🧰 Ruby Gems With Powerful Generators You Should Be Using in Your Rails Projects

December 9, 2025

A curated list of tools that accelerate development and keep your codebase clean

One of the most underrated strengths of Ruby on Rails is its generator ecosystem. Beyond the native Rails generators, many gems ship with their own commands to scaffold authentication, background jobs, pagination, translations, slugs, geolocation, and much more.

These generators save time, enforce best practices, and help maintain consistent architecture across your project.

In this article, I highlight some of the most useful Ruby gems that include generators — the ones that truly improve your workflow and development speed.

🔐 1. Devise — Complete authentication in minutes

Generators:

• devise:install
• devise MODEL
• devise:views
• devise:controllers
• mongoid:devise (if you’re using Mongoid)

Devise handles everything related to authentication: models, routes, views, controllers, mailers, and configuration.

Example:

rails g devise User

If your app needs login, registration, password recovery, or OAuth extensions, Devise is the most reliable way to build it fast.

🛡️ 2. CancanCan — Simple and centralized authorization

Generator:

• cancan:ability

This command creates the Ability class where you define the permissions for all roles and resources.

rails g cancan:ability

Perfect for dashboards, admin panels, and apps with role-based access control.

🌍 3. Mobility — Model translations done right

Generators:

• mobility:install
• mobility:translations

Mobility brings flexible translation support to models. It works with Postgres JSONB, key-value stores, and dedicated tables.

If your application is multilingual, this gem is a must-have.

🌐 4. FriendlyId & FriendlyId Mobility — SEO-friendly URLs

Generators:

• friendly_id
• friendly_id_mobility

FriendlyId makes URLs readable:

/articles/ruby-generators-guide

Instead of numeric IDs like:

/articles/42

With Mobility, you also get translated slugs for multilingual content.

📦 5. Kaminari — Pagination with customizable views

Generators:

• kaminari:config
• kaminari:views

Kaminari gives you pagination logic and view templates you can fully customize.

rails g kaminari:views

🗺️ 6. Geocoder — Location, geocoding, and IP lookup

Generators:

• geocoder:config
• geocoder:maxmind:geolite_city
• geocoder:maxmind:geolite_country

Geocoder helps you build features like:

• “stores near me”
• map-based search
• country detection from IP
• distance sorting

Great for ecommerce, delivery apps, and local services.

🧩 7. Responders — Cleaner controllers with less noise

Generator:

• responders:install

Adds smart responder logic (respond_with) that reduces boilerplate in controllers.

Useful in API-driven or resource-heavy applications.

🧪 8. RSpec — Powerful test generators

Generators:

• rspec:model
• rspec:controller
• rspec:request
• rspec:feature
• rspec:system
• rspec:job
• rspec:mailer
• rspec:mailbox

Example:

rails g rspec:model Article

If you’re building a professional Rails app, RSpec’s generators help maintain a clean, conventional test structure.

⚡ 9. Sidekiq — Background jobs ready for production

Generator:

• sidekiq:job

Sidekiq is the de-facto standard for background processing in Rails.

rails g sidekiq:job ProcessOrder

Perfect for emails, API calls, imports, image processing, etc.

🎨 10. Heroicon — Hundreds of SVG icons for your Rails views

Generator:

• heroicon:install

Installs a full set of high-quality outline and solid icons you can use directly in ERB.

Great for admin dashboards, forms, and UI components.

🖼️ 11. Stimulus (Hotwire) — Modern interactivity without a SPA

Generator:

• stimulus

rails g stimulus cart

Creates a new Stimulus controller under app/javascript/controllers, ready to add dynamic behavior.

✉️ 12. MailForm — Simple, database-free contact forms

Generator:

• mail_form MODEL

MailForm is perfect for building form submissions (like contact forms) without storing data in the database.

📑 13. Serializer — Clean JSON structures for APIs

Generator:

• serializer

rails g serializer User 

Used to structure API responses and avoid exposing unnecessary model attributes.

👁️ 14. CanonicalRails — SEO improvements with one command

Generator:

• canonical_rails:install

Adds canonical URL helpers automatically, reducing duplicate content issues.

🛡️ 15. Sentry — Professional error tracking

Generator:

• sentry

Quickly adds monitoring and exception tracking to your Rails app.

📚 Conclusion

These gems not only improve Rails development — they encode years of conventions and best practices into commands you can run in seconds. If you want to level up your Rails workflow, build features faster, and keep your application maintainable, mastering these generators is a great step forward.