Who's Using Ruby on Rails Now and Is It AI Panacea for Devs? (2024)

In the most recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Ruby on Rails was used by 5.49% of respondents. While that doesn’t seem like much, it’s higher than more modern web frameworks like Nuxt.js (3.69%), Deno (2.36%) and Gatsby (2.33%). The reality is, Ruby on Rails is still a fairly popular web framework, despite its heyday being a long time ago (it was the trendiest developer tool of the Web 2.0 era).

So who’s using Ruby on Rails in 2024, and why?

The ‘Is Rails Dying’ Conversation

Partly because of its age, but also because it’s not React or another JavaScript framework, a lot of developers dismiss Ruby on Rails. And it’s true that its usage is declining over time, at least if we use the Stack Overflow survey as a guide. In 2019, 8.2% of respondents said they used Ruby on Rails. Django, at 13% in 2019, is also on a slow decline (11.47% use it now).

By comparison, you won’t be surprised to learn that most JavaScript frameworks have increased in popularity over the past four to five years — React went from 31.3% in 2019 to 40.58% in 2023, and Next.js wasn’t even listed in the 2019 survey but scored 16.67% in 2023 (just behind Angular, perhaps the only JS framework to decline over that period!).

While usage is edging down over time, the Rails project itself continues to evolve. Hotwire, a suite of tools and frameworks created by 37signals, was released several years ago as a complement to Rails and “an alternative approach to building modern web applications without using much JavaScript.”

As Rails developer Jason Charnes noted at the most recent Rails World conference, “The thing is, well, Rails has never died.” He insisted that, “Ruby on Rails has been pressing forward — some pushes bigger than others, but they’ve been consistent.”

Who’s Using Ruby on Rails

Similar to Django and its enduring legacy, Ruby on Rails is still a critical component in some large, high-profile projects. Shopify is the best-known example; its founder Tobi Lütke famously built Shopify using Ruby on Rails, while he was a Rails core team member from 2004-2008. Shopify’s core monolith runs on Rails to this day — in September 2020, the company stated that it includes “over 2.8 million lines of Ruby code and 500,000 commits.” More recently, in November last year, Lutke provided an update on X which implied that Rails continues to scale just fine (the ability of Rails to scale has been hotly debated over the years).

Even though Shopify still relies on Ruby on Rails, it has moved some of its core apps to more modern JavaScript frameworks. Shopify acquired the React framework Remix in October 2022 and earlier this year I interviewed its co-founder and CEO, Michael Jackson. He told me that Shopify.com and Shop.app, the company’s main website and mobile app respectively, have both been rebuilt using Remix. However, Jackson also acknowledged that when he and his co-creator Ryan Florence built Remix in 2020, they were directly inspired by Rails.

“We’ve developed in a number of different paradigms, mostly PHP and Ruby. So we take a lot of our inspiration from some of the PHP frameworks, we take a lot of inspiration from Rails — you know, Ruby on Rails — and so a lot of people who come to Remix, they […] feel like it’s kind of familiar because it’s built on web standards [and] we’re not trying to invent a lot of our own API’s.”

GitLab is another well-known company that still uses Ruby on Rails. Indeed, its co-founder and CEO, Sid Sijbrandij, wrote a contributed article for The New Stack in June 2022, entitled “Why We’re Sticking with Ruby on Rails at GitLab.” However, similar to Shopify, GitLab has modernized its Rails-based stack over time. Here Sijbrandij explains some of the adjustments it has made:

“Although structuring GitLab as a [Rails] monolith has been extremely beneficial for us, we are not dogmatic about that structure. Architecture follows needs, not the other way around. And while Rails is an excellent technology for our purposes, it does have a few drawbacks, one of them being performance. Luckily, only a tiny part of most codebases is actually performance-critical. We use our own gitaly daemon written in Go to handle actual git operations, and PostgreSQL for non-repository persistence.”

GitHub tells a similar tale, of sticking with Rails but building more modern parts around the edges. In December, GitHub’s Max Beizer discussed the evolution of its Rails monolith:

“GitHub’s primary codebase is a large Ruby on Rails monolith with over 4.2 million lines of code across roughly 30,000 files. As the platform has grown over the years, we have come to realize that we need a new way to organize and think about the systems we run.”

He went on to describe how GitHub now uses a custom solution called “serviceowners” to help manage its Rails monolith.

What Shopify, GitLab and GitHub have in common is that they all continue to depend on a Ruby on Rails monolith, however, all three have introduced other technologies over the years to help with performance and scalability.

It’ll be interesting to track how Shopify continues to integrate Remix (again, a modern JavaScript framework) into its stack. Some have suggested that Shopify may “use Remix as a full-stack framework” and eventually ditch Ruby on Rails — but there is no evidence yet of that happening.

DHH: Ruby on Rails in the AI Era

Finally, it wouldn’t be an article about Ruby on Rails without some comment from its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson (a.k.a. DHH). Right from the start, DHH has been strident about his opinions on web development — he built Ruby on Rails over twenty years ago as a kind of bridge between the technical rigor of Java and the ease of use of PHP. As a result, Ruby on Rails has always been promoted as a tool that a single person can use to create a web application — that’s why it was so popular with Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

The Rails website in April 2005 described the framework as “a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.” While XML is no longer a factor in 2024, DHH continues to do interviews espousing the “joy and less code” philosophy. In an interview with the devtools.fm podcast last month, he even suggested this approach will help developers adapt in the current generative AI era.

“As we are now facing perhaps an existential tussle with AI,” he said, “I think it’s never been more important that the way we design programming languages is designed for the human first. The human needs all the help the human can get, if we’re going to have any chance to remain not only just valuable, but relevant as a programmer. And maybe that’s a lost cause anyway, but at least in the last 20 years that I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails, I’ve seen that bet just pay [off] over and over again.”

What’s certainly true is that many companies still rely on Ruby on Rails today, so that alone will keep the framework relevant for the foreseeable future. Perhaps, as DHH suggests, human developers will increasingly look to Rails as a means to stay relevant in the AI era. Regardless, Ruby on Rails will survive — even if every year its usage ever so slightly declines.