About Rubyonrails
Ruby on Rails is a full-stack web application framework written in Ruby, following the Model View Controller pattern. It includes everything needed to build modern database-backed web apps, such as rendering HTML templates, updating databases, sending and receiving emails, maintaining live pages via WebSockets, enqueuing jobs for asynchronous work, storing uploads in the cloud, and providing security protections.
The framework emphasizes convention over configuration, aiming to keep code token-efficient and easy for agents to write and for humans to review. It has been used to create hundreds of thousands of apps over the past two decades, with contributions from over six thousand people.
Key features
- Rendering HTML templates
- Updating databases
- Sending and receiving emails
- Maintaining live pages via WebSockets
- Enqueuing jobs for asynchronous work
- Storing uploads in the cloud
Rubyonrails: questions and answers
- What is Rubyonrails?
- Rubyonrails is a Ruby on Rails is a full-stack web application framework written in Ruby that follows the Model View Controller pattern and includes tools for building database-backed web apps.
- Is Rubyonrails open source?
- Yes. Rubyonrails is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at rails/rails and is written mainly in Ruby.
- Is Rubyonrails free?
- Yes. Rubyonrails is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Rubyonrails?
- Yes. Rubyonrails can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Rubyonrails an alternative to?
- Rubyonrails is an open-source alternative to Pusher. Other open-source alternatives to Pusher include Aspnetcore, Phoenix and NATS.
- Is Rubyonrails actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Rubyonrails was on 14 October 2026, and the latest release is v8.1.4, published on 24 September 2026. The project has 59k stars on GitHub.
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