60 RoR Gems: Pin To Plane For Developing RoR Application

Table of Contents

Introduction

Ruby on Rails is an excellent framework for building web applications. It has plenty of powerful features that help accelerate web development using an MVC pattern. RoR is designed to be easily extended using the most popular Ruby gems provided by the RoR community. The Ruby Gem programming language and its partner Rails framework are powerful tools for developing exceptional applications.

Here at Bacancy, our skilled developers are well-versed in Ruby on Rails development and can help you build a choice of a custom product using Ruby’s gems. Ruby on Rails is an advanced solution that allows web developers to fill in various functionalities in the application using the open-source Gems.

What is Ruby Gem Used For?

Usually, web app development takes months, but using the ‘Gems’, it can be built in a few days. They are modular and offer the advantage of high performance. Moreover, their integration into the new applications is effortless. The Ruby community has created an enormous number of gems for use. Rubygems is the answer to- Which website hosts the ruby gem for ruby on rails. Rubygems is a public/community repository. The gemspec files and the gem file of all the gems will give you more information on the usability of the gem.

There’s a gem for almost everything you might want to accomplish in your Ruby on Rails application. There are gemfiles to get authenticity and security in your application, as well as many gem installs for debugging and testing.

The ruby gems list is used by savant ruby on rails developers at Bacancy Technology, and hence, I can assure you that you have landed on the right destination.

Best Ruby on Rails Gems You Can’t Miss in 2024

The official report from Rubygems.org mentions the most downloaded gems in 2024. This will give you a market idea of what Ruby on Rails developers use and which Rails install gem is most beneficial.

We have categorized the gems based on their utility, like the best gems to manage the active record, gems used for security, authentication, authorization, debugging, testing, admin panel, file upload, deployment, code quality, payments, and others.

ActiveRecord

1. Activecord Import

Bulks of records can be easily inserted using ActiveRecord-import. It works according to the ActiveRecord associations while generating minimal SQL insert statements as required. With this gem in, if you hire a dedicated RoR developer with enough knowledge, they won’t have to deal with the N+1 insert problem. ActiveRecord is an ideal choice for uploading ten records.

Uploading hundreds of records with this gem can prove daunting. However, it is beneficial for importing external data. The conversion time is significantly reduced with ActiveRecord-import.

GitHub: 21.4k Stars

2. Kaminari

With approximately five million downloads, Kaminari tops the most popular Rails Gems list. You can paginate anything using this gem. Pagination can be carried from ActiveRecord imports to easy arrays using an easy-to-use scope-based API.

GitHub: 8.5k Stars

3. Paranoia

This gem helps you to soft delete on a record. Once you have destroyed a record, it is difficult to use it. Hence, to bring a solution, Paranoia hides the object by scoping queries on the model. However, to strictly delete a record, you need to use the really_destroy gem.

GitHub: 2.9k Stars

4. PaperTrial

You are often so irritated with using the undo and redo actions because of the changes in your model. The PaperTrial gem helps you retain all the changes by naming all the versions with every change, and hence it becomes easy to work with your model.

GitHub: 6.7k Stars

5. Globalize

The Globalize gem makes it easy for you to add foreign languages in your application, i.e., to adapt to internationalization. Globalize gem is powered by Google’s i18n API. This gem helps with the translation of non-static database content.

GitHub: 2.1k Stars

6. AASM

State machines for Ruby classes. This gem enables ruby on rails developers to add finite states to their ruby classes. It is a generic library that provides adapters for various ORMs.

GitHub: 5k Stars

7. Pagy

Pagy is a high-performant pagination gem. Its speed is because of its size, independence, and simplicity. This RoR gem works in all types of environments and supports all pagination. It supports all CSS frameworks and works with all collections.

GitHub: 4.5k Stars

8. Cells

Cells is a standalone Ruby & Rails gem that works without trailblazer. It enables you to encapsulate your UI components into view-models.

GitHub: 3.1k Stars

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View Helper

9. Draper

With Draper, developers can quickly build decorators around their models. Using the Draper Gem In Your Ruby on Rails App makes adding views much cleaner. There is no need to write helpers with Draper in use. Developers can easily define a decorator instead of calling helpers procedurally with models. They also provide a list of attributes and extended methods for the object.

