Rails Without Ruby

When Rails 7.2 shipped, it quietly added something that makes life a lot easier for developers: native support for development containers (or dev containers for short). If you’ve ever onboarded to a new Rails project, you probably know the drill: install the right version of Ruby, fight with system dependencies, get Node and a JavaScript bundler working, set up PostgreSQL… only then can you finally type rails new. It’s a lot, especially for beginners. With devcontainers, that setup pain just disappears. A devcontainer is simply a Docker environment tailored for development. It comes with Ruby, Node, a database, Redis, and even Headless Chrome ready to go — all isolated from your machine. And starting with Rails 7.2, you don’t even have to write the config yourself.