Using Plugins in Your App

we usually use five or six plugins in each app.
--David Heinemeier Hansson at Canada on Rails

Plugins are self-contained libraries made specially for Rails. They are a great way to reuse someone else’s code or to package your own code for reuse.


Unlike gems, plugins are installed directly into a specific Rails app. This makes it easier to deploy them remotely along with an entire application.

I mentioned that the following places are good sources for plugins:

• Core Rails
• Plugin Directory

Discover and Install（you should run the script in the project directory!）

Once you’ve found a plugin that does what you want, install it into your existing Rails app like this:

# Install a plugin from a known source ./script/plugin install calendar_helper #

Similar on Windows ruby script/plugin install calendar_helper

# Install from a specific url ./script/plugin install # Install by linking it directly

within Subversion ./script/plugin install -x calendar_helper

If the script doesn’t automatically find the plugin, run the discovery action which looks for all the sources on the Rails wiki:
./script/plugin discover

To uninstall a plugin, you can:

• Delete the specific folder for the plugin
• Remove it with svn delete
• Unlink it with svn propdel svn:externals vendor/plugins/