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Brayan Arrieta
Brayan Arrieta

Posted on • Originally published at brayanarrieta.hashnode.dev

10 Awesome Ruby Gems for Ruby on Rails Web Development

Ruby on Rails is one of the most popular for developing web applications with influential features that aid to increase the speed of your web app development utilizing an MVC pattern. It is intended in such a manner that it can be simply prolonged employing the most popular Ruby gems presented by the Rails community.

What are gems in Ruby on Rails?

Ruby Gems is known as the package administrator for Ruby language that presents a classic format for dispensing Ruby libraries and programs. It distributes in an independent format termed a gem a tool designed to provide some awesome features for our project.

In the next list, we will see some Ruby useful Gems that developers often use for adding various functionalities to their projects.

RSpec

One of the most popular Ruby Gems that’s also been downloaded the most, RSpec is fantastic for writing unit test cases. It is mainly used in BDD and TDD environments. The clear syntax of RSpec enables writing tests as close to human language as possible.

The Rails gem is efficient in testing the behavior of a particular model or a library. It is simple to use and can be executed by installing the configuration files and spec helpers.

Devise

Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Ruby on Rails based on Warden. The Devise Gem is used for user authentication, It creates sign-up and sign-in forms, it also can be used to create user accounts for privacy, and many more.

RuboCop

RuboCop is used for analyzing the code quality, which assures that your code matches the Ruby Style Guide for writing the best program. RuboCop no leaves a chance for style violations.

OmniAuth

OmniAuth is a library that standardizes multi-provider authentication for web applications. It was created to be powerful, flexible, and do as little as possible. Any developer can create strategies for OmniAuth that can authenticate users via disparate systems. OmniAuth strategies have been created for everything including Facebook, Google, and even GitHub.

Pry

Pry is a runtime developer console and IRB alternative with powerful introspection capabilities. Pry aims to be more than an IRB replacement. It is an attempt to bring REPL driven programming to the Ruby language. Pry facilitates the process of debugging

Faker

Faker is an awesome library that will allow us to generate fake data such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and many other topics. Faker can be used to generate test data to populate our database.

Simple Form

Simple Form aims to be as flexible as possible while helping you with powerful components to create your forms. The basic goal of Simple Form is to not touch your way of defining the layout, letting you find a better design for your eyes.

Webpacker

Webpacker makes it easy to use the JavaScript pre-processor and bundler Webpack v5 to manage application-like JavaScript in Rails. It coexists with the asset pipeline, as the primary purpose for Webpack is app-like JavaScript, not images, CSS, or even JavaScript Sprinkles (that all continues to live in app/assets).

Bullet

The Bullet gem is designed to help you increase your application's performance by reducing the number of queries it makes. It will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries), when you're using eager loading that isn't necessary and when you should use counter cache.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a framework for building automated deployment scripts. Although Capistrano itself is written in Ruby, it can easily be used to deploy projects of any language or framework, be it Rails, Java, or PHP. When Capistrano is installed, this gem gives you a ‘cap’ tool for deployments straight from your command line.

Conclusion

As you may see, there are many great gems that we can use on our web applications. During this post, we have seen some awesome Ruby gems that will help us to do more effective work and quality code to develop the best application for our clients.

I hope you find this article really helpful. I will be updating this post based on your comments and recommendations so let me know in any case. Thanks! 👍

References

Top comments (1)

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storrence88 profile image
Steven Torrence

Great list! Thanks for compiling! Also, be sure to checkout the "Rails" version of some of these gems for configurations specific to Rails.