Show HN: Rails UI
railsui.com79 points by justalever 4 hours ago
79 points by justalever 4 hours ago
Waiting for something similar but without Tailwind and with native elements.
This definitely does fill a gap that Rails has. I love using it but man I can't make a nice looking front end to save my life. We've used Tailwind UI a ton but thats kind of a foot gun because you end up slightly tweaking classes all over the place if you're not disciplined.
I've fiddled with Open Props [0] a bit lately, seems like a nice middle ground! Colours/fonts/spacing/etc that look nice together are there, but it's still up to you to use them. (And you're still writing CSS, so might be a deal breaker if that's the part of tailwind you like... but CSS is rather nice nowadays.)
I used this about a year ago when I went through a short Rails phase. I was a bit surprised not to see more Rails-specific UI libraries considering how batteries-included the rest of the framework is, and at the time I didn't really 'get' tailwind. I'm not in a Rails phase anymore, but nice work on the library!
Hey, thanks for giving it a shot! Agree on the UI front. It seems to be the most "unconventional" thing about the framework. Always struck me as odd, but I suppose it makes sense given how an app needs to adapt to a brand, audience, and market.
It looks good, but I'll be honest, it's hard for me to consider $299/$799 if I can buy a beautiful theme off of somewhere like ThemeForest for $20 or $30 and toss it into an LLM to get the files parsed into components and templates.
Good to see work in non-AI world and for Rails!
I would make it clear in the landing page that the components are for demonstration purposes by adding a title like "For example" before them.
The above the fold looks a bit packed right now. I would leave the login box out until user presses top right as it's for retentive users only.
Agreed - particularly because there is an example of a login box and the screenshot of that is far more prominent than the rest of the design.
I don't think the demo should overpower the landing page.
And then it goes straight into themes. If I'm a Rails developer I'm not looking at theming, I'm looking for a conventional UI system that fits into Rails - stimulus, Hotwire, all that.
As far as I know, this site so far is just a bunch of specialised scaffolds for certain use-cases, but Rails itself has been capable of that the entire time.
Good feedback! This is a common misconception about themes. Rails UI is more of a hybrid as it offers UI components plus optional pages that build out a theme using those components.
You can either take the pages and tweak them for your own use case, or just use the UI components and skip the theme entirely. If you get a chance, try the free Ruby gem to see what I mean.
Thanks for chiming in!
The login box is maybe confusing or maybe I'm misunderstanding you, it's actually UI for a login box, not actually where you login. I agree this area could be tightened up.
If you’re showing off a UI framework, I shouldn’t be accidentally scrolling left and right on the page on mobile / my iPhone. Couldn’t be bothered to scroll down the page to look at components while accidentally activating horizontal scrolling.
This is interesting to me as someone who worked with Rails a good deal back in the day and has interest in picking it back up.
Any chance of some themes that bring in a little dimension? Doesn't have to be early 2010s Bootstrap or anything but some subtle, crisp drop shadows and gentle gradients would be welcome.
Additionally, is unused Tailwind CSS shaken out or does it all come along for the ride?
Yes, it's on my radar to add more unique designs to the mix. Less typical, if that makes sense. For now, it's mostly a huge head start if you're building quickly.
And yes, unused Tailwind CSS is automatically extracted when it's built. For Rails, we use the tailwindcss-rails gem as a dependency for Rails UI, which JustWorks™.
Broken in Safari on iphone. For example:
- table background moves left when table is scrolled horizontally
- actions in table and dropdown do nothing on tap
- text on buttons is selectable (really?)
I think you missed a trick not naming it Railwind UI.
maybe I'm just dumb but a lot of these elements don't seem to work? the "..." buttons don't open any flyout, the dropdown doesn't open up...
otherwise looks cool though
Hey! A lot of the UI on the theme preview site and on railsui.com isn’t fully functional. It’s mostly there to show the design and layout of the components, not the underlying logic. The railsui gem itself has more complete, working components and pages.
i don't get these types of products anymore. i think they're useful in their own way, but i can literally create styles with claude/gemini in a heartbeat and not have to pay some insane fee.
Fair enough. Yes, AI can one-shot a lot now, but I sort of think human-coded stuff has its place. Having done both, I'm most often cleaning up the AI UI that did a piss poor job. I'm sure it can improve in time, though. I built this to scratch my own itch as I'm doing a lot of 0-1 development on ideas.
Time (and money) will tell.
