Quick Overview:

In this post, I have shared my Ruby on Rails gem install dictionary with you, where I have listed the most used and trusted Rails gems and template engines for carrying varied functionality in my rails application. You can consider this as a list of top ruby on rails gems 2022 that you should undoubtedly use in your Rails app development.

Read ahead to find out category-wise bifurcated rails gems and share with your reviews and feedback on my collection. Learn the consecutive process from installing the gem to utilizing it to its maximum potential.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Ruby on Rails is an excellent framework for building web applications with plenty of powerful features that help accelerate your web development using an MVC pattern. RoR is designed in such a way that it can be easily extended using the most popular Ruby gems provided by the RoR community. The Ruby gem programming language along with its partner rails framework is a powerful tool to develop exceptional applications.

Here at Bacancy, our skilled developers are well-versed with Ruby on Rails development and can help you build a choice of a custom product using Ruby’ 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, a 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 mostly everything that 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 2022

The official report from Rubygems.org mentions the most downloaded gems in 2022. This will give you the market idea of what ruby on rails developers are using and which rails install gem is most useful.

Ruby useful Gems and their usability

I 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 to upload ten records.

Uploading hundreds of records with this gem can prove out to be a daunting task. However, it is beneficial for the import of external data. The conversion time is significantly reduced with ActiveRecord-import.

GitHub: 50.8k 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: 8.2k 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: 2.7k 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: 6.3k 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: 4.6k 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: 3.6k 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: 3k Stars

There’s an avalanche of Ruby Gems!
Contact Us and hire Ruby on Rails developer to find out the best rails gems suitable for your project.

View Helper

9. Draper

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

GitHub: 5.1k 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: 8k 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: 2.5k 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: 5.1k Stars

If you are inquisitive about how can you 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: 3.7k 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: 6.5k 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: 6.8k 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: 3.4k 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: 4.8k Stars

18. Capybara

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

GitHub: 9.6k Stars

19. Database Cleaner

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

GitHub: 2.8k 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: 3.2k Stars

21. SimpleCov

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

GitHub: 4.4k 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: 7.5k Stars

23. Faker

As the anem says, another gem to generate fake data such as name, address, and contact numbers.

GitHub: 10.1k 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: 5.1k 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 gem ruby on rails turns out one of the best rails gems 2021. It makes work effective and easy.

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: 22.5k 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: 7.5k 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: 3.3k 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: 3k Stars

29. Pundit

An amazing Rails gem that provides Authorization. It is very easy to use as it provides strong, scalable, and simple authorization by merely using the basic Ruby classes and object-oriented OO design.

GitHub: 7.6k Stars

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Admin Panel

30. ACTIVE ADMIN

This framework is for building interfaces of administration style. 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: 9.2k 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: 7.6k 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, then administrate rails gem is the best alternative.

GitHub: 5.4k 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 the 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: 4.4k Stars

34. Stripe Ruby Bindings

Installing Stripe gen will help you to interact with Stripe.com. This particular 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 both mobile users and desktop users, stripe.js stores credit cards’ details and secures them throughout the transmission process. Stripe supports android pay, apple pay, and Amex Express checkout, thereby building a robust and strong eCommerce site. You can consider Stripe as the best ruby on rails eCommerce gem.

GitHub: 1.7k 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: 11.8k Stars

36. Robocop Rails

This gem is an extension to the above robocop gem for enforcing rails best-practices and coding conventions. It automatically checks the rails code style with its checking tool.

GitHub: 608 Stars

37. Ruby Style Guide

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

GitHub: 16k 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: 3.6k 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

Bundler ensures the proper running of Ruby applications in the very same code on every machine. Bundler can download and install a list of gems that a particular application depends on. However, before installing, Bundler keeps a check on the latest versions of each gem’s compatibility so that they can be loaded together at the same time. After installing, Bundler also helps you to upgrade them when the new versions are available.

GitHub: 4.9k Stars

41. Bundler Audit

Running on top of Bundler, Bundler audit helps you keep a 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: 2.5k Stars

42. 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: 3k Stars

File Upload

43. 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: For keeping your code near and clean, CarrierWave saves each of your data in uploader classes.

GitHub: 8.7k Stars

44. 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: 2.7k Stars

Deployment

45. 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: 7.1k Stars

46. 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 deployment of web applications, 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: 12.1k Stars

47. 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, for deploying rail applications, Chef is used on rare occasions as it owns scarce resources for automated and custom-built deployment.

GitHub: 6.9k Stars

APIs

48. 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 web applications that already exist like 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: 9.5k Stars

49. 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: 1.1k Stars

50. ElasticSearch

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

GitHub: 1.9k Stars

51. 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: 5.2k Stars

Others

52. Bullet

The bullet is designed for increasing the performance of an application by reducing the queries. It keeps a watch on the queries during the process of app development. 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: 6.5k Stars

53. 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 assets of the application. 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

54. Sidekiq

Sidkiq 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. Sidekiq 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: 11.8k Stars

55. Figaro

Figaro is Heroku-friendly and simple Rails best gems app configuration. It 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: 3.7k Stars

56. 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: 3.6k Stars

57. Paperclip

It is not easy to work with file attachments. Typically, they involve a massive amount of work. It’s too time-consuming for the developers to ensure proper and secure implementation of the task. Paperclip is designed to keep track of the entire process inside the Rails application. The additional benefits offered by this gem include the transformation of images into thumbnails. Unfortunately, this gemfile is now deprecated.

GitHub: 9.1k Stars

58. Delayed Job

The Delayed Job gem is the best ruby gems for rails development 2022 when it comes to handling the longer-running actions for background tasks. It can be extracted directly from Shopify, where multiple tasks are handled by the job table. 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: 4.7k Stars

Conclusion

Using Ruby gems is standard practice when developing Ruby on Rails web applications. The above-listed gems are efficient to solve common issues in Rails applications. They can quickly solve the problems related to file testing, uploads, security, debugging, authorization, and authentication. Also, the gems eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel for each app. Using these gems frequently isn’t bad at all, but it is essential to use them the right way to build perfect applications. However, gems won’t solve all your application development problems.

An experienced ruby on rails developer will have the knowledge and proficiency to customize the use of installed Rails gem for your rails application. Bacancy Technology is a hub where you will find cost-efficient and sage RoR developers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

We make use of RoR gems to extend and modify the functionality of a ruby program. The innate purpose is to enable the reusability of functionality without re-writing the code again and again.

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.

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.

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