The Ruby Dispatch

Ruby and Rails applications are awesome on Fly! This is the home for Ruby-oriented content including Rails, Sinatra, Turbo, Rack, and more.

By Brad Gessler

Welcome to Rails Cheat Sheet

Rails has been around since early 2004. Back then, the choices of building web applications was either working with a bunch of spaghetti code that was SFTP'ed up to a server or work with an enterprise monstrosity like Enterprise Java Beans. Rails ...

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By Brad Gessler

Hacking Rails Implicit Rendering for View Components & Fun

Understanding how Rails handles requests from routes.rb to calling the action method on a controller makes it possible to build Rails plugins ranging from Hanami-like action classes to component-driven Rails development. Have you ever opened a Rai...

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By Brad Gessler

Component Driven Development on Rails With Phlex

Building applications entirely from UI components can be a great way to manage complexity in non-trivial application views, especially when using CSS frameworks like TailwindCSS. It's a technique that's been used with great success, by many commun...

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By Brad Gessler

Humane Rails Forms

How many times have you cursed at a date form field because it rejected 03/01/22 and wanted 03/01/2023? Number inputs are the same—what if instead of copy & pasting from the calculator app you could enter 79 / 2 in a field and have it evaluate to ...

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By Sam Ruby

Introducing Live Elements

Ruby on Rails contains everything you need: Rendering HTML templates, updating databases, sending and receiving emails, maintaining live pages via WebSockets, enqueuing jobs for asynchronous work, storing uploads in the cloud, providing solid se...

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By Brad Gessler

Pairing With GPT-4

GPT-4 can be helpful for beginner and senior Ruby developers, but it does have limitations. It won't write all of your software for you, but it will point you in a useful direction, especially if you prefer learning by doing. Let's look at how wel...

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By Sam Ruby

MRSK vs Fly.io

MRSK was introduced last month and it truly is a game changer. From the announcement: It sits on top of basic Docker, and harvests all the benefits you get from isolated containers with a sliver of the complexity associated with most other solu...

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By Brad Gessler

Little Gestures of Confidence Make Our Tools & Community Better

The world is a much better place when we say "please" and "thanks" as we go about our daily lives. The same should be true for the tools, frameworks, documentation, and code we use in Ruby—and a little effort can go a really long way to build conf...

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By Sam Ruby

CI/CD

You've been a model developer. You've placed your source code under version control and posted it to GitHub. You've got a suite of tests, and they run green. You've deployed your software to production. That's a lot of work. You deserve a brea...

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By Sam Ruby

Health Checks

Rails 7.1 is adding discoverable health checks, which fly launch will automatically configure and monitor. This page will tell you what you need to know. No matter how well you plan, you will always need to be prepared to deal with unforeseen and...

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By Brad Gessler

Rails on Docker

Rails 7.1 is getting an official Dockerfile, which should make it easier to deploy Rails applications to production environments that support Docker. Think of it as a pre-configured Linux box that will work for most Rails applications. That means ...

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By Brad Gessler

Monkey Patch Responsibly

What are the hazards of Monkey Patching in Ruby? How you can create a Monkey Patch that you can share responsibly and safely with the Ruby community without causing bugs from forgetting to remove the patch. We live in an imperfect world, which mea...

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