Rails is one of the most popular web development frameworks. For those who do not know, it represents a compilation of many commonly used programming libraries written in Ruby, and that comes with the pattern of convention over configuration. In other words, it saves you a lot of time by avoiding the need to repeat the same initial procedures of setting up a project and so you only need to start implementing the business logic.

There are other Ruby gems that do not come with Rails, and that you may need to add. More specifically, there are gems that can be used widely in the projects that you work on, and that you need to add each time you create a new Rails project. That might be a bit boring and tedious.

One Rails-type bundler of many helpful gems that I really like is suspenders, developed by thoughtbot – the team that is behind very popular Ruby gems such as factory_girl and paperclip. It is the base application used at this company, which was generous enough to share it with all of us.

Something that I really like about suspenders are the testing gems that come with suspenders. When you generate a new Rails application with suspenders, you will also have the project directories for your tests already set up. It is something very handy when you want to start writing an application using TDD – Test Driven Development and not want to have to follow the gems documentation on how to configure them. Here is a list with these gems:

Moreover, suspenders also allows you to deploy your application to Heroku really quickly. It also includes many goodies that can save you time up front:

Suspenders also comes with:

For more details, please go to this gem’s GitHub page.

I hope you find this gem helpful for you!