Rails Trace

What code runs when you request a page from a Ruby on Rails application?

Here is an annotated trace showing every method call within Rails and its dependencies. It is for an example application that loads a blog post from the database and renders a page containing the post's title.

Scroll to see the trace

The Model Layer

ActiveRecord is Rails's model layer. It models records in your application that you want to persist to a database.

You can see methods being called here to help manage database connections and to generate the SQL query to needed to load our Post record from the database. Once the query is run Rails creates a new Post object with fields from the database.

Created by Chris Zetter in a tribute to Rails and its many contributors.

Read out more about how the trace was made.

You can see the code that powers this page and suggest resources to link to on GitHub.