Email the Author
You can use this page to email Lucas Dohmen, Tom Henrik Aadland, and Obie Fernandez about The Rails 8 Way.
About the Book
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:
- “No PaaS required” 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.
- “No Devise required” is the third theme. By providing an authentication generator, you can get a basic authentication running in no time. We still recommend sticking with Devise for now, as it covers quite a few additional features you might need in a production application.
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.
About the Authors
Lucas is the team lead of the web team at komoot, an app to explore the great outdoors by hiking or cycling. He is working on web development and architecture on the front and back end for almost 20 years now. He programs in Ruby, JavaScript and Go – with Rails being his go-to framework for web applications since 2006.
Tom is a Business Architect at Ørn Software where he is building the bridge between business strategy and development.
Tom was an early adopter and advocate of Rails, specialising in it since 2006. During his spare time he enjoys travelling, reading and music. One of his adventures led him to Argentina Buenos Aires where he spent a decade, pioneering in remote working and living life as a digital nomad before the term was even coined. There he was the founder of the first Rails conference in the Southern Cone, Locos por Rails 2009. When he is not working on some project he spends his time with his wife and two kids.
The "one and only" Obie Fernandez is an avid writer and technology enthusiast, in addition to achieving worldwide success as an electronic music producer and touring DJ. He is Co-founder and Chief Scientist of AI platform Olympia, and also Partner and Chief Consultant at MagmaLabs, a powerhouse Ruby on Rails consultancy.
Obie has been CTO and co-founder of many startups including Mark Zuckerberg's beloved Andela and Trevor Owen's Lean Startup Machine. His published books include the acclaimed business title The Lean Enterprise. He also founded one of the world's best known Ruby on Rails web design and development agencies, Hashrocket and is author of the bible of Rails development, The Rails Way and series editor for Addison-Wesley's Professional Ruby Series.
On the rare occasion when Obie is not busy building products, consulting clients or writing books, you can find him behind the lens of his camera or DJing in the dust at Burning Man.
Follow @obie on Twitter or email him at obiefernandez@gmail.com