In the Ruby on Rails ecosystem—where development speed and strong engineering practices often define a project’s success—having a solid foundation can make all the difference.
What began as a way to speed up internal processes has grown into a mature project with a strong impact on the community, surpassing 600 stars on GitHub.
At Rootstrap, we constantly work with new clients, and many of those projects start from scratch. As is often the case, a significant portion of the initial development time is spent configuring essential tools for an API.
Some time ago, this led us to a simple idea:
What if we packaged the best gems and all the initial setup into a ready-to-use boilerplate, following the highest possible standards?
That’s how Rails API Base was born—a project with clear goals: accelerate new project setup, maintain high quality standards, and contribute to the community.
Today, it is the foundation of our internal projects, and Rails API Base has continued to evolve in the best possible way. Recently, we surpassed 600 stars on GitHub, a clear signal of strong adoption from the Ruby community.
But why such a big impact?
Rails API Base is not just another boilerplate. It’s a carefully curated foundation that combines production-ready tooling with best practices, allowing teams to focus on building real product features from day one.
Quality-first engineering
From the very beginning, the project promotes clean code and long-term maintainability:
- Rubocop for consistent style and conventions
- Brakeman for static security analysis
- Bundler Audit to detect vulnerable dependencies
- Prosopite to catch N+1 queries early
- RSpec with ready-to-use examples
- Optional SonarQube integration for deeper code quality insights
Instead of spending days configuring these tools, teams get them out of the box—already working together.
CI/CD and development workflow
Modern teams need automation, reproducibility, and confidence in their delivery pipelines. Rails API Base is built with that in mind:
- CI workflows using GitHub Actions
- Parallel testing with Knapsack and Parallel Tests
- CD workflows prepared for AWS ECS, adaptable per environment
- Docker and Devcontainers for consistent local development
- Structured logs via Lograge, plus colorized logs for better readability during development
This setup shortens feedback loops and makes deployments predictable—not stressful.
Built-in product features
Instead of reinventing what most real-world products need, Rails API Base includes many features by default:
- Latest versions of Rails and Ruby, always kept up to date for security and performance
- Feature flags using Flipper
- User impersonation for support and debugging scenarios
- ActiveAdmin as a flexible admin panel
- Automatic API documentation using rswag, rspec-openapi, and Swagger UI
- Background jobs with GoodJob, without requiring Redis
- Chaotic Order tooling to experiment and refactor safely
- New Relic dashboards for monitoring and observability
These are the kinds of details that make a codebase feel professional from the very beginning.
Evolving from API-only to full-stack
One of the most powerful—and lesser-known—features is a script that allows teams to transform the project from an API-only application into a full Rails full-stack app.
You can start simple, move fast, and still evolve later without starting over.
These and many other tools and configurations are ready to help you start building your project, each with clear justification and room for further customization.
Among the core pillars behind Rails API Base are “doing things right from the beginning” and “its significant impact on development time.”
For startups, small teams, or MVPs, this translates into weeks of advantage when starting a project. For us at Rootstrap, it means speed, consistency, and confidence when working with our clients.
The road to 1,000 stars
The project continues to evolve, grow, and improve thanks to both the community and our internal contributions.
Our next big goal is to reach 1,000 stars on GitHub—not as a vanity metric, but because of what it represents:
- Greater visibility for Rails API Base
- Stronger feedback loops
- More external contributions
- Broader impact and usability beyond Rootstrap
Rails API Base is a living project: used daily, actively maintained, and constantly improving.
In addition to community contributions, the project evolves through internal collaboration at Rootstrap. We actively work on group and individual contributions, regularly running proofs of concept (POCs) and experimenting with new gems, tools, and emerging trends across the Rails and Ruby ecosystems.
These explorations allow us to validate ideas in real projects before incorporating them into the boilerplate—ensuring every addition delivers real value. As Rails, Ruby, and the broader ecosystem evolve, Rails API Base evolves alongside them, continually refining its foundations.
This ongoing cycle of experimentation, validation, and improvement is what keeps Rails API Base relevant, reliable, and aligned with real-world production needs.
👉 Try it here: https://github.com/rootstrap/rails_api_base
