Returning to Rails in 2026

I love Rails, but after working for a few places with huge Rails codebases and then several other places with .NET and other frameworks with actual typing, I just can't go back to Rails for anything that isn't a personal project.

Working with a large codebase with an untyped codebase is just a nightmare, even with powerful IDEs like RubyMine that are able to cover some of the paint points. I wonder how good Sorbet is these days, though, especially the RoR experience

Thanks for such public confirming there is a lot of more us. I’m just tired hearing how great ideas will save our overblown pseudo-microservice architecture and I’m also running into some projects during evening that just solve problems without use STOA, unnecessary solutions and architectures.

I’m not into RoR, because I was mainly PHP rescuer in the beginning of my career, but they both are just problem solvers. Sit down, write minimal (in case of PHP not so cool looking) code and proceed to next task.

We've been running Rails apps in production continuously since 2007. If you treat software as anything other than completely disposable, it's been a no-brainer for the entire 19+ years I've been paying attention (not despite its age, but because of it).

The premise that you get meaningful efficiencies from JavaScript on the back-end just because you have to use it on the front-end has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Instead you mostly get a larger blast radius when the front-end ecosystem has its monthly identity crisis. OP's "stacks-du-jour" and programming language "flavour of the month" framing is exactly right. A shocking amount of web software architecture is just following fashion trends dressed up as technical decision-making.

Most of the churn in tech stack isn't driven by engineering requirements, it's driven by résumé optimization and Hacker News anxiety. Rails has quietly been powering serious businesses the whole time. Does anyone think NPM's 3.1 million packages enable more functionality than RubyGems' 190,000 packages?

I love the batteries that RoR or Django gives you, but then I also remember how much time it takes to maintain old projects. Updating a project that was started 5-6 years ago takes a lot of time. Part of that is managing dependencies. For Django, they can easily go above 100. Some of them have to be compiled with specific versions of system libraries. Even Docker does not save you from a lot of problems.

Right now, I would rather use Go with a simple framework, or even without one. With Go, it's so easy just to copy the binary over.

The upgrade story is underrated. I've maintained Next.js projects where major version upgrades broke fundamental patterns (pages router → app router, completely different data fetching). Rails' deprecation-then-removal cycle is slower but way less disruptive. When you're shipping product, stability of the interface you build against matters more than having the latest paradigm.

Rails feels like one of those frameworks that quietly keeps winning because of developer productivity rather than hype cycles.In a lot of startups I’ve seen, teams spend enormous time assembling stacks (React and multiple backend services + infra glue) when Rails would have shipped the same product months earlier. Curious if the newer generation of developers is rediscovering the value of opinionated frameworks.?

I used to think ruby/rails was the best way to solve most problems, I still do, but I used to too.

I've been a Rails DevOps and nowadays a web one-man-show with it for over 10 years and I'd do it again.

Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason.

It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write.

In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception !

Give it a try.

I've never used Rails, but I agree upon "the state of the modern landscape". Instead of looking backwards, I tried to look forward, and what I found was Elixir and the Phoenix framework.

Nothing wrong with Rails in 2026. We still use it for both internal and customer projects. I haven't yet encountered anything that made me feel like switching. I'm also not interested in changing frameworks just to have the New Hotness die in 2-5 years (our oldest currently maintained Rails project is over 10 years old, and some stuff I started working on when Rails 2 was new is still being maintained, just not by us)

I was part of building the streaming frontend for one of Sweden's largest broadcasters in Rails about 10 years ago. Handled 1M+ concurrent users on Heroku with horizontal scaling. Fun fact: someone on the team literally stayed up monitoring traffic during big live events. It worked. Rails was a great fit for that especially at the time.

I moved on, not because Rails failed me, but because the things I started building next (Streaming infra, APIs behind proxies, lots of concurrent HTTP work, infrastructure tooling, AI/ML) just fit better in other languages. I pick tools by the problem, not loyalty.

What I notice in this thread is a lot of "Rails vs X" framing when the real answer is boring: use Rails (if you like the vision and Ruby) when the complexity is in the data model and business logic. Use something else when it's in concurrency or infrastructure. The one-person-framework pitch is real, but it's for a specific shape of problem.

Also: God i miss writing Ruby, its a fantastically and beautiful language.

Also: Blast from the past: Ruby is a great DSL for Rails.

I had a project I already tried out in Symfony and then full typescript, both a normal REST setup and ORPC. They all felt like - at scale - they became messy and I was unsure where goes what.

I gave RoR a try last year, and so far I'm at the same level I was with the other projects but I actually enjoy programming the project after the PoC phase. Maybe because third time's a charm? Maybe because I know what I need to do? Who knows! But RoR fits in that idiom.

Just to note, its a really boring app thats been done before (odeva.app)

Ruby on Rails and Laravel all the way. Solid, proven, stable and scalable.

