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!