# How to Create a Website With Ruby on Rails in 2026 > Yes, Ruby on Rails builds real websites. The exact commands from install to a live site, what rails new ships in 2026, hosting prices, and who should skip it. Source: https://llamapress.ai/how-to-create-a-website-with-ruby-on-rails-from-first-command-to-live-site | Updated: 2026-09-04 --- [LlamaPress Blog](https://llamapress.ai/blog) # Create a website with Ruby on Rails, from the first command to a live site Yes, Ruby on Rails builds real websites. The exact commands from install to a live site, what rails new ships in 2026, hosting prices, and who should skip it. [Back to all articles](https://llamapress.ai/blog) ![Kody Kendall](https://llamapress-ai-image-uploads.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/jujc1ep8nuqrdiftdfer1ngp833u) Written by Kody Kendall AI & Software Engineer | Creator of the Leonardo Coding Agent Updated September 2026 Yes, you can create a website with Ruby on Rails, and the path is eight commands. Install Ruby, install the Rails gem, run rails new, create the database, start the server, generate a controller, set the root route, and run your first migration. That gets you a running site on your own machine in minutes. Rails is a web framework, meaning a toolkit for building web applications, so it fits a site with accounts, records and rules behind it. Hosting starts at about $4 a month on a server you run yourself, or $5 to $7 a month on a managed host, as of this writing. A five page brochure that never changes does not need Rails at all. In short - Eight commands take a clean machine to a running Rails site: install Ruby, gem install rails, rails new, db:create, server, generate a controller, set root, db:migrate. - Current stable Rails is the 8.1 series, and Ruby's current major series is 4.0. A guide that tells you Ruby 3.x is current is out of date. - A new Rails app already includes Propshaft, import maps, Hotwire, Solid Queue, a production Dockerfile, Kamal 2, Brakeman, RuboCop and a GitHub Actions workflow. - There is no drag and drop Rails website builder. The real options are Rails generators, a CMS gem, or an AI coding agent that writes the Rails for you. I write Rails for a living. Every customer app we ship runs on Ruby on Rails, and we operate a fleet of production Rails apps for our customers. Our AI agent, Leonardo, writes Rails code, and the people supervising it ship Rails daily. We also maintain an open-source Rails AI framework on GitHub, LlamaBot, with the llama\_bot\_rails gem. Every command below was checked against the official guides in September 2026. ## Can you build a website with Ruby on Rails? Yes, and large companies still run their main product on it. Rails builds what it calls an application, meaning a program that serves pages from a database. A Rails website is one of those applications with public pages on the front. The proof is in who pays to keep the framework alive. The [Rails Foundation's own member list](https://rubyonrails.org/foundation) names GitHub, Shopify, 37signals, Doximity, Cookpad, Procore, 1Password, Fleetio, Fin and Judge.me as core members, and Gusto, Clio, Chime and others as contributing members. GitHub's engineering blog describes GitHub.com as [a Ruby on Rails monolith since the beginning](https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/building-github-with-ruby-and-rails/). We go through those companies and what their stacks actually tell you on our page about [websites built with Ruby on Rails](https://llamapress.ai/websites-built-with-ruby-on-rails-and-what-they-tell-you). Rails is strongest where a site has state. User accounts, records people create and edit, forms, permissions, an admin area, email, file uploads, scheduled work. All of that ships with the framework or sits one gem away. The honest limits section below names the cases where Rails is the wrong pick. ## What do you need before you start? You need four things: Ruby, the Rails gem, a database, and a terminal with a text editor. Nothing else is required to reach a running site on your own machine. **Ruby.** Ruby's current major series is 4.0, not 3.x. Ruby 4.0.0 was released on 2025-12-25 and the latest patch is 4.0.6, released 2026-07-14. The 3.4 branch is maintained alongside it, with 3.4.10 released 2026-06-30. The dated table is on [Ruby's own releases page](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/releases/). Rails 7.2 made Ruby 3.1 the minimum, so anything older will refuse to run. **Rails.** The current stable gem is 8.1.3.1, released 2026-07-29, per the [RubyGems API](https://rubygems.org/api/v1/gems/rails.json). Rails 8.1.0 shipped in October 2025, Rails 8.0 in November 2024 and Rails 7.2 in August 2024, per the [official release notes index](https://guides.rubyonrails.org/8_1_release_notes.html). Patch releases land roughly monthly, so check the current number. **A database.