The name of this is tentative. Not really too sure what to call it yet.

Rails is in dire need of UI frameworks. The JS ecosystem has all these awesome UI frameworks that make building beautiful UIs a breeze. But, Rails is missing that, and it's a pain. LycanUi serves to fill that gap.

LycanUi is a collection of UI components that can be easily added to your Rails app, either by copy and pasting the code, or by using a generator.

Yep, copy and paste. Inspired by shadcn/ui, LycanUi just gives you the code.

The worst part about interacting with any UI framework is when you need to customize their designs or funcitonality. If you need to do something that is outside what the component was originally designed for, you normally.. just can't. Not to mention overriding their provided CSS is normally hellish.

LycanUi provides sensible defaults for styles and functionality, that way you get something that works and follows accessibility guidelines.

Start with the default functionality and styling, and then when you need to expand or change anything, you can.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "lycan_ui", group: :development

And then execute:

$ bundle

Now to make sure your app is set up for use, run

$ rails generate lycan_ui:setup

Say you want to install the Button component. You can do so by running the following command:

$ rails generate lycan_ui:add button

You'll now see some things in components/button.rb, you can now use that component in any view or helper like so

<%= render Button.new %>

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.