Ruby on Rails

Documents the simple but obscure syntax to make a multiple-select select widget work properly with a HABTM association.

Another viewer for Rails API documentation, with some unique features.

Scriptaculous in-place editor widget documentation.

An extensive reference to Ruby on Rails, and a large set of links to other resources.

The official API site for Ruby on Rails documentation.

Searchable API documents for Rails, as well as for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The first edition of the primary Ruby reference work is available for free online. The print version is in the second edition.

The Ruby language RDOCs.

Wiki with extensive set of information about Ruby.

A Rails API viewer using Ajax. Can also be downloaded to run locally.

AJAX-based viewer for Ruby API documentation.

Documentation for the SVN (latest) version of ruby-debug.

Searchable Ruby on Rails documentation

Rails docs in Windows help file format. Unfortunately, as of this writing the version is rather behind.

From the README: BackgrounDRb is a ruby job server and scheduler. It main intent is to be used with Ruby on Rails applications for offloading long running tasks. Since a rails application blocks while servicing a request it is best to move long running tasks off into a background process that is divorced from the http request/response cycle.

Merb is a new, light weight MVC framework optimized for simplicity and performance. From the site intro: “Like Ruby on Rails, Merb is an MVC framework. Unlike Rails, Merb is ORM-agnostic, JavaScript library agnostic, and template language agnostic, preferring plugins that add in support for a particular feature rather than trying to produce a monolithic library with everything in the core. In fact, this is a guiding principle of the project, which has led to third-party support for the ActiveRecord, DataMapper, and Sequel ORMs.”

Very useful set of tutorially-oriented documentation for Rails.

Rathole is a fixtures oriented Ruby on Rails plugin that makes working with foreign key relationships much easier. It also removes the need for separate join table fixture files. Rathole is available for Rails 1.2.x and is now part of the official Rails 2.x distribution.

Instructions for installing RMagick on Mac OS X, including how to use MacPorts to get ImageMagick running. Part of the larger documentation set for RMagick.

An ambitious effort to develop better documentation for Rails, including improvements to the API documentation, an open-source ebook for beginners, and minidocs on specific topics.

Reference manual for RubyGems

The cache test plugin adds assertions to Test::Units::TestCase to check for cached and expired pages, actions and fragments in your tests.

Plugin for high performance caching. From the site description: “Interlock uses memcached to make your view fragments and associated controller blocks march along together. If a fragment is fresh, the controller behavior won’t run. This eliminates duplicate effort from your request cycle. Your controller blocks run so infrequently that you can use regular ActiveRecord finders and not worry about object caching at all.”

A Rails plugin that is a drop-in replacement for Rails Action Caching. Adds many useful features including: last-modified header usage, storing response headers in cache, custom cache key implementations, conditional caching, and more.

Introduces a new level of caching for Rails in which content that doesn’t include layouts is cached. Similar to action caching, but more granular.

No-frills, full cheat-sheet for ruby-debug.

Log4r is a comprehensive and flexible logging library written in Ruby for use in Ruby programs. It features a hierarchical logging system of any number of levels, custom level names, logger inheritance, multiple output destinations, execution tracing, custom formatting, thread safteyness, XML and YAML configuration, and more.

test/spec layers an RSpec-inspired interface on top of Test::Unit, so you can mix TDD and BDD (Behavior-Driven Development).

Official home page for the MacOS X Ruby on Rails default installation by Apple. Contains many pointers to useful articles using the environment, resource lists, FAQs, and information about related software (such as RubyCocoa).

Walks through installing Ruby and Rails, as well as Postgres, via ports on Mac OS X Leopard. This is an alternative to using the default Leopard installation.

How to compile the mysql gem when using the Mac Ports install of MySQL and the native Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) Ruby and Rails (and gems) installs.

The official API documentation for Active Record as implemented in Rails.

RSpec is a Behaviour Driven Development framework for Ruby. It provides two frameworks for writing and executing examples of how your Ruby application should behave: a Story Framework for describing behaviour at the application level; and a Spec Framework for describing behaviour at the object level.

Step by step instructions for installing a full Ruby and Rails stack (with Mongrel and MySQL) on a Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) system. These instructions have you compile almost all of the code and install a copy of the applications into /usr/local. This process does not disturb Apple installed software.

Watir is a simple open-source library for automating web browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read and easy to maintain. It is optimized for simplicity and flexibility.

test/spec layers an RSpec-inspired interface on top of Test::Unit, so you can mix TDD and BDD (Behavior-Driven Development).

