In this episode, we look at changing the default Rails 7 development environment over to a Docker based environment.

With Rails 7 coming out soon, it's a good time to look at what it could take to upgrade our existing applications to esbuild. In this episode, we start with a Rails 6 application and begin the upgrade process by removing Webpacker and switching over to esbuild.

In this episode, we create a chat application using Rails 7, esbuild (JS Bundling), CSS Bundling, Hotwire, and Action Text. We also dive into some issues around CSS Bundling and Action Text.

CSS Bundling for Rails provides a new way for importing and managing our CSS assets in Rails Applications, but it does have some challenges around a few libraries (specifically font awesome and a few others) which we'll look at in this episode.

Using Hotwire we'll create a comment and voting system from scratch without any javascript. With the help of Turbo, we enable real-time updates and broadcasts of comments and votes.