Does Vercel support Ruby on Rails applications?

Vercel supports using Ruby on Rails applications with a headless architecture.

Developers enjoy the productivity of building APIs and backend logic inside Rails applications but are often looking for more modern options for their frontend like React. A headless architecture separates your frontend and backend tooling, enabling you to choose best-in-class solutions for each part of your stack.

With Vercel, you can continue using your Ruby on Rails application as an API for your frontend on Vercel, with zero-configuration support for 35+ frontend frameworks.

Benefits of decoupling

Vercel helps you build and deploy the fastest frontends for your Rails applications. You can deploy your site with zero configuration to the best frontend infrastructure.

• Develop: Connect to your favorite APIs, databases, and content management systems.
• Preview: Integrate with any GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repository for instant continuous deployment.
• Ship: Deploy your site to every edge node worldwide for the fastest sites. Static files, Serverless and Edge Functions, and more.

Further, by moving to a modern frontend framework like Next.js, you can reduce the load on your backend through Incremental Static Regeneration, saving you money on server-side compute.

Migrating to Vercel

You can migrate your existing domain and DNS to Vercel with zero downtime.

Vercel has been designed for incremental adoption. You can continue using your existing Ruby on Rails frontend and take over new pages on Vercel as needed. By starting small and incrementally adding more pages, you can prevent derailing feature work by avoiding a complete rewrite.****

1. The first strategy is to configure your server or proxy such that, everything under a specific subpath points to Vercel For example, your existing website might be at example.com, and you might configure your proxy such that example.com/store serves your new frontend on Vercel.
2. The second strategy is to create your new frontend on Vercel which points to the root URL of your domain. Then, you can use rewrites to have some subpaths to be proxied to your existing app.

If you are using Next.js, learn about incrementally adopting Next.js for more details.