Find actively maintained & popular open source software libraries for the Ruby programming language

The Ruby Toolbox is a catalog of all Rubygems that keeps track of popularity and health metrics to help you choose a reliable library

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Categories

To give you an overview of what open source libraries are available for a given task we group projects for common problems into categories.

The catalog itself is available for contributions on GitHub.

Search

With our search you can find Ruby open source libraries beyond what is listed in our categories.

We index all Rubygems published on Rubygems.org.

Project Popularity

We sort projects based on their popularity in the Ruby community - Rubygem downloads as well as popularity of the source code repository on GitHub.

This helps to identify projects that have a big user base, which is an indicator of project stability, maturity and maintenance.

Project Health

We assess the maintenance status of projects based on recent activity like package releases, commit activity or open issue counts and display colored indicators based on that.

This gives you a quick overview of the health of a project.

Popular Categories

Browse all categories
We list 2479 projects in 188 categories as well as 149380 Rubygems in total. Here are a few categories containing very popular Ruby libraries:

Web App Frameworks

Software Frameworks that are designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs

JSON Parsers

JSON parsers convert data serialized in the popular JSON data exchange format to and from Ruby objects

Scripting Frameworks

Libraries that simplify the writing of command-line interfaces for your Ruby programs

Test Frameworks

Frameworks for writing automated tests for your software

Template Engines

Generate HTML and other markup based on dynamic content

E-Mail Delivery

Easily send e-mails from your Ruby programs

Amazon Web Services

Official and community-built utilities for working with Amazon's AWS cloud services

HTTP clients

Easily interact with HTTP-based services

JavaScript Tools

Utilities for working with JavaScript in Ruby

CSS Tools

Tools to make working with Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) easier

Concurrent Processing

Tools that simplify the writing of concurrent Ruby programs

Browser testing

Write and run automated tests of your web app in a real-world browser environment

Ruby Core Extensions

Libraries that enhance Ruby's core classes like Hash or String with additional features

Web Servers

Expose HTTP-based services from Ruby. Usually these are used with a rack-based Ruby web framework.

Command Line Option Parsers

Utilities to process arguments to terminal command line programs easily

SQL Database Adapters

Low-level adapters for interfacing with various SQL database servers