Community Rails Hotwire Best Practices

Comprehensive guide for building interactive Rails applications with Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus), maintained by Community. Contains 53 rules across 9 categories, prioritized by impact to guide automated refactoring and code generation. Follows the DHH "One Person Framework" philosophy: the server renders HTML, Turbo makes it feel like an SPA, Stimulus adds the sprinkle of JS where needed.

When to Apply

Reference these guidelines when:

• Configuring Turbo Drive navigation, prefetching, and caching behavior
• Adding Turbo Frames for partial page updates and lazy loading
• Delivering Turbo Streams for surgical DOM mutations
• Broadcasting real-time updates over ActionCable
• Enabling Turbo 8 morphing for page refreshes
• Writing Stimulus controllers for client-side behavior
• Handling errors in Turbo navigation, frames, and WebSocket connections
• Choosing between Drive, Frames, Streams, Morphing, and Stimulus
• Testing Hotwire interactions in system and integration tests

Rule Categories by Priority