GitHub: 5.2k Stars

10. Simple Form

As the name suggests, the Simple Form gem enables you to use forms in your rails application with efficient and clear code. The gem offers exceptional flexibility when working with form elements like checklists, radio buttons, dropdown lists, etc.

GitHub: 8.2k Stars

11. Meta Tags

A ruby on rails gem that helps you create an SEO-friendly application by sticking to SEO best-practices and creating efficient meta tags.

GitHub: 2.7k Stars

12. Slim

This template engine transforms your heavy-weight syntax code into a slim-trim code structure. You can maintain simplicity in your application code using the Slim gem.

GitHub: 5.3k Stars

If you are inquisitive about how you can install and work with the most popular RoR gems, read: How to Download and Install Ruby Gems into Gemfile.

13. Haml

This gem stands for HTML Abstraction Markup Language. Developers use it to enhance the structure and design of their HTML/XML documents.

GitHub: 3.8k Stars

Debugging

14. Pry

Developers usually face library integration issues or difficulties in binding the gems while generating the code. During that time, they have to deal with a lot of errors. So, it is always better to Hire Dedicated ROR Developers with good enough experience. To eliminate these issues and debug the errors, rails PRY gem turns out to be an ideal choice.

This gem allows the developers to set the breakpoints and implement code debugging step-by-step. Pry comes with a unique set of features, including Syntax highlighting, Runtime invocation, Command shell integration, Exotic object support, flexible and powerful command system.

GitHub: 6.7k Stars

15. Better Errors

When your users come across a not-so-appealing error page, they might abandon your application. The better errors gem replaces the clumsy and rejecting RoR error pages with quite improved and better error pages.

GitHub: 6.9k Stars

16. Letter Opener

This gem lets you see the preview of the mails that your Rails application sends- on your browser screen. It eases your effort of checking and editing in your mailbox.

GitHub: 3.7k Stars

Testing

17. RSpec Rails

The gem RSPEC RAILS is a perfect choice for the developers who are into writing unit test cases. This gem facilitates application developers with the integration of the RSpec framework into any of the Rails projects. Users simply have to generate the required spec helpers and configuration files. The framework is used in TDD and BDD environments. In simple words, gem install RSPEC RAILS features descriptive and neat syntax.

GitHub: 5.1k Stars

18. Capybara

The gem that integrates tests to help users by guiding them through the ongoing process in short phrases. Developers use it mostly in authorization scenarios. Capybara is often used along with the RSPEC gem.

GitHub: 10k Stars

19. Database Cleaner

This gem cleans your testing database, and you can set the cleanup time- either before launching the test or before and after running tests. It is supported for Ruby 1.9+ versions.

GitHub: 2.9k Stars

20. Shoulda_Matchers

This fantastic gem writes validation/association one-line tests that are compatible with Rspec. RoR developers can quickly test the functionality of their application real quick using matchers.

GitHub: 3.5k Stars

21. SimpleCov

This gem shows you how much code (percentage) you have covered by testing it and how much yet remains.

GitHub: 4.7k Stars

22. Factory_bot

Factory bot is a library gem, previously known as Factory girl. It provides fake data for test cases. This eases your testing process because then you do not have to enter data every time manually.

GitHub: 7.9k Stars

23. Faker

It is another gem that can assist to generate fake data, such as name, address, and contact numbers.

GitHub: 11.2k Stars

Authentication & Authorization

24. CANCANCAN

CANCANCAN Gem is perfect for developing complex applications. It allows the users to have numerous rules, but developers need to restrict access for some users. This gem offers the ease of setting up the user access restrictions, and everything is manageable in one place. The “Authorizations definition library” module of CANCANCAN allows developers to set the rules for users. Also, it offers the ease of accessing different objects to the helpers, given they need to check those permissions before access.

GitHub: 5.5k Stars

25. DEVISE

When creating an application on any of the social networks or building an e-commerce solution, developers usually need to log into the social media page. They’ll need to provide authorization and authentication for the particular application. Some developers prefer using their code for the purpose; others prefer using Ruby gems for authentication.

