If you’ve ever searched for a specific gem functionality, you’ve likely sorted through reviews, forum posts, and articles detailing the specifics of each gem before settling on what to use. Before that, maybe you searched for “authorization gems” or “data visualization gems” to find out which ones you want to research further.

You can skip that step by starting from the Awesome Ruby instead. This Ruby on Rails resource lists hundreds of Rails gems by functionality, in alphabetical order. It’s essentially a Rails gem directory, saving you a little time whenever you need to find a new gem to use.

For example, here’s the list of authorization gems to check out, with links to each GitHub repository.

From here, you can do further research on each option and decide which suits your project best.

When you've been working in Rails for some time, you may have a few gems you go back to again and again for specific functionality. But for a new Rails developer, this site is a helpful resource for getting started and discovering the right gem for each use case.

This site is helpful because the community behind it verifies that each Gem meets certain quality standards to be added to this list. Each Ruby gem on the list meets these criteria:

• Generally used and useful to the community
• Actively maintained (even if that just means take care of open issues)
• Stable
• Documented
• Include tests

Of course, contributions to Awesome Ruby are helpful to make this site as useful as possible for the next person who checks it out. You can fork the Awesome Ruby repository to make changes and add any new gems you discover that would be useful in this directory. You can view the Github repository to propose additions or changes.

If you haven't used this site before, give it a go the next time you're researching a new Gem for a project. And if you know a new Ruby on Rails developer or student who might find this helpful, be sure and send over a link!