Community Ruby on Rails Design System Best Practices

Comprehensive design system guide for Ruby on Rails applications, maintained by Community. Contains 51 rules across 9 categories, prioritized by impact to guide automated refactoring and code generation. Covers the full Rails frontend stack: Turbo (Drive, Frames, Streams), Stimulus, ERB partials, design tokens, form builders, and view helpers. Complements rails-dev (controllers, models, queries) and tailwind (CSS patterns) by covering the systematic UI component architecture layer.

When to Apply

Reference these guidelines when:

• Deciding whether to extract a partial, component, or helper
• Defining design tokens with Tailwind CSS @theme
• Creating or refactoring ERB partials with explicit locals
• Decomposing pages into Turbo Frames for targeted updates
• Using Turbo Streams for multi-element CRUD updates
• Coordinating Turbo navigation with Stimulus controllers
• Building ViewComponent or Phlex components for complex UI
• Implementing a custom FormBuilder for consistent forms
• Writing view helpers for badges, icons, and conditional classes
• Adding Stimulus controllers for interactive behaviors
• Managing JavaScript dependencies with Import Maps
• Auditing the codebase for UI duplication and naming drift