** A new app uses SQLite, and Rails 8 endorses SQLite for production rather than dev and test alone. The Rails 8 announcement says 37signals runs SQLite in production for ONCE, with thousands of Campfire and Writebook installations in the wild. Rails 8 hardened the adapter with WAL and IMMEDIATE mode defaults. PostgreSQL and MySQL suit apps where several servers touch the same data. **A terminal and an editor.** Any editor works. You can also skip installing Ruby on your laptop. Rails 7.2 added a generated .devcontainer folder and a rails devcontainer command, so the toolchain runs in a container. That detail is in the [Rails 7.2 release notes](https://guides.rubyonrails.org/7_2_release_notes.html). ![A laptop open on a desk running a terminal, where every Rails command in this guide is typed](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1587620962725-abab7fe55159?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3w4NTU2MDF8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHwxfHx0ZXJtaW5hbCUyMGNvbW1hbmQlMjBsaW5lJTIwbGFwdG9wJTIwZGV2ZWxvcGVyfGVufDB8fHx8MTc4ODU1NDQ5Mnww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080) Photo by [James Harrison](https://unsplash.com/@jstrippa?utm_source=leonardo_rails_app&utm_medium=referral) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/black-laptop-computer-turned-on-on-table-vpOeXr5wmR4?utm_source=leonardo_rails_app&utm_medium=referral) ## How to create a Rails website step by step Run these eight commands in order and you end with a Rails site running at localhost:3000 with a home page you wrote and a database table you created. The sequence follows the [official Getting Started guide](https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html), which states outright that you need no prior Rails experience to follow it. 1. **Install Ruby and check the version.** Ruby has to be on the machine before Rails can be. The command prints the version string, which is how you confirm the install worked. Terminal ``` ruby --version ``` 2. **Install Rails as a gem.** A gem is a packaged piece of Ruby code. The first command downloads Rails and its dependencies, and the second prints the Rails version you just installed. Terminal ``` gem install rails rails --version ``` 3. **Generate the application.** This writes the project skeleton into a new folder and installs its gems. You see a long list of created files, then you move into the folder. Name it after your site. Terminal ``` rails new store cd store ``` 4. **Create the database.** Rails reads the database settings the generator wrote and creates the development and test databases. You see one confirmation line per database. Terminal ``` bin/rails db:create ``` 5. **Start the development server.** This boots Puma, the web server that ships with Rails, and prints a banner with the Rails version and the port. Open http://localhost:3000 and you get the Rails welcome page. Terminal ``` bin/rails server ``` 6. **Generate a controller for your first page.** A controller decides what a URL does. This creates the controller, a view file for the index action, a helper and a test file, and skips routes so you write them yourself. Terminal ``` bin/rails generate controller Products index --skip-routes ``` 7. **Point the home page at that controller.** Open config/routes.rb and add a root line. Reload localhost:3000 and the Rails welcome page is replaced by your own page. config/routes.rb ``` root "products#index" resources :products ``` 8. **Add a model and run the migration.** A model is the Ruby class that owns one database table. The generator writes the model and a migration file, and the migrate command applies it. You see a migrating line and a migrated line with the elapsed time. Terminal ``` bin/rails generate model Product name:string price:decimal bin/rails db:migrate ``` One correction to advice you will see elsewhere. Plenty of tutorials say the official path is bin/rails generate scaffold, which writes a model, controller and a full set of views in one shot. That generator is real and it works. The current official guide does not lead with it. The guide builds the pieces as separate explained steps, then continues into validations, authentication, caching, Active Storage uploads, Action Mailer, background jobs with Solid Queue, RuboCop, security, CI and a production deploy. ## What does rails new give you in 2026? A new Rails app arrives with the big choices already made. The asset pipeline, the JavaScript approach, the job system, the cache, the deploy tool, the container image, the security scanner, the linter and the CI workflow are all wired for you. People underrate that when they compare frameworks. The list below comes from the [official Rails 8 announcement](https://rubyonrails.org/2024/11/7/rails-8-no-paas-required) and the [7.2 release notes](https://guides.rubyonrails.org/7_2_release_notes.html), and