Official RubyForge home page for project.

SpiderTest is an automated integration-testing script that iterates over every page in your application.

Documentation site for Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and select Gems.

Home page for the RubyCocoa project on SourceForge.

acts_as_ferret plugin enables simple integration of the Ferret search engine into a Ruby on Rails project.

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library. SolRuby is dedicated to information about integrating with Solr from Ruby.

A comprehensive guide to Textile markup syntax.

Want to try out a textile expression? Enter it on this page and it will show you the resulting HTML markup.

Quick reference and a web-based Textile-to-HTML converter for testing.

Rich Text Editor built within the Yahoo Javascript Library.

Rails Doc morphed into APIdock. Collects various versions of Rails, Ruby, and Rspec documentation into one place.

Replacement for older memcache-client that deals with disconnecting memcache server issues.

If you are experiencing the error: “undefined class/module MyClass” when fetching data from memcached, be assured that you are not alone…

Now you can access your nested routes directly or through the complete nested resource path without specifying multiple manual routes.

Using the great libraries Prototype 1.6, Script.Aculo.Us 1.8 and TinyMCE 3.1, IPRE provide a really easy way to implement an in place AJAX-powered editor using WYSIWYG.

Handy guide looking at the results of the Yahoo yslow FireFox plugin and how to handle some of the performance issues using Ruby on Rails or web server (nginx) configuration tricks.

A guide for getting SQLite installed on windows. Important as the default Rails DB is currently set to sqlite3.

Two-day seminar for new Rails developers, from the authors of the “Softies on Rails” blog (former .net developers).

Four-day seminar on building Ruby on Rails applications, led by the author of the well-regarded Ruby for Rails book.

Three-day advanced Rails training designed for experienced Rails developers.

Three-day seminar for Rails developers. One of the few Rails seminars that is aimed at experienced Rails developers.

Three-day seminar in Columbus, OH on using test-driven development for Rails applications.

The primary U.S. conference for the Rails community.

Primary Rails conference for Europe.

Ruby on Rails training

Learn to program in Ruby from two real experts in the field, Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler.

Three-day introduction to Ruby on Rails.

An excellent list of web-related conferences.

The primary discussion group for users of Ruby on Rails. Very high traffic, lots of noise, but a good place to look for advice and to search for tips.

Discussion group for the Rails core team. This is not a place to ask questions about Rails, but rather for those working on the framework itself to discuss ongoing work.

Group for discussion of Rails application deployment.

Discussion group for issues surrounding the business of Rails, including consulting, hosting, and project management.

Discussion group for freelance Rails developers. Focuses on client and business issues.

Primary discussion group for users of the Ruby language. Very high traffic.

Forum for discussion of Prototype, Scriptaculous, and other Rails spinoffs.

Announcement-only list for issues relating to Rails security.

A listing of screencasts on Ruby on Rails (and other topics)

A large collection of short, focused, and free screencasts on Rails techniques.

Walks through Mike’s reasons for building his own online store, the Rails code he developed, and the alternatives for online payments.

An experienced web developer, now at the Jet Propulsion Lab, explains in detail why he has moved from J2EE to Rails. Along the way, he compares Rails to Zope, TurboGears, and Django as well by showing the creation of a “hello world” example using each platform.

Excellent screencasts on many aspects of Rails development (and some other topics as well). They cost $9 each but are well worth it. Come with sample code and other notes.

Are you accepting sensitive user data? Passwords, credit card numbers, etc. By default, Rails stores all submitted parameters in plain text in the logs. This episode will show you how to filter this sensitive input so it doesn’t show up in the log file.

A quick runthrough of merb-slices, showing how to create a slice and then do some overrides from the main application. Merb-slices are like mini-applications that can be connected to your router. Akin to Rails Engines.

A new entrant in Rails screencasts, Gregg and Jason bring their wit and creative production skills to an advanced Rails screencast. No doubt the most entertaining Rails screencast yet, and also full of great information. Priced at $9.

Interviews with members of the Rails community.

Nice list of Ruby and Rails tutorials and other resources. Rated by how many users have added a given item to their “toolbox.”

Great list of tools for analyzing and optimizing your site’s search engine rankings, and for learning more about how search engines see your site and how people search for it.

Discusses the default installation of Ruby on Mac OS X, particularly Leopard’s default environment, how to override, etc.

A wiki for web developers to share information.