DEVISE includes 10 modules, namely- Omniauthable, Database Authenticatable, Registrable, Confirmable, Trackable, Recoverable, Lockable, Timeoutable, Rememberable, FriendlyId, and Validatable. The resource URLs are easily identified by the primary key (database ID) of each module. However, developers may have to deal with the unoptimized URLs of the web page. FriendlyId easily transforms the URLs to an easy to remember and much friendlier web page URLs. The best part is that it doesn’t require any code modifications in the web application, making it a famous Ruby gem.

GitHub: 23.8k Stars

26. OmniAuth

OmniAuth is a Ruby on Rails authentication gem which is flexible and uses the Rack middleware. This gem enables authentication through your social media accounts like Facebook and Google. There are several ready-to-use authentication-providers in this gem for you to use.

GitHub: 7.9k Stars

27. Ruby-JWT

A unique rails token authentication gem is the ruby-JWT which implements the RFC 7519 OAuth JSON Web Token (JWT) standard. It is a useful rails jwt authentication gem.

GitHub: 3.6k Stars

28. Rolify

Rolify is a rails gem that is a role management library that doesn’t enforce any supporting scope on the resource object.

GitHub: 3.1k Stars

29. Pundit

It is a fantastic Rails gem that provides Authorization. Pundit is easy to use as it allows for strong, scalable, and simple authorization using the basic Ruby classes and object-oriented OO design.

GitHub: 8.2k Stars

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Admin Panel

30. ACTIVE ADMIN

This framework is for building administration-style interfaces. Active Admin abstracts the business application patterns and makes it easy for developers to implement elegant and beautiful interfaces with less effort. Its various features include Scopes, User Authentication, Global Navigation, Action Items, Sidebar Sections, Index Styles, Filters, Downloads, and APIS.

GitHub: 9.5k Stars

31. Rails Admin

A Rails engine to manage your data having a friendly user-interface. Developers leverage the features like data export to CSV, custom search, filtering, custom authentication, and authorization. Once you install the rails_admin gem, you are good to go with using it.

GitHub: 7.9k Stars

32. Administrate

Create a responsive admin panel using the Administrate Rails gem. When you do not prefer to use the above two gems, Active admin and Rails admin, the Administrate Rails gem is the best alternative.

GitHub: 5.9k Stars

Payments

33. Active Merchant

This Ruby Gem is maintained and written by Shopify. The main goal of Active Merchant is to facilitate the users with a unified API that offers access to multiple payment gateways using different internal API’s. Developed especially for Ruby on Rails web applications, Active Merchant can also be integrated as a plugin. In addition, it offers support when used as a stand-alone library.

GitHub: 4.5k Stars

34. Stripe Ruby Bindings

Installing Stripe Gem will help you to interact with Stripe.com. This site has splendid features that make it simpler and easier to process all the payments. While Stripe checkout offers personalized and custom-built payment flow for mobile and desktop users, stripe.js stores credit card details and secures them throughout the transmission process. Stripe supports Android, Apple Pay, and Amex Express checkout, building a robust eCommerce site. Stripe is the best Ruby on Rails eCommerce gem.

GitHub: 1.9k Stars

Code Quality

35. Robocop

Rubocop is basically a code formatter and a Ruby static code analyzer that is based on the Ruby style guide. It auto-corrects all the code offenses on the detection and owns strong and robust formatting capabilities from your pieces of code. Rubocop almost gets along well with any of the major Ruby implementations. As it offers brilliant features, many of the online services use Rubocop as it is simple and hassle-free to expand Rubocop with the formatters and custom cops.

GitHub: 12.5k Stars

36. Robocop Rails

This gem is an extension of the above robocop gem for enforcing Rails’ best practices and coding conventions. Its checking tool automatically checks the Rails code style.

GitHub: 795 Stars

37. Ruby Style Guide

This one is a gem for the community and recommended by the community of RoR developers for the best practices in the ruby coding style. This guideline collaborates with the Ruby on Rails experts, professionals, and editors’ suggestions, feedback, and recommendations.

GitHub: 16.4k Stars

38. Overcommit

The overcommit Ruby on Rails gem is a manager of Git hooks for your rails project. It supports various hooks and can also define your own hooks and use them across repositories.

