H1 Rails (HTML First Rails) is a boilerplate for building slick, polished web apps.
- Low Floor, High Ceiling: Extremely easy for beginners to get started with minimal setup and simple patterns based on the languages you already know (html, css, js).
- Batteries Included: For the most common UI & UX patterns & challenges (modals, tabs, toasts, tooltips etc.).
Who It's For
- Existing Rails Developers who want even more simplicity, and/or more batteries included (solutions to common UI & UX challenges).
- Developers new to Rails as the most approachable way to explore Ruby & Rails ideas without getting bogged down in some of the areas with a high learning curve (Importmaps, Hotwire, Stimulus).
Enhancements & Simplifications
- Out-of-the-box support for common UI patterns like modals, toasts, tooltips, forms and other UI patterns, powered primarily by Base Styles.
- No Build: By default, we store CSS and javascript libraries in the
/publicfolder. This removes an entire category of debugging & deployment complexity. - HTMX instead of Hotwire/Turbo: We also have several best practices docs for how to achieve common UX patterns using HTMX (multi step forms, type to search, etc.)
- Documentation is available at h1rails.com.
- Demos are available at
/demosin the app.
The preferred way to create a new H1 Rails app is to use the generator. Cloning this repo directly will work, but is not as clean as using
rails new.
To create a new H1 Rails app
rails new APPNAME -m https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reallygoodsoftware/h1rails/refs/heads/master/generator.rb
- Settle on a solution for Modals & toasts and remove the alternatives.