A selection of tutorials on Rails in general, and deploying on Morph’s AppSpace.

This plug-in simplifies the use of the FCKeditor, an open-source, JavaScript, WYSIWYG HTML editor, in Rails applications.

The FeedFetcher plugin locates RSS feeds, given the URL of a site.

Gem for analyzing Rails production logs to find the slow parts of your code.

Rails plugin to implement the pretty accessible forms design from A List Apart.

An open-source Rails implementation of an electronic medical records system.

An exploratory project to automatically produce better documentation for Rails applications.

ActiveScaffold is a plugin that dynamically generates Ajax-based scaffolds that understand model associations and are customizable via configuration statements.

A plugin that replaces the view code produced by the standard Rails scaffold with a view that explicitly references each column, rather than iterating over all the columns, so it is much easier to customize.

Plugin that simplifies the use of Selenium for testing Rails applications.

Plugin for building location-based apps; provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation.

Plugin that provides a JavaScript widget for entering dates in a mini-calendar, and also parses many common text versions of dates—even things like “next Tuesday”.

Plugin that makes using Textile as simple as it can be. The specified model field is always interpreted as Textile when displayed, except when in a form (for editing).

Plugin that shows a simple toolbar over Textile text-entry areas, so you can, for example, click a Word-like “B” icon for bold and it will wrap the selected text in asterisks. (Display is still not wysiwyg, however.)

Plugin to provide a validation for email address formats.

Plugin lets you track visitors, referrers, robots, search terms and more.

Goldberg is a Ruby on Rails generator that enables you to set up fully-featured websites within minutes. Goldberg provides security, site navigation and content management.

Rails plugin for accessing the FeedBurner API.

A simple plugin that inserts the google analytics tracking code in your layout.

Plugin for using Yahoo maps in Rails applications.

An alternative template engine for Rails applications.

Open-source e-commerce system for Rails applications, implemented as a Rails engine.

Central site for the Ruby programming language

Javascript function to add a tooltip when the user hovers over certain items. Uses Prototype and includes Rails helpers.

Enterprise support for Ruby applications from ThoughtWorks.

Open-source continuous integration software for Ruby applications.

Legacy Rails core plugins.

Plugin that bundles multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single pair of files to improve page rendering times.

Rails database adapter that supports replicated MySQL databases.

Plugin for integrating the WYM editor into Rails.

Add gmail-like keyword search (using keyword:value pairs) to your application.

Flash video streaming platform built on Rails.

Plugin for validating email addresses using the existence of an MX record as the test.

Provides a rake tasks that adds comments to all your models listing the database columns.

This is a “one-click” installer for Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on Windows. It is the successor to the widely-used InstantRails installer, which is no longer being maintained.

IBM Sharable Code is a platform for building, sharing, and managing Web 2.0 API mashups

Open-source CRM and ERP system written in Rails.

A “micro-CMS” (content management system) Rails plug-in.

A complete open-source Rails application that includes a forum, calendar, and files area.

An open-source content management system written in Rails, developed in Japan.

Listing of stress and load testing tools that are useful with Ruby on Rails (and other) web applications.

The ZenTest collection includes a full test coverage suite of tools (including the extremely useful autotest).

Doesn’t appear to have been updated in a while, but still lots of logging/analysis tools to check out.

Rails plugin to support the X-Sendfile protocol, which enables you to use Rails to do authentication while having the web server deliver the file.

Apache 2 module that enables your application server to tell Apache when to send a static file. Use with Rails Xsendfile plugin.

A high-quality, but not inexpensive, package that translates HTML/CSS files into PDF.

Plugin that provides a cleaner interface to the PDF::Writer gem.

Facets is a huge collection of Ruby libraries. Before you write something that addresses a common problem, look here to see if it has already been done for you.

If you want to access the ActiveRecord source code independently of Rails, you’ll find it here. (And yes, you can use ActiveRecord in non-Rails projects.)

Official Mocha Readme

FlexMock is a simple, but flexible, mock object library for Ruby unit testing that integrates easily with Test::Unit.

The most widely used payment processing library for Ruby on Rails. Provides interfaces to more than 30 gateways with a single, abstracted API. Extracted from the Shopify hosted service.

Here’s where to find all the plugins that used to be in Rails but were pushed out for Rails 2, such as acts_as_list, acts_as_tree, and scaffolding. You’ll also find other plugins that were never in the framework but have come from the core team, such as exception_notification and ssl_requirement.

