32 Best Ruby on Rails Gems to be Used with SAAS Applications

We have prolonged expertise in Ruby on Rails and we truly love it because of the awesome features it has. The most beneficial thing we love about Ruby on Rails is its support for Rapid software development. The core reason for this easy and faster development is nothing but the use of Ruby on Rails Gems. The open-source gems are what help the Rails community to thrive on its own. For the Rails developers, they can see the evident difference in the development period for new features in terms of days and weeks, when they implement gems which are well-written and well tested.

No doubt all the gems are not that good enough but, having a general idea of them can help you excel when you are developing a Rails project.

What is Gems in Ruby on Rails?

Gems is a package manager developed for ruby in order to ease and accelerate the entire ruby development process like app creation, deployment, API connection, library support etc. By using Ruby Gems developers can integrate most common features with very little efforts as you got ready-made solutions instead of developing it code from scratch. Our ruby on rails development team is actively involved in developing new gems as per requirement.

To help out the Rails developers to get done with their projects quickly, here we have listed some of the popular Rails gems.

List of Gems best suitable for SaaS Applications

Devise and devise_invitable

Most of the Rails projects have been making use of the Devise in the authentication library for the last few years. No doubt there are several other libraries available to offer authentication services but, it is more frequently used for SaaS application due to the ease of use and support it offers. You can have an add-on gem named Devise Invitable used in your SaaS application as an invitation system so that the users of the application can invite others to it.

Local_time

Local Time makes it easy to display times and dates to users in their local time. gem comes with a JavaScript helper and view helper to display relative time. Apart from the process to format the string on the client-side, it updates the string with respect to time.

Paper_trail

In order to know which users made the change, you can check the audit logs on particular models by using Paper_trail. The information can be used to troubleshoot the chances or to have it displayed in the activity log within the application.

Rolify and CanCanCan

In the application, you can make use of Rolify to assign roles like Admin or User on the User object. You can use such roles and apply authorization policies to it using CanCanCan.

Ranked-model

Using Ranked-model , you can easily and swiftly order and sort sibling elements. It makes use of big numbers for sorting instead of using sequential position integer.

Friendly_id

You can use Friendly_id to obfuscate the primary ID, which is auto-incremented and used from the URL in rails objects.

Bootstrap-sass

In order to have your application build a usable interface, Bootstrap_Sass helps you make use of Bootstrap HTML/CSS framework.

Kaminari

You can use kaminari for pagination. Apart from that, it also handles edge cases of pagination and has templates which can be made use with Bootstrap.

Sidekiq

By using Sidekiq, you can easily run background work with the support of Redis queue. You can easily drop the tasks like sending an email to a Sidekiq job so as to get it done in the background instead of running it in the main request loop.

Slim_rails

Slim_rails is one of the other templating languages which you can use instead of HTML markup, which is embedded with Ruby code. You can use it to write simple markup that too, without making use of any kind of closing tags.

Money-rails

The issues which come up when calculating money can be standardized around the regular issues using Money-rails. It also offers a few template helpers for the project.

Paperclip and aws-SDK

By making use of Paperclip together in an application, it is now possible for you to upload assets which are like avatar images into AWS S3 through your application.

Ransack

You can create simple forms which can be used to search through tables by using Ransack. Such kind of search can be made available on the index page of users.

Premailer-rails

When you need to have your mail templates with CSS inclusion, you can use Premailer-rails. Based on how the included CSS gets ignored, Gmail generally breaks email templates. In order to work with Gmail, this gem merges styles into the markup tags automatically.

Slack-notifier

This gem is nothing but a Slack API integration tool which is used to send message to a Slack Webhook swiftly. If you need to have to do more than Webhook integrations for Slack, then you can make use of in-depth gems. When a user signs up into Slack or in some other areas, Tiy can be used to send notifications.

Rollbar

When you need to send exceptions to an exception aggregator who works as the third party, then you can use Rollbar. In case you don’t use Rollbar, you will either have to spend all your time checking the Rails logs or set up your own exception notification process.

Griddler

When you receive an email through a mail sending API, you can Griddler to parse it. You can use this tool with any email providers of your choice.

Letter_opener

Instead of letting the mail to be sent in the development environment, you can Letter_opener gem to use the browser to open the mail.

Rspec-rails, simplecov, factory_bot_rails

Compared to the default Rails test framework, many prefer to use Rspec-rails. Compared to using fixtures, model factories are used for more complex model associations as it is quicker and easier. You can easily track the test coverage using SimpleCov.

Rack-cors

You can easily set up CORS rules using Rack-cors. If you plan to access the JSON requests from the domains that have no configured domain name of the current Rails’ app, you can use this gem. If your Rails application receives a request from front-end code, then this gem can be helpful.

ChartKick

You can make use of ChartKick in a go when you need to pull data from ActiveRecord and quickly get a graph or chart in your view. You will need to use a JavaScript library and build your JSON response if you need to have more of a specialized chart or if the graph contains more intricate data.

VCR

Now you can record all your external web requests and for the future test, replay them using VCR. Use of this gem offers two kinds of benefits. The foremost thing is that it will let the developer record a known version of the external request. After that, the YAML cassette VCR stores will locally load up when carrying out future test runs.

Also Check our Article : “Top Ruby on Rails Development Tools For Your Project“

Foreman

When you need to use Procfiles to run your application, you can make use of Foreman. When you are trying to run multiple servers or applications, this gem can be used. When you are working with Webpack development server, ActionCable, Puma web server, etc. you can have them all started at once using Procfile.

Marginalia

In order to know what application, action, and controller the query originates from, the Marginalia gem will add a comment into the log in your SQL entries. If you feel that any of the queries in the log seems to be off when it comes to having some kind of link to an action, you can use this gem for debugging.

BrakeMan

This is the kind of the gem which you can have through gem install, unlike the other ones which you will have through the install of the Gemfile. BrakeMan is actually a security analysis tool which you can make use of to check any security vulnerabilities that are present in the application.

OmniAuth

You will have to learn to deal with OAuth in case you plan to go ahead with third-party APIs. You need to make use of OmniAuth and other open-source strategies that come with it if you want to work with OAuth. By doing so, you will be able to make OAuth simple in terms of handling some responses and for configuration variables.

Concurrent Ruby

This is a gem which can be used to write concurrent code but, this does not always seem to be present in every gem file. Today a number of gems which are popular in the market make use of concurrent-ruby in the form of the main dependency.

Pundit

Pundit can be used within your application for the authorization by using a simple Ruby class approach. The developers who love to have explicit codebases make use of this gem very much. It is at this point that Ruby or Rails developers plan to make use of the tools based on their preferences.

Paranoia

When it comes to soft-delete functionality, there are very few gems which seem to be useful. When it comes to SaaS applications, soft-deleting seem to be right when you need data for audits and associations, all the while deleting the objects in other cases. Here Paranoia comes to help you out

Rack Mini Profiler

Rack Mini Profiler helps you keep the efficiency of your application up. This does it by profiling the entire web request and then in each part of the stack showing the time it will take to get done through the use of a widget. visit its website here

ActiveAdmin

In case you just need an admin area to take care of data, or you have earlier used the admin interface of Django, then you would love to use ActiveAdmin.

Conclusion

The use of gems in case of Rails development is quite important. Today the number of developers using these gems in their project has increased. This is because of the ease it offers in developing new features as well as the amount of time it saves in the process. It is not necessary that you should be using all the gems here but, you should be having an idea of them so as to use them effectively.