The Rails 8 Way

With a foreword written by Eileen M. Uchitelle, Rails Core Team

“When I read The Rails Way for the first time, I felt like I truly understood Rails for the first time.”—Steve Klabnik, Rails contributor and mentor

The Rails™ 8 Way is the comprehensive, authoritative reference guide for professionals delivering production-quality code using modern Ruby on Rails. It illuminates the entire Rails 8 API, its most powerful idioms, design approaches, and libraries. Building on the previous editions, this edition has been heavily refactored and updated. Rails 8 has the following big themes:

• “Easier Deployments” is basically the release subtitle. A fresh Rails application now comes with a Dockerfile ready for production traffic. Thruster is a reverse proxy that will take the incoming requests into your Docker container, which then sends the traffic to an application server like Puma. It adds HTTP/2 support, automatic TLS certificate management, and serves your static files efficiently. Kamal is a deployment tool like Capistrano for a dockerized application. It configures a fresh Linux box to run your application behind the new Kamal Proxy for zero-downtime deployments.
• “No Redis required” is the second big theme. For years, most Rails applications had their primary database (like Postgres) plus Redis as their sidekick. Solid Cache is an Active Support cache store, and Solid Cable is an Action cable adapter. Both use your database instead of Redis (or memcached). The third library is Solid Queue, an Active Job adapter that works similar to GoodJob (the adapter we recommended in previous editions). Compared to GoodJob, Solid Queue has one advantage: It also works with MySQL and SQLite.

Through the detailed code examples in this book, you’ll dive deep into Ruby on Rails, discover why it’s designed as it is, and learn to make it do exactly what you want. Proven in thousands of production systems, the knowledge in this book will maximize your productivity and help you build more successful solutions.

• Build powerful, scalable, REST-compliant back-end services
• Program complex program flows using Action Controller
• Represent models, relationships, and operations in Active Record, and apply advanced Active Record techniques
• Smoothly evolve your database schema via Migrations
• Build your assets with the asset pipelines
• Optimize performance and scalability with caching
• Improve your productivity using Haml templating
• Secure your systems against attacks like SQL Injection, XSS, and XSRF
• Integrate email using Action Mailer and Action Mailbox
• Improve responsiveness with background processing
• Build “API-only” back-end projects that speak JSON
• Store your files in the cloud via Active Storage

After all the additions we made to The Rails 7 Way, it became clear that the book had turned into a tome. As we still have more things to share, we decided to split the book into three parts. This here is the first book, going over the entire framework. Apart from that, we have two more books coming soon:

• Rails Way: ActiveRecord Deep Dive — this will go into the advanced topics of Active Record, covering every detail of this important part of Rails.
• Building Progressive Web Apps with Rails — which will answer your question: How do I build a modern web frontend with Rails, entirely without an SPA framework like React, Angular, or Vue.