Mole is a gem that instruments your application and stores usage and performance information in the database.

Open-source social network application in Ruby on Rails. Download the code and use it as the basis for your own social network site.

Announcin preview releases of Net::SSH, Net::SFTP, and Net::SCP

Plugin for using the Dojo JavaScript libraries with Ruby on Rails applications.

A nice simplification for rendering partials.

Plugin for Flexigrid JavaScript library, which enables grids with “click on header” sorting, pagination, and more.

Spree is distributed as both a Rails plugin as well as a Ruby gem (requires Rails 2.0.2). You use the gem to create your application which automatically installs the plugin in your project. The newly created project is actually a fully functional store. All that remains is for the developer to customize and style to taste.

Rails software bundle for creating recurring billing using the Braintree gateway. This is commercial software, not open source.

Auto-generates tags based on text content.

Tutorial on uploading multiple files to a Rails application using a Flash-based UI.

Open-source social networking application written in Ruby on Rails. From the author of RailsSpace, this application is derived from the sample application presented in that book.

A modified version of the in_place_editor plugin code so that it works with Rails 2.0

Browser Debugging tool (like Firebug), but runs on any device that Opera runs on.

Comprehensive debugging and in-browser development tool for Firefox.

Ruby gem for translating Textile markup to HTML.

Rails Trac ticket describing the CSRF problem with the existing in_place_editor and a proposed patch.

The “official”, but currently flawed, in-place editing plugin for Rails.

These are the plugins that live in the official Rails repository. Some are in serious need of updating, however, and in some cases there are better alternatives elsewhere.

A gem that supports using enhanced gems to replace Rails plugins.

Open-source Ruby on Rails application for managing Continuity of Care Records embedded in PDF-Healthcare files for use in new patient registration.

Ruby on Rails plugin that crawls your site, exercising all the URLs and checking things as it crawls along.

Rails plug for creating Flash-based charts.

Set of scripts for doing benchmarking and performance analysis of Rails apps.

ruby-prof is a fast code profiler for Ruby.

jRails is a drop-in jQuery replacement for Prototype/script.aculo.us on Rails. Using jRails, you can get all of the same default Rails helpers for javascript functionality using the lighter jQuery library.

github home of the action_mailer_optional_tls plugin. Use this plugin to connect to Google GMail from your Rails app. Pay attention to Googles TOU, as there are limits to the number of email messages you can send in one day.

A $199 package the provides all the code for incorporating maps into a Rails application

Official homepage for Liquid Templating engine (originally extracted from Shopify). “Ruby library for rendering safe templates which cannot affect the security of the server they are rendered on.”

A stand-alone performance diagnostic tool from Rubysophic, which plans to introduce a hosted service to complement the software.

Httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance. It provides a flexible facility for generating various HTTP workloads and for measuring server performance. The focus of httperf is not on implementing one particular benchmark but on providing a robust, high-performance tool that facilitates the construction of both micro- and macro-level benchmarks.

This plugin adds easily accessible debug information into your views. It adds a button that will pop up a new window that displays request parameters, session variables, flash variables, and assigned template variables.

DHH’s talk at RailsConf 2007.

Presentation from the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference 2007. A great overview of ActiveRecord

Excellent, detailed presentation on the finer points of sending and receiving email from Rails applications

An extensive set of slides from a five-day Ruby on Rails course.

Talk from RailsConf Europe 2007 on scaling Rails applications, based on the Twitter experience.

Slides from a one-day course presented by the UC Berkeley Rad Lab, by Armando Fox. Streaming video is also available.

Presentation slides, recording, and quick reference for Httperf talk at www2007 conference.

Good overview of what EXPLAIN is, how its results are calculated, and what all of the data is presents means.

These are videos of the presenters, unfortunately without the slides.

The UC Berkeley RAD Lab presented a one-day intensive in Ruby on Rails. A series of six, one-hour streaming videos is available here.

Unofficial videos of the keynote talks from RailsConf 2008.

Large and frequently updated directory of sites developed with Rails.

Extensive directory of Rails developers from all over the world. Also includes lists of sites, projects, and groups.

An excellent site for finding and rating Ruby gems.

A list of open-source applications built with Ruby on Rails that you can use as a starting point for your own sites.

Perhaps the largest Rails-specific community site. Includes directories of developers, companies, and sites, as well as forums and a job board.

Ruby-specific search engine.

Directory listing of open-source Rails applications.

RJS cheat sheet