📦 Framework News: Bridgetown 2.0 released, Rack 3 coming to Hanami, named redirects in Roda
A newly-invigorated yours truly, addressing the elephant in the room (Ruby Central), and excited about community building. By Jared White
Hello Ruby friends! I've emerged from my cocoon of shepherding the release of the Bridgetown site generator & app framework, and I'm very excited to announce that 2.0 “River City” is finally here! 🎉
More on that own below. Also, as you may (or may not) know, Bridgetown's dynamic server functionality is built on top of the Roda web toolkit—a "superset" of Roda if you will. In addition to that, I've been toying with the Hanami framework and enjoying my experience familiarizing myself with their conventions even while pushing them in…unusual ways 😅 (as I've written about previously), so I thought it'd be fun to send out an issue of Fullstack Ruby to share all of this news together.
To address the elephant in the room: I don't want to touch on the recent drama swirling around Ruby Central here directly, but I've been making noise about it on Mastodon and I'll have more to say formally on the topic in the days ahead. Main takeaway for you: I'm actually really enjoying writing Ruby—and writing about Ruby!—nowadays, so I haven't found this situation demoralizing. On the contrary, I'm invigorated and ready to stand shoulder-to-should with other folks who building towards a new era of ethically-informed Ruby.
Speaking of which, now that Bridgetown 2.0 is out the door, I can finally sit down and write about some of the gems and goodies in and around the release; y'know, get that content pipeline going. I expect it will keep me busy over the next couple of months and ensure this newsletter remains active.
So thanks for being here! I hope you enjoy this “Q4 2025” revival of Fullstack Ruby.
–Jared ✌️
Bridgetown 2.0
(Re)introducing the only Ruby web framework which bridges the gap between static Markdown sites and fullstack database-driven application deployments. 🎉 This version has long been in the hopper, and it’s chock full of major quality-of-life improvements such as ERB-by-default (rather than Liquid), Fast Refresh, ESM configuration for esbuild, switching from Yarn to NPM directly, the Streamlined HTML template solution based on Ruby heredocs, and much more.
Good Times in River City: Bridgetown 2.0 is Here! | Bridgetown
Introducing the only Ruby web framework which bridges the gap between static Markdown sites and fullstack database-driven application deployments.
Roda Updates
Jeremy Evans has been busy over in the Roda project with some handy new features:
Roda 3.96.0 Released · jeremyevans/roda · Discussion #399 · GitHub
Roda 3.96.0 has been released! New Features A redirect_path plugin has been added, which integrates the path plugin with r.redirect: Foo = Struct.new(:id) foo = Foo.new(1) plugin :redirect_path pat...
In v3.96.0, there's a new "redirect_path" plugin which lets redirects refer to named paths (defined via the existing "path" plugin). So for example, you could write r.redirect(user), and because you'd previously set up how to handle paths for User instances, it knows just what to do (perhaps a URL like /admin/users/:id).
And in v3.95.0, you can set up a mapping of content types so that in responses you can refer to them via symbols rather than the full MIME string, aka response.content_type = :pdf. Good stuff.
Hanami & Rack
I've been eagerly awaiting Rack 3 support in Hanami for a while, and I'm excited that it's now been merged in. Bridgetown 2.0 likewise requires Rack 3, which means…you can now integrate a Bridgetown site (e.g. /blog) with Hanami! 🤯 It's even possible to share frontend assets like CSS between the two, as well as Bridgetown components which can render common layout views. Even Roda-based routes are supported!
Stay tuned for a full writeup of how this all works. 😁
Do note you need to be on the "edge" versions of all the Hanami gems, until there's an official release update:
gem "hanami", "~> 2.2", github: "hanami/hanami"
gem "hanami-cli", "~> 2.2", github: "hanami/cli"
gem "hanami-assets", "~> 2.2", github: "hanami/assets"
gem "hanami-controller", "~> 2.2", github: "hanami/controller"
gem "hanami-db", "~> 2.2", github: "hanami/db"
gem "hanami-router", "~> 2.2", github: "hanami/router"
gem "hanami-validations", "~> 2.2", github: "hanami/validations"
gem "hanami-view", "~> 2.2", github: "hanami/view"
I also found this discussion thread to be an interesting read, not merely as a guide to upgrading from Hanami 1.x but seeing how flexible Hanami is at solving various architectural conundrums:
Hanami 1.3 > Hanami 2.2 : tips & notes about my journey - sharing - Hanami
As a long time Hanami user (8 years) for my SaaS company, I’m currently working on the migration from 1.3 to 2.2. Thanks to the team for this amazing piece of software 🤗 With a quite big codebase and many things that work quite well, my first step is to keep most of the things in place, while embrassing some new concepts. I’m making good progress, and I take notes along the way. I think that they may interest some fellow migrators like me, so here it is, I’ll add stuff in this thread.
It really feels like Hanami is "having a moment", and I couldn't be more pleased. As a fellow Ruby framework author, I believe the community is only as strong as its diversity. (And equity. And inclusion.) And even if you don't personally plan to use Hanami, Roda, or Bridgetown yourself any time soon, you should be rooting for anything beyond just the big kahuna in this space to prosper. 🪷
🤔🌩️ Things that make you think: 💡😃
Ages ago, when I was still a student, I taught myself Ruby on Rails for my senior thesis and fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’ve used Rails at every job I’ve ever held in the tech industry. Fifteen years, and I still love Rails! But there’s something rotten at its core, and we share a name.
There’s a growing discontent that I see on social media over leadership in Rails, most of which comes down to DHH’s continued involvement, waning trust in the organizations who continue to platform him (like Ruby Central), and the problematic reality of how much Ruby and Rails is beholden to Shopify money. But what’s the answer? What can we reasonably change?
–David Celis
