marckohlbrugge

The Unofficial 37signals/DHH Rails Style Guide

About This Document

This style guide was generated by Claude Code through deep analysis of the Fizzy codebase - 37signals' open-source project management tool.

Why Fizzy matters: While 37signals has long advocated for "vanilla Rails" and opinionated software design, their production codebases (Basecamp, HEY, etc.) have historically been closed source. Fizzy changes that. For the first time, developers can study a real 37signals/DHH-style Rails application - not just blog posts and conference talks, but actual production code with all its patterns, trade-offs, and deliberate omissions.

How this was created: Claude Code analyzed the entire codebase - routes, controllers, models, concerns, views, JavaScript, CSS, tests, and configuration. The goal was to extract not just what patterns are used, but why - inferring philosophy from implementation choices.

bradgessler

# config/initializers/route_format.rb
#
# Global route formatting override for Rails routing.
#
# This hooks into ActionDispatch::Routing::Mapper::Mapping and mutates the
# Journey AST in place so that underscored literal path segments are
# dasherized. It affects *all* routes (get, resources, scope, etc.)
# because they all end up as a Journey AST passed into Mapping.
#
# IMPORTANT:

andynu

require 'active_support/concern'

# The {FiltersConcern} provides a <tt>filter_params</tt> scope which takes a hash <tt>{ col1: term, col2: term }</tt>
#
# see app/assets/javascripts/filterable.js
#
# == type sensitive filtering
# * strings - fuzzy search of %term%
# * dates -
#   * July - => month

pcreux

// Display a developer-friendly error message when Turbo Frame fails to load.
if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development') {
  document.addEventListener('turbo:frame-missing', async function (event) {
    event.preventDefault();

    const frame = event.target;
    const response = event.detail.response;
    const frameId = frame.id;
    const url = response?.url || frame.src;

bensheldon

import {Controller} from "@hotwired/stimulus"

// Warns if form fields have unsaved changes before leaving the page.
// Changes are stored in Session Storage to restore un-warnable events
// like using the back button
//
// To use:
//  <form data-controller="unsaved-changes">
//    <input type="text" name="name" data-unsaved-changes-target="field">
export default class extends Controller {

henrik

Before:
<%= render Admin::HeadingComponent.new("Hi") %>

After:
<%= c.heading "Hi" %>

fxn

Namespaces 101

Introduction

Ruby has recently merged namespaces as an experimental feature that is disabled by default, as of this writing.

This is a non-trivial development driven by @matz himself, and mainly implemented by @tagomoris, who just became a Ruby committer (🎉).

The feature has been cooking for a long time, with a first ticket opened a couple of years ago (#19744) and a revised one opened just last week (#21311).

bensheldon

# frozen_string_literal: true

require "bundler/inline"

# Inline Gemfile for dependencies
gemfile(true) do
  source "https://rubygems.org"
  gem "benchmark-ips"
end

peterc

• You MUST NOT try and generate a Rails app from scratch on your own by generating each file. For a NEW app you MUST use rails new first to generate all of the boilerplate files necessary.
• Create an app in the current directory with rails new .
• Use Tailwind CSS for styling. Use --css tailwind as an option on the rails new call to do this automatically.
• Use Ruby 3.2+ and Rails 8.0+ practices.
• Use the default Minitest approach for testing, do not use RSpec.
• Default to using SQLite in development. rails new will do this automatically but take care if you write any custom SQL that it is SQLite compatible.
• An app can be built with a devcontainer such as rails new myapp --devcontainer but only do this if requested directly.
• Rails apps have a lot of directories to consider, such as app, config, db, etc.
• Adhere to MVC conventions: singular model names (e.g., Product) map to plural tables (products); controllers are plural.
• Guard against incapable browsers accessing controllers with `allo

aviflombaum

class BaseClient
  class APINotFound < StandardError; end

  attr_reader :auth_strategy

  def initialize(auth_strategy: :headers, headers: {})
    @auth_strategy = auth_strategy
    @headers = headers
  end