Prerequisites
Let's set strong foundations first so you can fly through the upcoming 15-minute quickstart.
Before you start
It makes things easier if before starting you have already decided:
You can also use a subdomain (like myapp.example.com) instead of a domain, but in any case you need to have either purchased and ready to use if you want to deploy your app to production. I recommend buying your domains from Cloudflare (they sell domains at cost)
You can always rebrand and change your project name and domain later, but renaming everything everywhere is always a pain, so I strongly recommend setting it right from the start.
Technical requirements
You should have the following things installed and configured in your development computer:
External services
For your RailsFast app to run in production (live for everyone to see and use), you will need accounts in:
These are the RailsFast recommendations. These are not hard requirements, but we'll move forward assuming you have accounts in these services.
You may be able to develop your RailsFast app locally without any of these, but they'll be needed for putting your app in production.
You may swap some of these external services for others you prefer (for example, using DigitalOcean instead of Hetzner, or using Mailgun instead of AWS SES), but these are not the official RailsFast recommendations and therefore RailsFast may not support them. It's strongly encouraged you stick to these recommendations.
If you've skipped it, I recommend going back to the docs home page and reading the motivation behind RailsFast. It's not mandatory, but it's a good read and I believe it will help you understand why we'll be doing the things we'll be doing.
Development tools
To develop / vibe code your RailsFast app, I recommend:
You can also just use VS Code, nvim or any other code editor if you like it more: development tools are very developer-specific, and therefore these are not hard requirements. RailsFast should work fine with any code editor you choose, but you'll only get the best AI-assisted experience if you stick to Cursor/Claude Code.
Throughout this first few "Getting Started" pages, I'll try to get you up and running from zero, explaining things in simple terms without making many assumptions about how much you may already know about Rails or web development in general. If you're an experienced developer, you may feel I'm overexplaining at times: please remember it's just to make onboarding easier for people that may not be as experienced. After the Getting Started section, the docs will get more technical. If, on the other hand, you're starting from scratch and this is the first time you work with an entire web project by yourself, you may find those extra explanations helpful. If you still have questions, no matter how basic, paste the docs URL into Grok or ChatGPT and ask away! P.S.: I'm writing everything in this "Getting Started" manually, without AI -- I've put a lot of effort and care into it so it's not AI slop!
All set? Jump to the 15 min quickstart!