Rails Plugins

Question

What are some of your favorite rails plugins that you would consider "must haves"?

This entry lists some of my favorites that I use in a large majority of my rails applications: My favorite rails plugins

Answer 1

If your app has any kind of user model, Rick Olsen's restful-authentication is a must.

I'm also partial to exception_notification for keeping tabs on errors in production apps.

Answer 2

acts_as_taggable shoulda (gem, but better unit testing)

Answer 3

• RESTful Authentication
• Exception Notification
• Acts As State Machine
• Shoulda
• Account Location

I use all of these in 99% of all of my Rails projects. Each link provides detailed information regarding what they do and why they are awesome.

Hope that helped!

Answer 4

• http://github.com/mislav/will_paginate
• http://github.com/nex3/haml
• http://ennerchi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/jrails
• http://github.com/smtlaissezfaire/annotate_models (fork that supports rspec)
• http://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec
• http://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails
• http://github.com/joshknowles/rspec-on-rails-matchers

Answer 5

Normal App Development

• RESTFul authentication
• shoulda
• I prefer Hoptoad over Exception Notifier, but both have their merits
• Mocha stubbing library
• Factory Girl

Facebook Development

• facebooker
• facebooker_authentication

Answer 6

Gem or plugin, doesn't matter:

• haml
• shoulda
• factory_girl
• hubahuba
• hoptoad_notifier
• strip_attributes
• has_many_polymorphs
• will_paginate

Answer 7

HAML (and its sibling SASS) are really number one for me. You can learn them in only a few minutes and the time they save adds up very quickly.

Also, take a look at Authlogic as an alternative to RESTful Authentication.

Answer 8

annotate_models - http://repo.pragprog.com/svn/Public/plugins/annotate_models/

custom_err_msg - svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/custom-err-msg/trunk

jrails - http://ennerchi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/jrails

validation_reflection - svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/valirefl/validation_reflection/trunk

Answer 9

most common i've used across projects lately (by no means all just most common)

• RESTful Authentication (http://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication/tree/master)
• Acts As State Machine (http://github.com/rubyist/aasm/tree/master)
• Mislav's will_paginate (http://github.com/mislav/will_paginate)
• HAML & SASS (http://github.com/nex3/haml)
• RSpec (http://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec)
• RSpec-Rails (http://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails)

Answer 10

Some already listed in other answers that don't need repeating plus:

• acts_as_categoy
• paperclip
• open_id_authentication
• ZenTest gem

Answer 11

ar_mailer for email delivery.