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shoulda-matchers gives you one-line RSpec and Minitest matchers for common Rails behavior — it { should validate_presence_of(:name) } replaces a hand-written validation spec. Add gem "shoulda-matchers", "~> 8.0" to your Gemfile’s test group, then add the configuration block to spec/rails_helper.rb naming your test framework and library. Version 8 works with Rails 8.1 and rspec-rails 8.

Sidekiq is a background job framework for Ruby that processes jobs concurrently on threads, backed by Redis. In Rails, add gem "sidekiq", set config.active_job.queue_adapter = :sidekiq, enqueue with perform_async, and run the sidekiq process alongside your app server. Sidekiq 8 requires Ruby 3.2+ and Redis 7+. That answer covers the mechanics.

Devise is a full-featured authentication gem for Ruby on Rails, built on Warden. It provides registration, login, password recovery, session timeout, and account locking via 10 composable modules. Install it with bundle add devise, then run rails g devise:install and rails g devise User. It works with Rails 7 and 8; Rails 8's built-in generator covers only simpler needs.

Real-time features are becoming increasingly important in web applications, but not every Rails developer is familiar with Action Cable, the framework's built-in WebSocket library. Rails Action Cable has long supported web sockets, but comes with some additional complexity. Rails 8 introduces Solid Cable, a new database-backed adapter for Action Cable that eliminates the need for Redis. In this guide, I'll walk you through Action Cable by way of Solid Cable and show you how to build a real-time feature.

In recent years, Markdown has become the lingua franca of plain-text files on the web. If you're a developer, you have read — and maybe even written — hundreds of Markdown documents over the course of your career. GitHub repositories use README files written in Markdown. Stack Overflow and Reddit use it to format posts. Technical documentation, blog posts, and entire books are written in Markdown. And it's not just for humans either!

In parts one and two of this series, we familiarized ourselves with the ins and outs of Showcase. Now, we'll dive into samples, Showcase's main feature. Samples show how a component can be used in a real application.

Deploying more than one web application on a single server used to require a lot of infrastructure fiddling. Docker made this better, but some things that are new in Kamal 2 make deploying containerized applications even easier. Kamal is a deployment tool from Basecamp that leans on Docker and its own integrated proxy to simplify deploying web apps. Kamal 2 makes deploying more than one Rails app to the same server easier.

In part one of this series, we walked through how to use Showcase in a Rails app. It's now time to read some Ruby code written by experienced Rails developers. To do this without getting lost, we'll choose one feature of the showcase engine and analyze how it works: rendering a preview of a component. Let's get started!

Reading a lot of code from very senior engineers is probably one of the best ways to level up as a Ruby on Rails developer. By doing so, we can learn new tips and techniques that we can reuse in our jobs. Thanks to open source, we can read code written by the best developers from all over the world, and for free! However, reading code from a Ruby gem or a Rails engine for the first time without being guided can be daunting. There are so many files; how do we even know where to start?