it carried forward into the current 8.1 line. - **Propshaft** is the default asset pipeline, replacing Sprockets, which the Rails 8 announcement dates back to 2009. - **Import maps** are the default JavaScript approach, so there is no build step. Teams that want esbuild, webpack or rollup opt in with jsbundling-rails. - **Hotwire**, meaning Turbo plus Stimulus, ships in the box. It gives you live page updates without writing a separate frontend app. - **Solid Queue, Solid Cache and Solid Cable** remove Redis as a required dependency. Solid Cache has run at Basecamp for over a year holding 10 terabytes. Solid Queue runs 20 million jobs a day for HEY alone. - **Kamal 2 and Thruster** are preconfigured for deployment. Thruster sits in front of Puma for asset caching and compression, so no Nginx is needed in front of it. - **A tuned production Dockerfile**, which 7.2 updated to set up jemalloc for memory allocation. - **Brakeman, RuboCop and GitHub Actions** are generated for you. Brakeman scans for common Rails security holes, RuboCop uses the omakase rule set, and the CI workflow runs Dependabot, Brakeman, RuboCop and your tests. - **Dev Containers** can be generated with the app, or added later with rails devcontainer. Those defaults are why a Rails site started today needs so few decisions. To see what a mature codebase does with them, read some real ones. We picked through the best public examples in [open-source Ruby on Rails apps worth reading](https://llamapress.ai/open-source-ruby-on-rails-apps-worth-reading-and-what-they-teach-you). ## How do you put a Rails website online? You either rent a server and deploy to it with Kamal, or you push the code to a managed platform that runs it for you. Kamal is the open-source deploy tool Rails 8 ships preconfigured with, and it turns a fresh Linux box into an application server with one setup command. The repo is [basecamp/kamal](https://github.com/basecamp/kamal), MIT licensed with 14,560 stars, read on 2026-09-04. Prices below are the published entry points as of this writing, read on 2026-09-04. Four vendors make that harder than it should be. Fly.io says on its pricing page that plans get complicated and it charges on usage, so the flat monthly figures live only in the docs. Render and Railway draw their price tables in the browser, so a plain fetch returns no numbers. Hetzner Cloud goes furthest. Its page loads and the price digits never appear to an automated read. This table gives it no figure rather than repeating one we could not confirm. | Option | What it is | Entry price, as of this writing | Who it suits | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Kamal on a DigitalOcean Droplet | You rent a plain Linux server and Kamal deploys onto it. [Droplet pricing](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets) | $4.00 a month for 512 MiB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GiB SSD, 500 GiB transfer | Cheapest real option, if you are willing to own the server | | Kamal on Hetzner Cloud | Same idea, a different server vendor. [Hetzner Cloud](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/) | Hetzner markets a low cost shared vCPU tier. Its page did not show a price to our automated read, so check the site for the current figure | European hosting and larger machines for the money | | Render | Managed platform, you push code and it builds and runs it. [Render pricing](https://render.com/pricing) | Workspace $0 a month, cheapest paid compute $7 a month for under 1 CPU and 512 MB RAM. There is also a limited free compute tier | A first site where you do not want to touch a server | | Fly.io | Managed machines billed by usage. [Machine price table](https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/) | shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB RAM is $1.94 a month, and with 1 GB RAM is $5.70 a month | Small apps and anyone comfortable reading a usage bill | | Heroku | The original Rails platform, still running. [Heroku pricing](https://www.heroku.com/pricing) | Eco dyno $5 a month, 0.5 GB RAM, sleeps after 30 minutes idle. Basic dyno $7 a month, 0.5 GB RAM, always on | Familiar tooling and the least new vocabulary to learn | | Railway | Managed platform with credit based billing. [Railway pricing](https://railway.com/pricing) | Hobby $5 a month minimum usage, including $5 of credit. Pro $20 a month minimum usage. A free trial gives $5 of credits for 30 days | Side projects that may grow into something bigger | Sleep is the detail that catches people. A Heroku Eco dyno sleeps after 30 minutes of no traffic, which is fine for a demo and wrong for a customer facing site. Add the database and file storage to whichever number you pick, because none of the figures above include them. ![A rack of servers in a dark room, the kind of machine a Rails site is deployed onto with Kamal](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1680992046626-418f7e910589?