Basecoat Rails
Basecoat (shadcn) powered layouts, scaffolds, views and partials for Ruby on Rails. Especially powerful for admin applications with a lot of CRUD actions.
Why?
The default Rails scaffolds are ugly. There is no styling, no Turbo Frames — the WOW factor is missing. Basecoat CSS combines Tailwind with clean CSS classes and components. It recreates the looks of shadcn/ui — without React — and this gem brings all of it to Rails: one command installs the layout, another generates fully styled scaffolds.
See it in action
This is the actual HTML produced by rails g scaffold Post title:string! description:text posted_at:datetime active:boolean rating:integer after installing Basecoat — rendered live below (try the sidebar and dark mode toggles).
What you get
- Basecoat CSS styling for every generated view
- Turbo Frame support for SPA-like navigation, plus view transitions
- Responsive layout with sidebar, header and automatic navigation links
- Dark mode support with a persistent theme toggle
- Form validation styling with required fields, booleans styled as switches
- Form helpers: searchable selects, remote search and a country picker
- Optional styled views for Devise, Rails authentication and Pagy pagination
Requirements
- Rails 8.0+
- Tailwind CSS (tailwindcss-rails)
- basecoat-css 1.0+ (installed for you)
- Stimulus (only for the remote search helper)