Ruby on Rails Internals

Sat, 30 Aug 2014 23:08:48 +0545

For this talk at DevMeetup, I walked through how Rails works internally - tracing the full code journey from Rack all the way through to Railties. The session covers the entire Rails request lifecycle and the architectural layers that make it tick.

Topics covered:

Rack - how Rack sits at the foundation, defining the call interface that every web framework speaks.
Rails boot sequence - what happens when you run rails server, from environment loading to application initialization.
Rack and Rails middlewares - the middleware stack, how request/response pairs flow through it, and what each built-in middleware contributes.
Rails engines - how engines mount into the host application, sharing routes, controllers, and views as self-contained modules.
ActionDispatch routing - the routing DSL, RouteSet, how a URL is matched to a controller action, and what goes on inside the router.
ActionController rendering - how controllers process incoming requests, invoke actions, resolve templates, and render responses.
Railties - the glue that wires the framework together, including configuration, initializers, generators, and the plugin system.

The slides walk through real source code from Rails itself, making it a practical deep-dive rather than just theory.

Slides on Saroj Maharjan

Ruby on Rails Internals