GitHub: 3.9k Stars

Security

39. Brakeman

Brakeman is a stable and unchanged security scanner that helps identify and spot the smallest of compulsions and vulnerabilities in rail applications. Since Brakeman is static, when Brakeman reports the vulnerabilities (even though there are no vulnerabilities), you can simply arrange and set up a list of warnings to limit and restrict the arrival of unnecessary and not-so-important notifications.

GitHub: 6.4k Stars

40. Bundler Audit

Bundler audit helps you check on your application’s potential vulnerabilities. With the help and assistance of the Bundler audit, you can save enormous amounts of time. As the Bundler audit effectively reviews and checks your rail applications in the gemfile.lock, you do not need to check each of the gems in your rail applications. It identifies your gem versions and stops the collection of unreliable gems.

GitHub: 2.7k Stars

41. Secure Headers

Secure-headers is a gem that cares about implementing security-related HTTP headers to the responses of rail apps. Allowing you to apply the headers such as CSP helps to restrain cross-site scripting, XFO, and merged and mixed content attacks, thereby preventing your content from hitting possible clickjacking attacks.

GitHub: 3.1k Stars

File Upload

42. Carrierwave

When a web application is created, developers make sure that they can post or upload files of several kinds, including images, audio documents, and videos. However, when it comes to images specifically, you will not find any useful gem other than CarrierWave. Functioning as an image processor and a file uploader, CarrierWave resizes and helps in adjusting the corners of images. Additionally, CarrierWave processes and caches files so that the users can quickly parse the posted text files or extract the EXIF data.

Bonus point: CarrierWave saves each of your data in uploader classes to keep your code near and clean.

GitHub: 8.8k Stars

43. Minimagick

Another gem that manages and handles image processing is Minimagick. It serves as a tiny or mini replacement to RMagick. Similar to CarrierWave, this gem is truly a gem. It works effectively by saving all your RAM resources and vends with mixed and diverse tasks, including rotating, flipping, blurring, resizing, and converting the images to famous formats like PNG. This gem helps reduce the memory of Ruby processes and helps in availing all options of the command-line of ImageMagick.

GitHub: 2.8k Stars

Deployment

44. Puma

Puma is a famous and renowned HTTP Web server that can host and deploy rail web applications. As deployment is a crucial stage in any software development cycle, these web servers help deploy the rail apps accurately.

GitHub: 7.6k Stars

45. Capistrano

A regular and general web application passes several steps before being deployed. This involves various stages, such as copying the files, transferring or migrating the databases, and compiling and arranging the assets. For successful web application deployment, an automated deposit and deployment tool is required. Capistrano is an automated deployment tool that manages and handles a plethora of operations, tagging the servers for disparate roles, managing diverse stages, and implementing parallel deployments.

GitHub: 12.7k Stars

46. Chef

The chef is a very effective Ruby gem. When merged with Capistrano, Chef handles and sets the server by placing files in certain locations, installing the packages, and many more. However, Chef is rarely used when deploying rail applications as it owns scarce resources for automated and custom-built deployment.

GitHub: 7.5k Stars

APIs

47. Grape (used for API)

Grape is basically a REST-like API framework for Rubygems. It is created and designed specifically to run on Rack or complement existing web applications, such as Sinatra and Rails. It offers an easy DSL to develop the RESTful APIs effectively and easily. Having built-in support for regular conventions, Grape owns diverse formats, subdomain restriction, versioning, content negotiation, etc.

GitHub: 9.8k Stars

48. jsonapi-serializer

This Ruby gem is also known as fast_jsonapi and is a fork of Netflix. The team of Netflix provided the initial support required. The gem offers an optimized version of serialization for compound documents.

GitHub: 1.4k Stars

Search

49. ElasticSearch

The elasticsearch gem provides a Ruby bridge to reach the Elasticsearch Ruby Client. It provides search, security, and monitoring features.

GitHub: 2k Stars

50. Ransack

This Ruby on Rails gem- Ransack is for object-based search, using which you can search your Rails app. It also enables advanced search options such as Algolia and ElasticSearch.