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3w4NTU2MDF8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHwyfHxzZXJ2ZXIlMjByb29tJTIwZGF0YSUyMGNlbnRlciUyMGRlcGxveW1lbnR8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzg4NTU0NDk5fDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080) Photo by [Tyler](https://unsplash.com/@tylergm?utm_source=leonardo_rails_app&utm_medium=referral) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-rack-of-electronic-equipment-in-a-dark-room-OnI_TNcIv9U?utm_source=leonardo_rails_app&utm_medium=referral) ## Is there a Ruby on Rails website builder? No, there is no drag and drop Rails website builder in the way Squarespace or WordPress means it. Rails is a framework, so the thing you build is code. Three real options sit behind that search, and they suit three different people. **The generators that ship with Rails.** bin/rails generate scaffold writes a model, a migration, a controller and a full set of views for one resource in a single command. That is the closest thing to a builder inside Rails, and it gives you working screens you then edit by hand. **A CMS or admin gem.** For editable pages, AlchemyCMS is a Rails CMS, BSD-3-Clause licensed with 906 stars. Publify describes itself as a self hosted web publishing platform on Rails, MIT licensed with 1,854 stars. For an admin area over your own tables, ActiveAdmin is MIT licensed with 9,708 stars, and Avo had 1,799 stars. GitHub's license detector could not classify Avo's license, so read that repo's LICENSE file. All four were pushed within the past week and all figures came from the GitHub API on 2026-09-04, so they drift. **An AI coding agent that writes the Rails for you.** This is the newest option and it is what we do. Our agent, Leonardo, writes Rails code, and the people supervising it are US-based engineers who ship Rails daily and review every change before it reaches you. The output is an ordinary Rails app any Rails developer can read. We describe that on our page about [the Ruby on Rails development company where AI writes the code](https://llamapress.ai/the-ruby-on-rails-development-company-where-ai-writes-the-code). The engineering side is on [building AI features into Rails apps](https://llamapress.ai/rails-ai-building-ai-features-into-ruby-on-rails-apps). None of the three change the shape of the work. A Rails site is code, a database and a server. A builder makes the first version faster, and the server still needs running. ## How long does it take, and what does it cost to keep running? No official Rails source states a number of hours or days, and I am not going to invent one. The answer depends entirely on whether you already write code. What is documented is scope: the official Getting Started guide takes a reader with no Rails experience through models, migrations, routing, CRUD, authentication, caching, file uploads, email, background jobs, CI and a production deploy. The running cost has three lines and only one is the hosting figure above. The second is the database and file storage. The third is the upgrade calendar, and it is the one people forget. The Rails [maintenance policy](https://guides.rubyonrails.org/maintenance_policy.html) gives each minor release bug fixes for one year and security fixes for two years after the first release in its series. A site left alone for three years is running unpatched code. Old Rails apps keep running when someone maintains them. One of the apps we operate is a 2019-era Rails 6.1 application with live paying users, and we keep that app patched and running in production right now. Staying current is a scheduled job rather than a rescue mission. We make that argument on [Rails upgrade and maintenance for apps you cannot afford to lose](https://llamapress.ai/rails-upgrade-and-maintenance-for-apps-you-cannot-afford-to-lose). ## When Rails is the wrong choice Rails is the wrong tool in four situations, and saying so costs me nothing. First, a brochure site of five pages that never reads or writes data. A static site generator or a hosted site builder is cheaper to run and easier to hand to a marketer. Second, a site whose point is a designer moving blocks around every week. Rails changes pages in code, and code changes go through a deploy. Third, a team with nobody who can read Ruby and no plan to hire one. Fourth, a product that is entirely a mobile app with a login screen on the web. Two limits apply even when Rails is right. You are responsible for a server, or for a platform bill that grows with traffic. And you own the security patching described above. Both are real work that a hosted site builder does for you. If you are still deciding what to build rather than how, we sorted the good and bad starting points in [Ruby on Rails project ideas worth building](https://llamapress.ai/ruby-on-rails-project-ideas-worth-building-and-the-ones-to-skip). ## When