rails-cto

Opinionated Claude Code plugin that turns Claude into a senior-engineer-grade Ruby on Rails collaborator. It guides every layer of the stack and enforces strict quality, security, and test gates so nothing ships without review.

Help wanted — early days

rails-cto is in active early development. The vision is a fully integrated Rails workflow that makes Claude the best collaborator a Ruby on Rails developer can have — see railscto.com for the bigger picture. There's a lot of ground still to cover, and a helping hand goes a long way. If you write Rails and have opinions about what a senior-engineer-grade Claude should do, contributions, issues, and feedback are all welcome on GitHub.

Skills

rails-cto covers the full Rails development lifecycle:

• Plans multi-step features before code is written — scoping, gem research, edge cases, and step-by-step implementation plans
• Writes idiomatic Rails code for controllers, models, RESTful routes, JSON APIs, and command/service objects
• Builds the front-end with ERB, ViewComponents, Stimulus, Turbo, and Tailwind
• Writes Minitest tests targeting full or near-full coverage — Spec DSL, parallel execution, and SimpleCov reports to verify it
• Auto-formats and lints Ruby with RuboCop and ERB with Herb — fixes what it can, flags what it can't
• Enforces code quality with Reek (code smells), Flog (complexity), and Flay (duplication)
• Scans for security issues using Brakeman and bundler-audit
• Guides Rails version upgrades with selective diffs and upgrade notes
• Automates the git workflow — clean commits, PRs targeting staging, and production release PRs
• Enforces QA gates at every step so nothing ships without tests, lint, and review

Start every session with /rails-cto — the orchestrator skill handles session init, routes to specialist skills, enforces QA gates, and runs the completion checklist. Browse skills/ for the full list of individual skills.

Installation

Install from the marketplace

/plugin marketplace add mattsears/rails-cto
/plugin install rails-cto@rails-cto

Install the companion gem

The plugin's skills rely on a quality toolchain (RuboCop, Reek, Flog, Flay, Brakeman, bundler-audit, SimpleCov, Herb) and a set of matching config files. Rather than installing and configuring all of that by hand, add the companion rails-cto gem to your Rails project:

group :development, :test do
  gem "rails-cto"
end

Then bootstrap the project:

bundle install
bundle exec rails-cto init

Install marketplace dependencies

The Stimulus skill depends on better-stimulus@obie-skills. Install it from the obie/skills marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add obie/skills
/plugin install better-stimulus@obie-skills

Node-side Herb tools

Herb's Node-side formatter and linter aren't part of the gem. Add them to your package.json devDependencies:

"@herb-tools/formatter": "0.9.2",
"@herb-tools/linter": "0.9.2"

Then run yarn install (or npm install).

GitHub CLI

The rails-cto-pull-request and rails-cto-production-pr skills use the gh CLI to open PRs. Install it (brew install gh on macOS, or see the install guide for other platforms) and authenticate once:

gh auth login

Updating

Refresh the marketplace manifest so Claude Code picks up the latest published version:

/plugin marketplace update rails-cto

Uninstalling

/plugin uninstall rails-cto@rails-cto

To also remove the marketplace reference:

/plugin marketplace remove mattsears/rails-cto