GitHub: 5.6k Stars

Others

51. Bullet

The bullet is designed to increase an application’s performance by reducing the queries. It keeps track of the queries during the app development process. This RubyGem notifies the users whenever (N+1) queries are needed. The users are also notified when the counter cache is to be used.

GitHub: 7k Stars

52. Webpacker

This RubyGem is designed explicitly for serving JavaScript and the assets like fonts, CSS, and images related to component-based JavaScript. Webpacker can also be used for all the application assets. Overall, it offers a fantastic solution for Rail application development. You may find this blog interesting Ruby on Rails: Let’s Bust the Myths, Get Some Facts and Understand Why RoR Is Ideal Choice for Web App Development.

GitHub: 5.3k Stars

53. Sidekiq

Sidekiq is a standard, clean and efficient tool used for processing Ruby. Specifically for scheduled jobs, Sidekiq is used. The Redis library supports this gem, and it uses Redis as a job management store. It has made itself successful in impressing a huge number of developers as it possesses multithreading capacities. Owning these capabilities, using Sidekiq results in a remarkable speed.

The significant benefit of using this gem involves monitoring jobs appropriately. The proper processing of statuses and the chance to implement jobs in parallel. Even though Sidekiq does not need Rails, it merges with Rails to clarify and ease the background processing to a great extent.

GitHub: 13k Stars

54. Figaro

Figaro is Heroku-friendly and simple Rails best gems app configuration. It is a YAML and an ENV file for secure configuration of the applications that are created using Rails. This gem introduces a convention that is potential enough to keep the configuration data and SCM separate. It parses the YAML file and loads its value into ENV.

GitHub: 3.8k Stars

55. AHOY

It’s an analytics platform used for tracking events and visits in native apps like JavaScript and Ruby. Technically, Ahoy is not a gem but a Ruby engine. It is responsible for creating visit tickets that contain the traffic’s source, place of origin of the location, and the client’s device information. It also enables the users to know about the UTM parameters of the website visits. Ahoy can even track events and visits in the application.

GitHub: 4.1k Stars

56. Delayed Job

The Delayed Job gem is one of the best ruby gems for rails development when it comes to handling the longer-running actions for background tasks. It can be extracted directly from Shopify, where the job table handles multiple tasks. Some of the unique features of Delayed Job include Image resizing, sending a huge number of newsletters, updating smart collections, spam checks, HTTP downloads, batch imports, and updating some after the product changes.

GitHub: 4.8k Stars

57. AWS SDK Core

The AWS SDK for Ruby integrates AWS services within Rails applications. The aws-sdk-rails gem offers flexible and scalable ways to interact with cloud services, simplifies development and security best practices, and enhances code structure. Other famous AWS and Ruby services are getting popular, such as aws-sigv4, aws-partitions, and aws-eventstream.

GitHub: 3.5k Starts

58. Diff::LCS

Diff::LCS is a Ruby Gem used to compare two lists of things like code or text lines. It helps you figure out the longest stretch and tells you what needs to be added or removed.

GitHub: 287 Stars

59. I18n RoR gem

The internationalization ( i18n) gem is developed into Ruby on Rails and enables you to translate app content into multiple languages. This gem helps you enhance user experience and manage translations for text displayed in error messages, date, views, and time formats. Moreover, i18n gem supports Ruby version 6 and more.

GitHub: 970 Stars

60. Rack

Rack gem is used to develop web applications and acts as an app extension for Ruby on Rails. Numerous Rack middleware are available in RoR gems, which add advances and primary functions without modifying your core code. Each Rack gem addresses particular needs in Ruby applications.

Github: 4.9k Stars

Conclusion

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are RoR gems used for?

We use RoR gems to extend and modify the functionality of a Ruby program. Their innate purpose is to enable functionality reusability without rewriting the code repeatedly.

How can I make a Ruby on Rails Gem?

In short, these are the steps to make your RoR Gem:

• You need to create the basic Gem structure first
• Create the file gemspec
• Write your gem code in the gem file
• Generate the RoR Gem with the build command
• Install the gem
• Add your RoR Gem to another ruby file and use it.

What is a bundler in ruby?

Bundler is an environment that holds your Ruby projects and installs the gems you need in their latest versions. It saves you from dependencies and ensures that you get your gems development, staging, and production phases.