at the same time.
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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Project mention: Lessons from open source in the Mexican government | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-06
Everything I see is moving to Discourse [1] now.
The experiment SW is a lot like the buildings and labs in every physics department I've been to: everyone is on a separate 3-5 year grant cycle and as such is contractually obliged not to push for newer infrastructure. People stick to the same software/lab until it is discontinued/condemned.
[1]: https://www.discourse.org/
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Project mention: Ruby on Rails Flash notifications with Hotwire and ViewComponents | dev.to | 2025-05-24
Assume we use devise for authentication. We need to subscribe user for personal notifications channel. Add this line to app/views/layouts/application/_flash_container.html.erb
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Project mention: How Elite Engg. Teams Deploy 208X More Frequently Compared to Us Mere Mortals? | dev.to | 2024-07-12
GitLab: Another excellent CI/CD tool with robust monitoring and reporting features.
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chatwoot
Open-source live-chat, email support, omni-channel desk. An alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc. 🔥💬
Project mention: Show HN: Jelly – A Simpler Shared Inbox for Small Teams | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-11-12This is one of those tools that do one thing and do it very well. Also the pricing is convenient. Congratulations to the creators.
If you want to go the open source + self hosted route, Chatwoot [1][2] may be for you. It is more feature rich (or bloated, depending what you need) and complex to set up, defined as "Open-source live-chat, email support, omni-channel desk. An alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc.", and it has a shared inbox feature [3].
[1] Website: https://www.chatwoot.com/
[2] Github: https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot
[3] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox
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Reminder: Future is now available to post on in general, and forem.com can be used to see a feed from both spaces.
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Project mention: 15 Open-Source Projects to Replace Popular SaaS Tools & Apps 👨💻🔥 | dev.to | 2025-01-13
👩💻 GitHub link | ⭐ 12.9K stars | 💻 Website link
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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Project mention: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-01-21
* Look into Diaspora. (https://diasporafoundation.org/). Upside: It's basically a self-hosted facebook. Really cool project. Downside: Unlike facebook, there's no fake/pushed content so it tended to feel stale.
* Look into hosting a forum (e.g. phpBB). Forums are excellent because they don't lose old information like facebook does. When someone says "Hey what's the policy on dogs?" three years later I can search "dogs" and find the answer. Downside: They're not pretty, not full of pictures and no infinite scrollingz. sadge alfababies.
* IRC chat. I hosted an IRC group for several years at work and it worked great. We only killed it when we decided to move to an enterprise communication app.
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Same reason IDEs — when you really know them — allow for quicker development compared to using primitive text editors with a bunch of third-party plugins duck-taped together. When you understand the framework, everything is written to the same standard, behaves in similar ways, and is where you expect it to be. Adding things like background job processing requires changing one line of config.
Also, one major thing I'm missing personally is automatically generated OpenAPI specifications + API documentation & API clients autogenerated from it. Last time I checked Go, you had to write the spec manually, which is just ridiculous — the code already has all the necessary info, and duplicating that effort is time-consuming and error-prone (the spec says one thing, the code does another). This may be out of date, but if it still isn't, it is enough to disqualify the stack completely for me.
Also, I don't think there anything similar in the Go world to these administration panels:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/contrib/admin/
https://activeadmin.info
https://nova.laravel.com
which are just fantastic for intranet projects and/or quick prototyping.
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Kaminari
⚡ A Scope & Engine based, clean, powerful, customizable and sophisticated paginator for Ruby webapps
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Project mention: 17 Free Open-source Icon Libraries (Carefully Curated List, Filterable & Sortable) - Need Feedback | dev.to | 2024-07-08
Octicons - Scalable icons handcrafted by GitHub
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Project mention: How to use nested attributes in Ruby on Rails (create associated objects in one form) | dev.to | 2025-02-24
I'm using the gem Simple Form for my forms. So the original form would look like this:
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Project mention: A library for setting up Ruby objects as test data | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-03
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If you're looking for static typing a dynamic language is going to be a poor fit. I find a place for both. I love Rust, but trying to write a tool that consumed a GraphQL API with was a brutal exercise in frustation. I'd say that goes for typing of JSON or YAML or whatever structured format in general. It's refreshing being able to just work with data in the form I already know it's in. Ruby can be an incredibly productive language to work with.
If you're looking for static analysis in general, please note that there are mature tools available. Rubocop¹ is probably the most popular and allows for linting and code formatting. Brakeman² is a vulnerability scanner for Rails. Sorbet³ is a static type checker.
The tooling is there if you want to try things out. But, if you want a statically typed language then that's a debate that's been going since the dawn of programming language design. I doubt it's going to get resolved in this thread.
¹ - https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop
² - https://brakemanscanner.org/
³ - https://sorbet.org/
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The current gem does not help you with this however since it is designed for SPA frameworks. If you wish to take this approach, you can build your own system or use Gems like react-rails and turbo-mount. Turbo Mount uses Stimulus to mount components, and is more robust if you are using Hotwire in your ERB views.
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Yesterday, I worked on elasticsearch integration with help of searchkick.
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The website is out of date, last release was actually in may (like smtp4dev) https://github.com/sj26/mailcatcher/releases/tag/v0.10.0
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FriendlyId
FriendlyId is the “Swiss Army bulldozer” of slugging and permalink plugins for ActiveRecord. It allows you to create pretty URL’s and work with human-friendly strings as if they were numeric ids for ActiveRecord models.
You can do that with many websites that have ids in their SEO slugs, this is usually not an issue as it's still standardized in a way that the string is just split into the id and the rest and you can look it up with both parts.
Popular libraries like https://github.com/norman/friendly_id implement it like that too.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
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A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
www.influxdata.com | 24 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Rails projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ruby on Rails | 56,919 |
| 2 | Discourse | 44,053 |
| 3 | Devise | 24,193 |
| 4 | Gitlab CI | 23,980 |
| 5 | chatwoot | 23,722 |
| 6 | forem | 22,306 |
| 7 | Spree Commerce | 14,646 |
| 8 | diaspora* | 13,515 |
| 9 | kamal | 12,549 |
| 10 | ActiveAdmin | 9,586 |
| 11 | Kaminari | 8,634 |
| 12 | octicons | 8,494 |
| 13 | Simple Form | 8,220 |
| 14 | factory_bot | 8,017 |
| 15 | Brakeman | 7,115 |
| 16 | PaperTrail | 6,868 |
| 17 | react-rails | 6,761 |
| 18 | Searchkick | 6,624 |
| 19 | MailCatcher | 6,619 |
| 20 | Rails style guide | 6,499 |
| 21 | FriendlyId | 6,187 |
| 22 | Administrate | 5,956 |
| 23 | ransack | 5,769 |
Sponsored
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com