Article nicely written, great overview of Rails current state. Kudos to the author.

> sometimes it’s worth doing things just for the sheer hell of it.

Rails for straight up CRUD is top, autogenerated things etc

however if your app doesn't fit the standard crud pattern you end just fiddling with a lot of things that you shouldn't and in that case I recommend Django which provides enough flexibility while providing a good base. There's less magic in Django

The upgrade path in Rails 8 is smoother than it's ever been, especially with the built-in solid adapters removing the Redis/Sidekiq dependency for smaller apps.

One thing that is not stressed enough, is Rails enforces good code patterns early on. If you follow the docs, you will know where model code should be, helpers should be, controllers should be. After all, it is an MVC framework.

However, modern day JS frameworks don't care about this at all. Most of them love flaunting about their raw performance numbers. Security? Fuck that. Not even basic form CSRF protection. A lot of times, there is not even SQL injection prevention in them.

Compound this with someone who just vibe codes their app on top of these frameworks - that's how you end up getting hacked. Every week there is an incident. That's why good frameworks like Rails are very important. People who actually care about writing secure, good quality software are on the decline, but thank God rails still exists as an option in 2026 despite the fact.

I’m honestly baffled by the praises of Rails in the comments.

I started my dev career with php and then nodejs, but recently got a job with rails, and honestly, it’s the worst among the 3.

There is no static typing whatsoever, it’s littered with magically generated methods, on a moderate size project the controllers or models directories grow to dozen of files. In general it feels like you need a lot of mental context in order to work with Rails, and I believe this is the reason people who run it for 10+ years in production love it. They simply carry all the magic in their heads, rather than let the framework guide you.

I, however, get much more DX and production stability by building with a boring (router + server side rendering) NodeJS stack with typescript and schema validation. My services are more stable and do not crash on “undefined method foo for nil”.

I guess people will defend whatever they know best, even if it has quirks.

On a positive note, I like ruby as a language. It has cool features like pattern matching, named arguments, or dropping verbose statements like “return” at the end of the function.

Great post, this has also been my experience in the past 2 years. Rails is just a lot of fun, and that’s especially important for side projects.

I’m usually a Go person and love it, but building simple crud routes is not the fun part of it.

Going off topic, but the article made me look into "2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey" and as usual there is the big difference between what the "Professional Developers" with and without AI claim to be using, and the usual HN discussions "X is taking over the world, no one uses Y anymore".

As for Rails, I guess now that Ruby is serious about having a JIT in the box, a few actually, it is kind of atractive.

Due to my experience with Tcl, and continuous rewriting into C modules, if a JTI isn't in the box, I kind of don't bother unless it is due to external factors.

it is also very token efficient in nowadays modern AI driven development[^1]. I wish more people would renown ruby/rails

[^1]: https://github.com/mame/ai-coding-lang-bench?tab=readme-ov-f...

I love rails and the recent improvements are great.

I have the impression, though, that these days it only appeals to those who picked it up before version 3 or 4, when it was smaller, maybe more understandable, and incredibly better than all the competing frameworks (except Django maybe).

If your first contact with rails is version 7+ and you’re only comfortable with JS/TS, then you’re not going to get it and might actually strongly dislike it

Ruby and RoR is cool and all, but as these web apps got more and more complex, the need for static types became too important. What gave PHP it's edge was types and is the reason I'm still using it after nearly 20 years. PHP seems to implement those important things just in time. OOP, better OOP, types, speed boost, and next probably concurrency.

I always enjoyed Rails, it isn't perfect but is way better then others. I have node and nextjs projects :) when they blow it, it is a major mystery what is blowing up.

Have so many good memories working with Ruby.

If anyone has old codebase need to be updated and upgraded, refreshed. I am happy to do that.

we run next.js on the frontend and the page router to app router migration was really painful. rails having stable conventions sounds very good when you go through something like that. I keep thinking about this trade off - move fast with the latest thing or just pick boring tech that works for 5 years.

and security.

ideally a JS frontend app won't show logic not intended for the user type in question.

in practice, really often I see a huge app covering all roles and cases, a trove of info for the red team. and even worse, the reality of software development with LLMs in 2026 is plenty of code is being shipped without security audit.

I know it's not an inherent fault of the JS frameworks. bit I share what I see on the streets, most of custom JS apps I see are way more vulnerable to hacking than a old-style MVC app.

yes it is possible to make mistakes in both styles, but in JS apps I probably see 400% more easily discovered vulnerabilities than in a common MVC (even with stimulus) app

try ActiveAdmin, it reduces work a lot. also, ruby is so succinct and rails is so opinionated, Opus is super effective building code and keeping the codebase well structured by default

i returned to rails in 2025 after 12 years pause and my experience has been frustration and annoyance

rails lost it's convention over configuration ways, the generated app is dozens of files, lack of explanations and guidance on how to setup various things like environments, kamal being the worst offender and the changes between recent major releases aren't making it any easier to read the (often ai slop) articles and docs

Remember only one programming language delivers developer joy - Ruby.

