Most useful Rails plugins, Ruby libraries and Ruby gems?

Question

I have seen many sites which provide the whole list of Rails plugins, Ruby libraries and Ruby gems, but we hardly use few of them and some may not suit our requirement and we spend a whole lot of time searching for useful plugins which suits our requirement.

I have created this poll, people can post useful libraries, gems and plugins which they have come across. It would be great help for newbies like me and to the entire Ruby on Rails community.

Note: to keep this poll as useful as possible, please remember:

• Post only one library, gem, or plugin per answer
• Mention the name of the library, gem, or plugin which you find it useful.
• URL of the location of the resource
• We don't want duplicate answers, so before posting check if the library has been mentioned already.

Thanks

Answer 1

Formtastic - Awsome form helpers.

It lets you do things like this:

<% semantic_form_for @user do |f| %>
    <% f.inputs do %>
     <%= f.input :email %>
     <%= f.input :password %>
     <%= f.input :password_confirmation %>
    <% end %>

    <% f.buttons do %>
     <%= f.commit_button 'Sign Up' %>
    <% end %>
<% end %>

and get decent, semantic HTML:

Answer 2

Will Paginate - essential for pagination.

Answer 3

Rspec - for BDD.

Answer 4

Paperclip - Simple file uploads

Answer 5

HAML and SASS http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/

Answer 6

Authlogic - Easy Authentication

Answer 7

grosser-rpx_now - Interface into RPXNow.com, which provides an interface into OpenID, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and much more in terms of authentication. A great companion for Authlogic.

Answer 8

Nokogiri - for all your XML and HTML parsing and searching needs.

Answer 9

Capistrano - for easy deployment.

Answer 10

Capistrano-ext - allows you to setup separate deploy recipes for staging / production / whatever other environment you have

Answer 11

Backup-fu - in conjuction with capistrano, we always backup before a deploy to Amazon S3, and set cron jobs that periodically backup the database and asset directories.

Answer 12

Seed-Fu - Easy database seeding gem. Please don't use migrations to seed your database! :)

Answer 13

Faker - for creating valid, fake data. Great for populating an empty dev DB / testing.

Answer 14

Populator - for pushing data into the DB when populating it. Used in conjunction with Faker. More info here.

Answer 15

Mofo gem - A ruby microformat parser , Helps to import Profile data from networking sites which implements microformats using hResume,hCard . ex LinkedIn , Xing ,Twitter etc .

Very useful gem .

Answer 16

soap4r: A must have for making soap calls!

Source: http://rubyforge.org/projects/soap4r/

Answer 17

Thinking Sphinx - for integrating with Sphinx for dead-simple text-searching in your app.

Answer 18

Validation Reflection - when used with formtastic, it frees you from having to specify which fields of a form are required, as it infers it from your model validations.

Answer 19

Nested Layouts - Great when you have sections of your site that sit inside their own wrappers. My account (in many apps) has a series of controllers that may have a common navigation header. Nested layouts allows you to use a my_account layout that sits inside your application layout, preventing the need for duplicate layout code or spurious navigation partials.

Answer 20

Contacts is a universal interface to grab contact list information from various providers including Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.

Answer 21

I really enjoy harsh for syntax highlighting. It gives you access to all of the TextMate themes also, which I love.

Answer 22

Clearance for authentication.

Answer 23

More, the rails plugin for Less, the CSS extension. I prefer Less to Haml; there's no learning curve for Less.

Answer 24

jRails is a drop-in jQuery replacement for the Rails Prototype/script.aculo.us helpers.

Answer 25

Delayed Job for background processing.

Answer 26

state_machine: adds support for creating state machines with a lot of very useful features. It has great ActiveRecord integration and even supports automatic named scope for states.

Answer 27

tracked_plugins keeps track of plugin install information/updates/local-modification for all plugins you install

Answer 28

Oddly self-serving but I find these helpful:

by_star - Helpful for finding records based on time ranges.
lookup - Ever wanted to look up a Rails method in the API from the command line? Use lookup has_many to be taken to that method in the API. Also supports fuzzy matching.

Answer 29

youtube-g is a pure Ruby client for the YouTube GData API. It provides an easy way to access the latest YouTube video search results from your own programs

Answer 30

cancan - for roles, companion of authlogic

Answer 31

calendar_date_select - calendar pop-up

Answer 32

prawn - PDF generation

Answer 33

thin, a faster http server

Answer 34

smerf - dynamic forms for surveys and questionnaires

Answer 35

devise - a more comprehensive authentication gem

Answer 36

FactoryGirl as a replacement for fixtures - nice because you can specify fields for a factoried model object in the test.

Answer 37

Savage Beast 2 Based on the very popular Rails message forum, Beast, this is a Rails forum that implements multiple topics, posts, moderators, RSS feeds, localization, and most all the niceties you've gotten to know on the Beast forums.

Answer 38

FactoryGirl : Fixture replacement for focused and readable tests.

Answer 39

Annotate - simple gem which adds something like

#== Schema Information
#
#Table name: buttons
#id           :integer(4)      not null, primary key
#text         :string(255)
#font_size    :integer(4)
#user_id      :integer(4)
#created_at   :datetime
#updated_at   :datetime
#button_stats :integer(4)      default(0), not null

to your model definitions and fixtures

Answer 40

ruote - Work flow Engine in Rails