My guess is there's a lot of shops that don't want to mess with prompting AI to get to something clean and usable, and would rather just save money and pay the fee.
I have hardware acceleration disabled in Firefox and my 5800X spins up trying to render the background wave. At least that's a known choice I made.
I wish I could use this – unfortunately UI frameworks are a political problem at every company I've worked at. The designers feel undermined or threatened by it, and product owners want to dictate design. Despite the massive productivity benefits of a UI framework, I've never been able to convince stakeholders to actually adopt one.
Hey I’m a designer and I love UI frameworks. Why design and build something from scratch if someone’s already doing it for you?
Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.
One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.
The last time I heard this from a designer, the designs we got constantly violated the UI framework in ways that required deep customization.
I'd love to have a designer that started with a style guide and then actually stuck with it. Writing CSS isn't hard, and sticking with a known set of rules makes it even easier. But then this one component needs a slightly different font size that doesn't match up to any of the established typography rules, and this other spot needs unique padding, and and and I end up having to waste so much time looking for these little surprises.
Been there! I see this as a solo dev or small startup tool, great for building 0-1 ideas faster (which is what I use it for). Unless they’re working on greenfield apps, established teams probably aren’t the ideal fit.
Is this another Tailwind wrapper? Yes, it is.
I think their comparison page does a good job of breaking down the differences (vs Tailwind UI that is) https://railsui.com/compare/tailwind-ui-vs-rails-ui
Do you not use Tailwind? What is being wrapped? Designed and built this all as a Ruby gem, you can one-click install if you want to build prototypes with Rails even faster. I suppose you're not the target customer, but thanks for chiming in.
But this one costs $799 a year.
Pricing page if anyone else is curious: https://railsui.com/pricing
"Solo" plan is $299/year (1 seat), "Team" plan is $799/year (30 seats), larger plans are "inquire now".
I'm not saying this product is good or bad, because I have no idea, but this is priced too low for it's claimed value prop, not too high. 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.
I'm not saying the product is unserious; just that developers are generally unserious about pricing.
There are a bunch of those for free no ? Rails blocks (paid, about the same price as this Rails UI), Ruby UI (MIT licensed), I think I saw a couple more here.
Pricing per seat makes little sense for a component library. It forces every party involved in building an application to acquire a license, not just a designer who might otherwise have been hired once to provide the assets. Seat-based pricing suits tools people daily drive (Figma, Slack), whereas asset libraries are better priced by what you ship with them.
A more natural unit for pricing would be per domain, application, environment, or similar.
That said, I'm aware several UI frameworks have moved toward seat-based licensing recently, so it must be working for them in some sense.
> 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.
Potential value bounds the price upper end, but alternatives set what the customer will actually pay. There are much more comprehensive tools of similar nature that are offered for free.
The (somewhat) unique value proposition it offers is in how it integrates into Rails, saving an hour of a developer's time — or a couple of minutes of an LLM's time, if the slot machine happens to work in your favour on that particular spin — required to manually do it themselves. That's worth something, but if you go too high it soon becomes more cost effective to just pay someone to put in that hour.
God grant me the confidence of whoever vibe coded this
The repo was created in May 2023, and it seems like the bulk of commits were made in 2024, before vibe coding was really a thing. I think it's pretty harsh to dismiss projects in this manner.
Thanks for noticing. It's all hand-made with a bit of AI to talk me off ledges on the gem structure/architecture front.
What does this even mean? Tailwind isn't like Bootstrap; it's a way of structuring styles, not a design language of its own.
I'm generally in favor of "Show HN" posts that are products, but this post just seems like blatant advertising.
There's an open source Ruby gem you can use at will. https://github.com/getrailsui/railsui
ugh this looks dated even by 2016 standards
when will developers learn UI actually matters
bootstrap was a mistake, and lowered the bar for everyone
I might be missing something, but was this project started in 2016? I'm not sure what line in the sand you're drawing. That was some minima for developers "knowing UI actually matters" I presume?
This you? https://flow-control.dev/
I would advise refraining from posting sick owns like this in your own Show HN threads.
im always surprised that Rails is still relevant
i havent used it since 2006 opting for php and django
i might give it another shot, any reason you like this more than django or other frameworks
In general, I like it for the speed. I can build an MVP in less than a weekend using Rails, Rails UI, and some AI for some one-shot copy and random repetitive stuff.
Under the hood, I like the Rails conventions and Ruby's beauty.
Rails is best as an API only, that's where it shines for me like no other tool.