Ruby on Rails

Rails grew out of 37signals’ work on the project management software Basecamp: its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, used Rails to build Basecamp while using the development of Basecamp to refine Rails. By December 2007, he had been working on the framework for about four and a half years.⁠[1][2]

On July 24, 2004, Hansson released Rails 0.5.0, saying that documentation and examples were still to come but that “real artists ship,” and that the project would continue to grow in the open. Rails 0.5 was released through RubyForge and was downloaded 357 times in its first five days. A 2006 article on rubyonrails.org, however, marked July 25 as the project’s second anniversary.⁠[1][1][3][4]

Six months after its release, Rails had shipped 15 versions, its gem had been downloaded more than 10,000 times, and 153 people were online in its IRC channel; Dave Thomas was writing the first book about Rails.⁠[3][3][3]

Rails 1.0 was released 15 months after the first public release. It brought together thousands of revisions, tickets and patches from hundreds of contributors and focused on stabilizing existing features rather than adding new ones. The same day, a rubyonrails.org website redesigned by 37signals went live.⁠[5][5][5][5]

Rails 2.0 took about a year to complete, and its main improvements centered on RESTful resource routing, such as using a slash instead of a semicolon to denote custom methods, adding namespaced routes, and a rake routes task that lists all routes. The framework also removed ActionWebService in favor of ActiveResource, choosing REST in the debate between SOAP and REST.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

In December 2008, Rails announced that Merb, another Ruby web framework, would be merged into Rails 3, ending the feud between the two projects: the Merb team would bring its key ideas into Rails 3, and Yehuda Katz joined the Rails core team. The merger plans included making it possible to run Rails with only a minimal core and bringing in Merb’s performance optimizations.⁠[6][6][6][6]

Rails 3.0 was developed over about two years and brought together the work of more than 1,600 contributors. Active Record switched to the ARel query engine, making scopes and queries composable and lazily executed; the routing syntax was rewritten in a RESTful style; and dependency management moved to Bundler.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

Rails 4.0 focused on making server-rendered applications fast enough without taking the route of client-side JavaScript plus JSON, with the techniques first tested in the new version of Basecamp: key-based expiration “Russian doll” caching, Turbolinks, which makes page changes nearly as fast as a single-page application, and declarative ETags. The release also added streaming responses and was safe to run on multithreaded servers by default.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8]

Rails 5.0 was released after four betas and two release candidates. Its two headline features were Action Cable, a new framework for handling WebSockets, and an API mode (rails new backend --api) for clients or native applications that need only a JSON backend. The default development server also changed from Webrick to Puma.⁠[9][9][9][9]

Rails 6.0 added Action Mailbox for processing inbound email, Action Text for rich text editing, multiple database support, parallel testing and Webpacker by default, and rewrote the code loader with Zeitwerk. In 2019, 341 code contributors submitted improvements, and GitHub, Shopify, Basecamp and others had already been running prerelease versions in production for months.⁠[10][10][10]

Taking advantage of browser support for ES6/ESM, HTTP/2 and the import maps standard, Rails 7.0 no longer depends on Node for the front end by default; Hotwire, made up of Turbo and Stimulus, became the default for new applications, replacing Turbolinks and Rails UJS. Projects that need Node can use jsbundling-rails to bring in bundlers such as esbuild, rollup.js or Webpack.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

In November 2022, The Rails Foundation, a nonprofit organization, was founded to improve documentation, education, marketing and events across the Rails ecosystem. Eight founding core members, Cookpad, Doximity, Fleetio, GitHub, Intercom, Procore, Shopify and 37signals, jointly contributed $1 million, and each appointed a representative to the board, with Hansson as chair. The foundation received a long-term exclusive license to all Rails trademarks and took over the rubyonrails.org website and social media, while the technical evolution of the framework remains the responsibility of the Rails core team.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12]

Themed around “No PaaS Required,” Rails 8.0 comes preconfigured with the Kamal 2 deployment tool and the Thruster proxy, allowing applications to be deployed to cloud virtual machines or one’s own hardware. Three new database-backed adapters, Solid Cable, Solid Cache and Solid Queue, let SQLite handle WebSocket messaging, caching and background jobs without necessarily relying on Redis; Propshaft replaced Sprockets as the asset pipeline, and a generator for an authentication system was added.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13]

Rails 8.1 brought together about 2,500 commits from more than 500 contributors, adding Active Job Continuations, which allow jobs to resume from an interrupted step, structured event reporting, local CI and Markdown rendering. At the time of release, Shopify and HEY had already been running it in production for months.⁠[14][14][14][14][14][14]

In September 2026, rubyonrails.org published phase two of the Agents on Rails benchmark, which uses 20 feature tickets written in the voice of product staff for Fizzy, a kanban application from 37signals, to test whether AI models can independently ship complete features; phase one had tested whether models know Rails.⁠[15][15][15]

Rails 8.1.4 was released on September 24, 2026, and was the latest version as of October 2026.⁠[16][17]

Rails World 2026, the first Rails World conference held in the United States, took place in Austin and drew more than 1,000 Rails developers from 58 countries, the largest edition to date; all four keynotes prompted discussion about AI. Videos of all the talks went online on October 1, 2026, and the next edition is scheduled for October 2027 in Lisbon.⁠[18][18][18][18]

The Rails Doctrine, written by Hansson, sets out nine pillars: optimize for programmer happiness; convention over configuration; the menu is omakase; no one paradigm; exalt beautiful code; provide sharp knives; value integrated systems; progress over stability; and push up a big tent. The Rails community coalesced around a set of “heretical” thoughts about the nature of programming and programmers.⁠[19][19][17]

Rails is a full-stack framework. In the model layer, Active Record represents database rows as objects carrying business logic; Action Controller handles requests; Action View writes templates that mix Ruby and HTML; and Action Dispatch handles routing. The framework also has built-in features for sending and receiving email, WebSockets, background jobs and cloud file storage. As of October 2026, more than 6,000 people had contributed code to Rails.⁠[20][20][17][17][17][17][17][17]

As of October 2026, the official Rails website positions Rails as a framework well suited to AI coding agents, citing its clear conventions, smaller amount of code (which uses fewer tokens) and decades of accumulated public Rails code. Under the heading “The One Person Framework,” the site also says that Rails provides a complete technology stack for building products, allowing a solo developer working with AI coding agents to take on a broader range of work.⁠[17][21][21][21][21]

Rails is released under the MIT License, and the copyright notice in the license file names David Heinemeier Hansson. “Rails,” “Ruby on Rails” and the Rails logo are registered trademarks of Hansson, exclusively licensed to The Rails Foundation for management; using them in commercial contexts to imply endorsement or affiliation requires prior permission. As of October 2026, the foundation had ten core members, each contributing $75,000 a year, and its executive director was Amanda Perino.⁠[20][22][23][23][24][24][24]

Ruby on Rails: Official website: https://rubyonrails.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

GitHub repository: Official link: https://github.com/rails/rails (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

The Rails Foundation: Official website: https://rubyonrails.org/foundation (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

X: Public account: https://x.com/rails (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public account: https://www.youtube.com/@railsofficial (opens in a new window)⁠[17]