hotwire

Turbo Drive records visits in browser history. For some interactions (like typing through search results), you don’t want every click to create a new history entry. Turbo supports data-turbo-action='replace' to replace the current history entry instea

Copy buttons are deceptively tricky across browsers. This Stimulus controller uses the Clipboard API when available, falls back to execCommand, and provides a hook for “Copied!” UI.

Turbo gives you a handful of built-in stream actions (append, replace, remove), but sometimes you want behavior like “replace then highlight”. You can implement this as a custom action: send a turbo-stream with action='highlight' and include a templat

When a page has lots of dynamic pieces but I still want “just refresh it” semantics, I use Turbo’s morphing refreshes. With turbo_refreshes_with method: :morph, Turbo updates the DOM by morphing rather than doing a full replace, which tends to preserv

Inline editing works best when the frame boundary is small and stable (one row). Render the display state inside a frame, then link to edit inside the same frame. Submit swaps it back. This keeps controllers simple and UI snappy.

Long-running jobs are where Hotwire can feel magical: start an export, then watch progress update live. I give each job a “progress” model, render it in a turbo_frame_tag, and broadcast replacements as the job advances. The job updates percent and sta

Even with model broadcasts, it’s useful to know how streams map to ActionCable channels. Turbo::StreamsChannel is essentially a channel that streams from a signed stream name. When I need custom behavior, I still follow the same scoping rules: identif

Turbo Frames can trigger lots of small requests, so caching matters. For expensive frame endpoints (like an activity panel), I use stale? with an ETag that includes a cache key and the latest update timestamp. If the content hasn’t changed, Rails retu

Broadcasting Turbo Streams via Action Cable enables real-time collaborative features without polling. When a model is created, updated, or destroyed, I broadcast the change to all subscribed users using broadcasts_to or manual broadcast_* methods. Sub

When a page has many small targets, wiring dozens of Turbo Stream operations can get noisy. Rails’ broadcasts_refreshes (Rails 7.1+) lets you take a pragmatic approach: broadcast a refresh, and Turbo morphs the page. It’s not always the right choice (

For controller-level confidence, I add a request spec that sets Accept: text/vnd.turbo-stream.html and asserts the response includes a turbo stream action. This is faster than a system test and catches accidental template name changes (create.turbo_st

Tabs often turn into a mini-SPA. Instead, I treat each tab as a URL and load its content into a turbo_frame_tag named tab_content. Clicking a tab link targets that frame. This gives you browser history, deep linking, and sharable URLs, while keeping t