Admin toggles (published/unpublished, featured/unfeatured) are a perfect Hotwire use case: server-rendered state, instant UI update. I render the toggle as a partial inside a frame, and the update action responds with a turbo stream replacing that fra

Sometimes you want only part of the screen to navigate—like a sidebar list updating the main content. Turbo Frames can do this cleanly: render the sidebar normally, and make its links target a turbo_frame_tag called main. Clicking a link swaps the mai

When I’m on Rails 7+, I like broadcasts_to because it makes realtime behavior obvious in the model. Instead of writing explicit after_create_commit hooks, I declare that a model broadcasts to its parent or to a scope. Then Turbo uses conventional part

For long text entry, autosave is a huge quality-of-life improvement. I implement it with a Stimulus controller that debounces input and submits the form to a drafts endpoint in the background. The response is a turbo stream that updates a “Saved at …”

A markdown preview doesn’t need a client markdown parser. I render the preview server-side (same pipeline used in production), and load it into a Turbo Frame. The editor form includes a frame called preview, and a “Preview” button submits the form to

Drag-and-drop reorder can be fancy, but the core is: user triggers a reorder action, server persists positions, and the UI updates. For simpler UIs, I skip drag-and-drop and use up/down buttons. Each click POSTs to a move_up action, updates position,

Double-submits are easy to trigger on slow connections, especially with Turbo where the page doesn’t visibly reload. I add a Stimulus controller that listens to turbo:submit-start and turbo:submit-end events on the form. On submit start, disable the s

A modal that opens without focusing an input is a tiny annoyance that adds up. In Hotwire apps, modals often swap in via Turbo Frames, which means the DOM is injected after navigation. Stimulus is ideal here: attach an autofocus controller to the moda

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

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

I don’t test Hotwire behavior by guessing; I add system tests that exercise the UI. With Capybara, I click a button that triggers a Turbo Stream response and assert that the DOM changes without a full page reload. The exact assertion depends on the fe

In a Turbo app, returning the right HTTP status is not optional—it controls how Turbo treats the response. For invalid form submissions, return 422 Unprocessable Entity and render the form with errors. If you mistakenly return 200, Turbo may treat it