Most useful Rails plugins, Ruby libraries and Ruby gems?

user_131024 0
Viewed 8593

I have seen many sites which provide the whole list of Rails plugins, Ruby libraries and Ruby gems, but we hardly use few of them and some may not suit our requirement and we spend a whole lot of time searching for useful Plugins which suits our requirement.

I have created this poll, people can post useful libraries, gems and plugins which they have come across. It would be great help for newbies like me and to the entire Ruby on Rails community.

Note: to keep this poll as useful as possible, please remember:

  • Post only one library, gem, or plugin per answer
  • Mention the name of the library, gem, or plugin which you find it useful.
  • URL of the location of the resource
  • We don't want duplicate answers, so before posting check if the library has been mentioned already.

Edit: Any new plugins/Gems for Rails 3 ?

Thanks!

ruby-on-rails-plugins wiki rubygems ruby-on-rails
43 Answers
user_120370
user_270600
Scyllinice_251290

Formtastic - Awsome form helpers.

It lets you do things like this:

<% semantic_form_for @user do |f| %>
    <% f.inputs do %>
        <%= f.input :email %>
        <%= f.input :password %>
        <%= f.input :password_confirmation %>
    <% end %>

    <% f.buttons do %>
        <%= f.commit_button 'Sign Up' %>
    <% end %>
<% end %>

and get decent, semantic HTML:

user_120370
user_120370
user_120370

Nokogiri - for all your XML and HTML parsing and searching needs.

user_680540
user_120370

Faker - for creating valid, fake data. Great for populating an empty dev DB / testing.

user_120370

Thinking Sphinx - for integrating with Sphinx for dead-simple text-searching in your app.

user_120370
user_120370

Capistrano-ext - allows you to setup separate deploy recipes for staging / production / whatever other environment you have

user_120370

Seed-Fu - Easy database seeding gem. Please don't use migrations to seed your database! :)

Scyllinice_251290

Cucumber - BDD and testing

It lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid - all rolled into one format.

user_1795810

grosser-rpx_now - Interface into RPXNow.com, which provides an interface into OpenID, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and much more in terms of authentication. A great companion for Authlogic.

Scyllinice_251290

Mofo gem - A ruby microformat parser , Helps to import Profile data from networking sites which implements microformats using hResume,hCard . ex LinkedIn , Xing ,Twitter etc .

Very useful gem .

user_1310240
user_187680

Contacts is a universal interface to grab contact list information from various providers including Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.

user_1310240

Webrat - testing

is a Ruby integration test library. It has two main purposes:

  1. Implement a browser simulator to allow fast, reliable integration testing (sans JavaScript) without requiring Selenium or Watir and their associated issues.
  2. Define a ubiquitous DSL for describing interacting with a web application from the perspective of an end user.
user_1795810

Validation Reflection - when used with formtastic, it frees you from having to specify which fields of a form are required, as it infers it from your model validations.

user_120370

Nested Layouts - Great when you have sections of your site that sit inside their own wrappers. My account (in many apps) has a series of controllers that may have a common navigation header. Nested layouts allows you to use a my_account layout that sits inside your application layout, preventing the need for duplicate layout code or spurious navigation partials.

user_120370

I really enjoy harsh for syntax highlighting. It gives you access to all of the TextMate themes also, which I love.

user_1313830

Backup-fu - in conjuction with capistrano, we always backup before a deploy to Amazon S3, and set cron jobs that periodically backup the database and asset directories.

user_120370

tracked_plugins keeps track of plugin install information/updates/local-modification for all plugins you install

user_1103330
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