Getting started with rails? Must have gems?

Question

I'm starting work on a project using Rails, but I'm waiting for the 3rd edition of the pragmatic rails book to come out before I purchase a book.

Anyway, my question is a bit more pointed than how do I get started...

What are some of the must have gems that everyone uses?

I need basic authentication, so I have the restful authentication gem, but beyond that, I don't know what I don't know. Is there a run down of this information somewhere? Some basic setup that 99% of the people start with when starting a new rails application?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

HAML is a must have. You'll never think of HTML in the same way again -- No more tag soup.

Answer 2

How can nobody have mentioned andand yet? It's the best thing since ||=

Answer 3

This is a old thread but I thought I'll refine the list with what I believe to be must have gems at this point in time:

• RSpec or Shoulda - tools for BDD/testing
• factory_girl - fixture replacement
• will_paginate - simple pagination
• paperclip - image uploading/attachment
• CanCan - authorization
• Authlogic - authentication
• HAML - templating engine

Answer 4

The only gems you need are:

• Rails
• Rake

If you "gem install rails" you'll get everything you need for Rails. You only need gems when you need them, so it's not worth worrying about before then.

EDIT: Actually there are a couple more you'll probably need:

• mysql - or whatever Ruby database driver you need
• mongrel - you don't necessarily need this until production, but it's nice to use in dev/test too
• ZenTest - I use this mainly for "autotest" so that my tests run in a console window whenever my source files change

There could be many other gems that help you but we'd need more info from you to know if they're applicable, eg:

• Web scraping (hpricot)
• CSV (fastercsv)
• Amazon S3 support (aws-s3)
• Image manipulation (rmagick)
• Graphing (gruff) - I use this as a plugin
• Role-based security (role_requirement) - This one is a plugin too