Rails Articles

Event Streaming in Rails with Kafka

Do you need to process a lot of data in real time? Event streaming is a pattern that could help. David Sanchez walks us through how to do event streaming in Rails with Apache Kafka, the popular open-source event streaming platform.

How to Sell a One-time Purchase in Rails With Stripe

Have you ever wanted to accept payments in Rails? With Stripe Checkout, it's never been easier. Jeffrey Morhous shows us how.

Rails' Hidden Gems: ActiveSupport Cache Increment and Decrement

You've probably used Rails.cache to read, write, and fetch cached data in Rails—but did you know you can also work with counters? In this series, Jonathan Miles introduces us to some of the lesser-known tools hidden in your Rails codebase.

How to Avoid Race Conditions in Rails

Race conditions are hard to debug—especially when you don't know it's a race condition! This article looks at some common race conditions and the best solutions for handling each one.

Complete Guide To Managing User Permissions In Rails Apps

There are many excellent authorization libraries for Rails, but did you know it's not that hard to build this functionality yourself? In this article, Renata Marques shows us how to use the Policy Object Pattern to implement access control in our Rails apps.

Using AWS S3 For File Storage in Rails Apps

S3 is an excellent way to store files scalably and reliably. This article by Jeff Morhous will show you how to use S3 to store files uploaded to a Rails app.

GraphQL APIs in Rails

GraphQL is a flexible, strongly-typed query language. It's useful because it gives front-end developers the ability to query the database without many changes to the back-end. In this article, David Sanchez shows us how to design and build our own GraphQL APIs in Rails.

Migrating From Turbolinks To Turbo

Turbolinks is no longer being developed. It's been superceeded by Turbo, which is part of Hotwire. In this article, Julio Sampaio shows us how to port our existing Turbolinks apps to Turbo.

Security Risks On Rails: Misconfiguration and Unsafe Integrations

In the third and final article of our series on the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks, we’ll explore the lesser-known risks associated with the development of web applications on Rails when it comes to threats involving security misconfiguration, JSON escaping, etc.

Running Rails on a Kubernetes Cluster: Part 2

Kubernetes is a popular way to deploy web services and applications using containers. In this, the second of a two-part series, Geshan finishes his step-by-step tutorial for getting up and running with Rails and k8s.

Railway Oriented Programming In Rails Using Dry-Monads

It's not every day that you learn a new approach to error handling for Ruby. In this article, Abiodun walks us through a novel error-handling process called Railway Oriented Programming and shows us how to implement it with dry-rb's monads.

Run Your Rails App On Kubernetes: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

Kubernetes has become very popular in recent years as a way to deploy applications using containers. In this article, Geshan shows us how to get a Rails app up and running inside a local K8s cluster.

Using DynamoDB in Your Rails App

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database offered by AWS. It can be a great way to avoid adding load to your primary database when you need tens of thousands of reads/writes per second. In this article, Julie Kent walks us through the basics of using DynamoDB with Rails.

ActiveSupport's #descendants Method: A Deep Dive

The #descendants method is part of Rails. It returns all subclasses that inherit from a given class. In this article, Jonathan Miles shows us how to use this method and how it's implemented. It's a great lesson in the ins and outs of Ruby's object model.

Multi-Factor Authentication for Rails With WebAuthn and Devise

If someone steals your password, they can pretend to be you. That's why many companies provide two-factor or multi-factor authentication via a fingerprint scan, a YubiKey, an authenticator app, or SMS. In this article, Petr Hlavicka will give you a solid foundation of knowledge about multi-factor authentication and will walk you through implementation with Rails, Webauthn, and Devise

Building a Real-Time Chat App in Rails Using ActionCable and Turbo

Turbo and ActionCable make it a snap to create Rails applications that respond to user behavior in real-time. In this article, Abiodun shows us how to use them together to create a full-featured chat application in Rails.

Using ActiveRecord's #update_counters to Prevent Race Conditions

Race conditions are arguably the most insidious kind of bug; they're intermittent, subtle, and most likely to occur in production. ActiveRecord's update_counter provides us with a convenient way to avoid race conditions when incrementing or decrementing values in the database. In this article, Jonathan Miles shows us how to use it, how it's implemented, and other approaches to avoiding race conditions.

React on Rails: Building a Simple App

To decide on a front-end for your Rails app, you need a feel for the options. Does a certain JS framework speak to you or does it make you feel dirty inside? There's only one way to find out! In this article, Julio Sampaio walks us through creating a React app from scratch and integrating it with a Rails back-end via webpacker.

Using Angular with Rails 5

Before you can decide on a front-end for your Rails app, you need a feel for the options. Does a particular JS framework speak to you or does it make you feel dirty inside? There's only one way to find out! In this article, Julio Sampaio walks us through creating an Angular app from scratch and integrating it with a Rails back-end via webpacker.

Configure Your App with SSM Parameter Store

Configuring your Rails app via environment variables works well, but sometimes you want to be able to update your configuration on the fly. Here's a way to update your app's environment using SSM Parameter Store.

Why would you want to do this? Well...