// the find
eliotsykes/real-world-rails
Real World Rails applications and their open source codebases for developers to learn from
A collection of 100+ real open-source Rails apps and engines bundled as git submodules, with a `bin/rwr` CLI for cross-cutting analysis — grep for method patterns, compare model names, extract view specs across all of them at once. Aimed at Rails developers who learn better from reading production code than tutorials.
The submodule approach is the right call — you get actual git history and can pull updates, not a frozen snapshot. The `bin/rwr` inspector system is genuinely useful for questions like 'how do other people name background jobs?' or 'which apps use doorkeeper?', answering them in seconds instead of hours of manual browsing. The app list is serious: Discourse, Mastodon, GitLab, Redmine, Spree — not toy apps. The `FILES_PATTERN` env var lets you point the inspectors at your own codebase, which is a smart escape hatch.
Many of the included apps haven't seen meaningful commits in years — some are effectively abandoned — so you're sometimes learning patterns from Rails 4/5-era code that has since been superseded. The repo itself weighs a lot once submodules are initialized (100+ full Rails codebases), which makes CI and onboarding slow. The inspector set is narrow: there's no inspector for routes, concerns, service objects, or anything outside models and views, so the analysis tooling doesn't match the breadth of what's actually in the apps. No curation of app quality — a half-finished side project sits next to GitLab, with no signal about which is worth reading.