Despite how easy it is to create a new Rails application, customization is often required where it falls short. Rails has had a long history of being as unfriendly as possible to Javascript, however in recent times, it has to get on board!

That’s precisely what’s happening now.

Before

To create a new Rails application, all one has to do is:

rails new myapp

In this command, it is possible to control the type of DB to configure, the test suite, and more! This would create an app where importmap-rails would handle the JavaScript approach. To override this, one would have to manually remove and add additional code.

After

With Rails 7, we now can create a new Rails application and configure the JavaScript bundler options.

The two other officially supported options are currently webpacker and esbuild-rails. These can be now be controlled via the -j or --javascript option with webpack and esbuild as the choices.

rails new myapp -j webpack

What’s great about this approach is that it makes Rails much more customizable and open to modifications. Another related PR also added rollup.js as a JavaScript bundler option.

Hope we see more options in the future!