to write it yourself and when to have it built Follow this page yourself if you want to learn Rails, if the site is yours to maintain, or if you enjoy the work. That is a real reason and it is most of the traffic to a page like this. The guide is free, the framework is free, and the first month of hosting costs less than lunch. Have it built if the site is a business system rather than a hobby. The signals are consistent. Several people will use it every day. It replaces a spreadsheet or a manual process that already runs the company. It needs logins, permissions and an audit trail. Someone other than you has to keep it alive next year. The steel contractor RSB is the example I give. Their estimating workbook priced every job, and every estimator worked in a copy of it. We rebuilt it as a custom Rails app in 6 weeks from kickoff to deployment. Estimates now go out 62% faster and each one costs 40% less to produce. We have converted 400+ spreadsheets the same way. If your process lives in a spreadsheet, that spreadsheet is the fastest starting point. The tabs are your tables, the headers are your fields and the formulas are your rules. Leonardo reads all of it and builds a first working Rails app, and an engineer reviews the result. That route is shorter than typing rails new and it ends at the same kind of app. Our page on [MVP development that ships a working product in days](https://llamapress.ai/mvp-development-that-ships-a-working-product-in-days) covers how that goes. Rails, Without Learning Rails ### Skip the first eight commands. Upload the spreadsheet your process already runs on. Leonardo reads the tabs, headers and formulas and builds a first working Ruby on Rails app. A US-based engineer reviews every change before it reaches you. [Start From Your Spreadsheet](https://llamapress.ai/excel-to-app) [Talk to an Engineer](https://llamapress.ai/contact) Building it yourself and stuck on a step? [Contact us](https://llamapress.ai/contact) and we will point you at the right part of the guide. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Can you make a website with Ruby on Rails? Yes. Rails builds database-backed web applications, and a website with public pages is one of them. GitHub, Shopify, 37signals, Doximity and Procore are all Rails Foundation members, and GitHub's own engineering blog calls GitHub.com a Ruby on Rails monolith. Rails suits a site with accounts, records and rules. A static brochure page does not need it. ### How do I create a Ruby on Rails website? Install Ruby, then run gem install rails. Run rails new store and change into the folder. Run bin/rails db:create, then bin/rails server, and open localhost:3000. Generate a controller with bin/rails generate controller Products index --skip-routes, add a root line to config/routes.rb, then generate a model and run bin/rails db:migrate. ### Is Ruby on Rails good for websites in 2026? Yes. The current stable release is the 8.1 series, and 8.1.3.1 shipped on 2026-07-29. A new app includes Propshaft, import maps, Hotwire, Solid Queue, a production Dockerfile, Kamal 2, Brakeman, RuboCop and a GitHub Actions workflow. Rails Foundation core members including GitHub, Shopify and 37signals still run it in production. ### Do I need to know Ruby to build a Rails website? To build it yourself, yes. The official Getting Started guide states you need no prior Rails experience, but you will be reading and writing Ruby from the first page. To have a Rails site without learning Ruby, you hire a developer, or you use an AI coding agent that writes the Rails under human review. That is what we do at LlamaPress. ### Is there a Ruby on Rails website builder? Not in the drag and drop sense. Rails is a framework, so three options sit behind that search. Rails generators including bin/rails generate scaffold write working screens for you. CMS and admin gems such as AlchemyCMS, Publify, ActiveAdmin and Avo add editable pages and admin panels. An AI coding agent writes the Rails code itself, supervised by engineers. ### How much does it cost to host a Rails website? As of this writing, a DigitalOcean Droplet you deploy to with Kamal starts at $4.00 a month. Render's cheapest paid compute is $7 a month. Fly.io lists shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB RAM at $1.94 a month. Heroku's Eco dyno is $5 a month and sleeps after 30 minutes idle, and Basic is $7 and always on. Railway Hobby is $5 a month minimum usage. ### What is the difference between a Rails website and a Rails web application? There is no technical difference. Rails calls everything it builds an application, and a Rails website is a Rails web application whose pages are public. People say website when the pages are mostly for reading, and web app when users sign in and change data. The same commands, the same framework and the same hosting apply to both.