No other programming language brings developer joy because……. errrr because ……. Well because we are just super certain and confident, that’s why! Oh and DHH said so.

The main line on the Rails website now reads:

> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review

And I fucking hate it. If I read this the first time I would think this is some kind of tool to optimize your LLM agents.

I have been using Rails for over a decade now and always liked the focus on writing beautiful and simple code. On making it easy to reason about with colleagues. Now it seems like DHH is throwing all what made Rails special overboard.

If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?

> Rails seems to have pretty much fallen out of favour, coming in at #20 underneath the bulk of top-10 JavaScript and ASP.NET frameworks

It's not just Rails. Ruby is dying. And has been for quite some years now.

The strangest things are people writing blog entries claiming the opposite. Like "ruby ages like fine wine". No, that is incorrect - it is dying. I have been using Ruby since about 2004 or 2005. I still use it just about daily. I started before Rails and couldn't care any less about Rails; sadly the ecosystem is infiltrated by corporations such as shopify and others. You can see how they took over RubyCentral effectively (and if they insinuate otherwise - nope, I am not an idiot. I see the pattern. I notice what is happening. You call a black cat a green frog and I call bullshit. It's a black cat. See RubyCentral running amok already before they mass-purged developers, but that's another story - let's go back to ruby, and rails.)

> And Ruby itself is nowhere near the top 10 languages, sitting just underneath Lua and freaking Assembly language in terms of popularity!

Yup. Ruby is dying. It is following perl.

Now, defining "dying" is hard because you still have an active community, even outside of the train wrek that is rails (anyone still caring what random crap DHH writes on his blog? I've noticed fewer people care about the garbage he publishes, other than making fun when shopify damages the ecosystem - oh wait, he sits on the board of shopify. Did I already point out how much damage shopify causes here?).

> But I’m a stubborn bastard, and if I find a technology I like, I’ll stick with it particularly for projects where I don’t have to care about what anyone else is using or what the latest trend is.

On this part I agree. Ruby as a language is very well designed. It is a great language. I don't think anyone really objects to this, so the criticism has to be split - some criticism is valid, some is not. As a language ruby is well designed.

Nonetheless it is dying too. That is also a factual statement. Anyone claiming the opposite is wrong. At the least this is the case right now, and has been in the last some years, to varying extent.

> realised Ruby was “a better Perl than Perl”.

Also true. Ruby is the better perl. But I actually call Ruby syntactic sugar over C, because this is actually what Ruby is, if you think it through. My use cases are mostly helper-scripts, tons of that, over whatever I do in general. Literally everything computer-related. That includes use cases for the world wide web. All my needs here are covered by Ruby - but not by rails. I don't need rails.

Sadly, ruby also has a second problem: documentation. The documentation is crap in general. Look at rack. Opal. WebAssembly for Ruby. That documentation is a joke. An insult. Even sinatra, though better documented than these, has a bad documentation for the most part. There are some exceptions; for instance, hexapdf is well documented, and Jeremy's projects are also well-documented. So I am not saying everything is poorly documented. But for a language that once claimed it wants to compete against python ... sorry, documentation-wise this is still an epic failure point. In some ways ruby actually deserves to follow the path to extinction like perl did, merely because it failed to adjust, adapt and really improve. Yes, there is some internal improvement, but in many ways ruby failed to solve the problems people critisized it for, for many years. And now catching up is SUPER hard. I don't think it can happen anymore. I thought it was possible 10 years ago, but the last 5 years made it clear that ruby is towards extinction. It still does not change me using it, since ruby covers my use cases, but anyone thinking there will be an influx of new young folk driving ruby forward, is just worshipping an illusion here.

> There’s just this minimal translation required between what I’m thinking and what I type.

That's true. Ruby is kind of transitioning your thoughts into code.

> Sure, I can knock things together in Python, Go, or whatever the flavour of the month is, but I always feel on some level like I’m fighting the language rather than working with it.

Kind of, though python works fairly well too.

> And of course there was the welcoming, quirky “outsider” community feel with characters like Why the Lucky Stiff and their legendary Poignant Guide To Ruby.

Well - _why ragequit when someone doxxed him. But even aside from this, I found the poignant guide super-confusing. It was art, but I prefer less confusion myself. Still, _why is gone from the ruby ecosystem. Supposedly he is still doing computer-related stuff in reallife but he is no longer really affiliated with ruby as such. Did I already point out that ruby is dying?

> it’s just so nice being able to write things like

    unless date <= 3.days.from_now

    if upload_size > 2.megabytes

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