Best Ruby Gems in 2024

Similarly to a number of various development environments, with Ruby on Rails you can use a wide selection of third-party libraries. Fortunately, this programming language offers the systematized process of employing such libraries. RubyGems – a package manager for Ruby, was developed especially to simplify and accelerate the stages of the application creation, deployment, and library connection. With top ruby gems, programmers get access to all commonly used features, and can avoid the need to develop most of them manually.

Our team of developers also actively employs Ruby Gems in the process of software building. We’ve prepared for you the top of the most popular and useful ruby gems of this year. Check it out!

Best ruby gems in 2024: our top-12 gems

Let’s take a look at our gem list, we included the solutions we have particularly been using during the work on the projects in 2024:

• Bullet. Let’s start with one of the most downloaded Ruby gems out there. It was initially created with an intention to boost software performance. It does so by decreasing the total amount of ‘client-server’ requests. Basically, Bullet tracks the ‘N+1’ cases of requests and notifies the developer when other tools can be used instead (e.g. cache counter).
• Fast JSON API. Fast JSON API will come in handy when you need fast serialization of software code. It works much faster than ActiveModelSerializers (which starts lagging while processing compound documents), and uses caching.
• Pry. Want to simplify the bug fixing procedures for your RoR-based application? We’d recommend doing that with the Pry gem, which is a more advanced alternative to the standard IRB wrapper.

• Wicked PDF. This gem is working alongside with wkhtmltopdf, and helps realizing an interaction with the DSL generator. Its performance is identical to the performance of PrinceXML. However, as opposed to the latter, Wicked PDF is absolutely free.
• Sitemap Generator. Another one of the awesome ruby gems, Sitemap Generator generates XML data contained in the Sitemap files in any Ruby-compatible framework.
• Devise Masquerade. This Ruby gem helps developing multi user apps. In particular, with Devise Masquerade you’ll be able to test your app from the perspective of users with different levels of access, all without the need to repeatedly re-enter the required account.
• FriendlyId. This gem allows creating ‘aesthetic’ and readable URL addresses. All in all, instead of ‘http://ourexample.com/us/4323454’, you can get something like ‘http://ourexample.com/us/new-york’. FriendlyId can be one of the main features to optimize your website positions in the search results.
• GeoCoder. Being able to connect through itself over 40 APIs, this Ruby gem implements both the direct and reverse geocoding by IP address, geographical coordinates, and even real physical addresses (e.g. the address of the street). It is compatible with ActiveRecord, Mongoid, and MongoMapper.
• Money Rails. If you are planning to integrate your app with Ruby Money, this gem will come in quite handy. Particularly, it enables you to convert currency and, thus, implement any possible monetization options.
• Letter opener. With the help of the Letter Opener, a developer can check email right in the browser. For instance, if you’ll need to create a newsletter mechanism to send notifications to all users that launched your app, this gem will help you do that much easier, you won’t need to integrate and configure your own SMTP server.
• Pundit. Another solution to add to the list of awesome ruby gems – the Pundit gem – a tool that allows defining different levels of access to the app functionality according to the rights of an authorized user.
• Devise. Based on the MVC model, the Devise gem can provide secure user authentication and session management. It is used in combination with the Warden gem and is intended to enhance the process of authentication in RoR-based apps with the involvement of Rack interface.

Generally speaking, Ruby Gems are thousands of tools that can be a real treasure to developers. Unfortunately, they aren’t structured in any way, so in order to find ruby gems, it’s best to use a regular search engine and the required key words (gems are described on GitHub in good detail, you can use that info for your searches). Choose your tools wisely, we hope our list of must have ruby gems of 2024 will help you with that. If you don’t want to waste time looking for the appropriate tools to realize your business concept yourself, and want real professionals to implement your project – let’s work on it! We will gladly complete the most extraordinary and voluminous tasks.