inertia-rails-best-practices_skill

Overview

This skill provides a concise, prioritized set of Inertia Rails best practices for building, reviewing, and refactoring Inertia.js applications with Rails backends and React, Vue, or Svelte frontends. It distills 50+ actionable rules across server setup, props management, forms, navigation, performance, security, testing, and advanced patterns. Use it to improve reliability, performance, and developer ergonomics in Inertia Rails projects.

How this skill works

The guidance inspects common server-side and client-side patterns and recommends concrete rules: what to include in props, how to configure server rendering and asset versioning, form handling patterns, navigation behaviors, and testing checks. It prioritizes rules by impact so you can apply critical fixes first (e.g., limiting props and protecting sensitive data) and follow with performance and advanced patterns. Each rule targets a specific scenario and maps to practical implementation choices in controllers, views, and frontend components.

When to use it

• When writing new Inertia Rails controllers, pages, or layouts
• During code reviews or refactors to reduce payloads and surface area
• When implementing forms, validation, file uploads, or PRG redirects
• While optimizing perceived and actual page load performance
• When setting up authentication/authorization or hardening security

Best practices

• Return only necessary data in props; avoid sending sensitive or bulky objects
• Leverage lazy evaluation (lambdas) and deferred props for expensive or non-critical data
• Use useForm for complex programmatic forms and declarative Form components for simple cases
• Prefer Link components for internal navigation and configure preserve-state/scroll explicitly
• Implement code splitting, prefetch likely navigations, and prefer async visits for background tasks
• Rely on Rails CSRF, strong parameters, server-side validation, and avoid exposing auth secrets in props

Example use cases

• Refactor a controller to return minimal props and convert heavy queries to deferred props
• Add proper file upload handling with multipart forms and validation error bags
• Introduce partial reloads and once props to speed up navigation between pages
• Write RSpec or Minitest assertions that validate Inertia responses and deferred prop behavior
• Apply prefetching and dynamic imports to reduce initial bundle size for large SPA frontends