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Comment by devKnight | Hacker News Reader

I've always been interested in rails, even though my career has gone the JS/TS route. Think i might finally take the plunge and try to build some random stuff with it. See how far i can get by looking at code examples and asking gpt "how do you do x in rails" etc.

Really love that it seems to just be a complete toolbox, especially for a solo project.

Also seeing more and more rails roles out there, but obviously don't have 5+ years with the framework

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There was a period of time around the height of Rails original heyday where the idea of a very opinionated, complete framework such as Rails got a lot of blowback, which gave rise to the Javascript ecosystem and its myriad front-end frameworks.

I think the pendulum is kind of swinging back the other way now. While there are certainly advantages with the Node ecosystem, it always felt very messy to me. Rails language extensions, ORM, testing, and migrations frameworks have never been matched by any javascript libraries. Ruby and Rails have always prioritized quality of life features, which made it a very enjoyable and productive framework.

I think the reason rails has stuck around is because of it being a very opinionated framework and it dictates a method to do almost anything. This allows the docs to be very straightforward, almost as if they were written for the Rails application itself.

I also think the language itself is a big plus. I don't like the reflection system or hot patching being a feature in a language, but rails makes extensive use of it to create it's own domain specific language.

The reflection and hot patching features are often called out as negatives, and in general I agree, but for the most part, they're non-factors. All of the "find_x_by_id_and_status()" methods that rely heavily on reflection are all available with a more general, maintainable "find_by()" method which just takes a hash of parameters. And in practice, I'm not sure how much custom hot patching is actually used in production codebases. Overall it's mostly a red herring which detractors have vastly overstated.

Yeah, i mainly deal with react/next + supabase on a daily basis at work.

And do sometimes think of small apps i could build for fun, but the thought of doing react, again, is tiring in and of itself lol plus the whole setup around getting express running and picking packages.

Rails is ready out of the box, for me to not have to screw around with.

Just love the ruby syntax(along with python, which i am actively learning now with datacamp). Its cleaner, and i can probably do 90% of what i do in react there. Then for the rest throw solid js or svelte, or even just react for specific components.

Can only encourage you, I'm mostly working with Go but all my side projects are with Rails which I've only started a few years ago. It's a lot of fun.

I'm not a big fan of watching tutorials, but more of learning by doing but I signed up for https://gorails.com when I started out and it was very helpful to get an overview.

I’m similarly interested in learning Rails.

Does anyone here have any recommendations for free or at least very cheap Rails hosting for a toy app just for learning purposes? I’m looking for a PaaS offering since I don’t have the time to secure and manage a VPS.

Heroku is decent although I don't like some of the tweaks you can't do with it. For example, setting variables in postgres is neutered.

I haven't used their Rails hosting, but I have liked Fly.io for other PaaS-y things before. Heroku is technically still around.

https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/

You could probably dockerize it and stick it on render.com

Happy render customer right here. We’ve got multiple rails apps running on render. Renders tech support team have been very helpful wherever needed also.

Should also point out the recently released Rails 8, has as key features focussed on making rails much easier to deploy to anywhere that supports Docker.

Render doesn’t need a rails app to be dockerized. I have several Rails apps running on it right now.

Does it really take any more time to secure a VPS than a docker container on a custom runtime for a hobby project? Either way you still have to run software and OS updates.

You might also want to try Kamal, which Rails is already configured for out of the box.

You'll still be spinning up a VPS, but at least set up and management is done via a very heroku-like interface from your local machine. Just get any VPS that will be accessible via SSH, and `kamal setup` can handle the rest. [1]

The one annoying part right now, is it relies on a docker registry you have to provide. I think they're working on removing that requirement, but you can use the free github container registry until then. It's just for rollbacks AFAIK.

[0] https://kamal-deploy.org/

[1] https://kamal-deploy.org/docs/installation/

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