Make your Rails CLI output beautiful. Railbow enhances migrations, routes, stats, notes, and more with colorful, emoji-rich, information-dense formatting.

Features

• Migrations - colorful db:migrate output with readable millisecond timing
• Migration Status - rich db:migrate:status with git authors, calendar view, table detection, landing dates, and time filtering
• Routes - color-coded HTTP verbs and highlighted parameters in rails routes
• Stats - beautiful rails stats tables
• Notes - rails notes with git blame, author colors, date filtering, and sorting
• About - polished rails about output
• Git Integration - authors, diffs, branch origin, landing dates, uncommitted file indicators
• Calendar View - month separators and week tick markers for migration timelines
• Smart Defaults - auto-disables in CI, piped output, NO_COLOR, and LLM agents

Installation

Option A: Add to your Gemfile (recommended)

gem "railbow", group: :development

bundle install

Option B: Use the CLI wrapper (no Gemfile changes)

gem install railbow
railbow rake db:migrate:status
railbow rails routes

The CLI creates a temporary wrapper so Railbow loads automatically without modifying your project's Gemfile.

Usage

Railbow works automatically once installed. Every example below works with both rails and rake commands.

rails db:migrate

Before:

==  CreateProducts: migrating =================================================
-- create_table(:products)
   -> 0.0028s
==  CreateProducts: migrated (0.0028s) ========================================

After:

🚀 CreateProducts: migrating...
  ✓ create_table(:products) → 2.8ms
✅ CreateProducts: migrated (2.8ms total)

rails db:migrate:status

This is Railbow's flagship feature. The plain Rails output:

Status   Migration ID    Migration Name
--------------------------------------------------
up       20260202145343  Add weight field to animals
up       20260203134528  Create vaccination records
up       20260210183902  Create pet tags
up       20260303120000  Add breed restrictions to adoption policies
up       20260313132325  Create veterinary appointments

becomes a rich, information-dense dashboard (with default config):

         Feb 2026   W06
 ↑↑    │ 20260202145343 │ 2026-02-02 14:53:43 │ Add weight field to animals          ● animals
 ↑↑    │ 20260203134528 │ 2026-02-03 13:45:28 │ Create vaccination records           ● vaccination_records
 ↑↑    │ 20260210183902 │ 2026-02-10 18:39:02 │ Create pet tags              ⤻ Mar 04  ● pet_tags
───────┼────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────
         Mar 2026   W10
 ↑↑    │ 20260303120000 │ 2026-03-03 12:00:00 │ Add breed restrictions to…   ⤻ Mar 13  ● adoption_policies
 ↑↑    │ 20260313132325 │ 2026-03-13 13:23:25 │ Create veterinary appointm…  ⎇ PS-142  ● veterinary_appointments

Out of the box you get:

• Calendar separators — month + ISO week headers to orient you in time
• Status aliases — ↑↑ / ↓↓ instead of up / down (customizable)
• Created At — timestamp parsed from the migration ID
• Landing dates — ⤻ Mar 04 badge when a migration was merged to main after its creation
• Branch badges — ⎇ PS-142 showing the source branch/ticket
• Affected tables — color-coded table names extracted from migration files
• Time filtering — only the last 70 days shown by default (since: 70d)
• Your migrations highlighted — rows authored by you are visually distinct

rails db:migrate:down

⏪ CreateProducts: reverting...
  ✓ drop_table(:products) → 1.2ms
✅ CreateProducts: reverted (1.2ms total)

rails routes

HTTP verbs are color-coded (GET=green, POST=yellow, PATCH/PUT=cyan, DELETE=red), route parameters (:id, *splat) are highlighted, and controller#action pairs stand out.

rails stats

Code statistics rendered as a colorful table with highlighted totals and code-to-test ratio.

rails notes

Annotations enriched with git blame data — author names, commit dates, and color-coded tags (TODO=yellow, FIXME=red, OPTIMIZE=cyan, HACK=red, NOTE=green).

Configuration

Railbow works with zero configuration, but everything is customizable.

Config files

Config is loaded in layers (each overrides the previous):

1. Built-in defaults
2. Global: ~/.config/railbow/config.yml
3. Project: .railbow.yml (commit to git)
4. Local: .railbow.local.yml (gitignored, personal overrides)

Generate a config interactively:

railbow init
# or, within a Rails project:
rake railbow:init

Example .railbow.yml

since: 70d
date: rel
git: "author:me,diff,mask:auto"
view: "calendar,tables"
calendar: wticks

compact: "maxw:120"

aliases:
  columns:
    Status: Live
  values:
    Status:
      up: "↑↑"
      down: "↓↓"

Environment variables

Every option can also be set via RBW_* environment variables, which override config files:

Variable	Example	Description
RBW_PLAIN	1	Disable all formatting
RBW_SINCE	2mo, 70d, 1y, all	Filter migrations by time period
RBW_DATE	full, rel, short, custom(%b %d)	Date display format
RBW_GIT	author:me,diff,mask:auto	Git integration options
RBW_VIEW	calendar,tables	Enable calendar view and table detection
RBW_CALENDAR	wticks	Show week tick markers
RBW_COMPACT	oneline,dense,noheader,maxw:80	Compact display options
RBW_VERB	GET,POST	Filter routes by HTTP method
RBW_SORT	file, date	Sort order for notes
RBW_HELP	1	Show help messages

Quick examples

# Last 2 months, calendar view
RBW_SINCE=2mo rake db:migrate:status

# Relative dates, highlight your migrations
RBW_DATE=rel RBW_GIT=author:me rake db:migrate:status

# Full git context with table detection
RBW_GIT=author:all,diff RBW_VIEW=tables rake db:migrate:status

# Only GET routes
RBW_VERB=GET rails routes

# Notes sorted by commit date
RBW_SORT=date rails notes

How It Works

Railbow integrates through a Rails Railtie — it prepends formatter modules onto existing Rails classes without modifying your code:

• ActiveRecord::Migration - migration output
• ActiveRecord::Tasks::DatabaseTasks - migration status
• ActionDispatch::Routing::ConsoleFormatter::Sheet - routes
• Rails::Info - about
• Rails::SourceAnnotationExtractor - notes

Formatting auto-disables when:

• RBW_PLAIN=1 or NO_COLOR is set
• Running in CI (CI env var)
• Output is piped or redirected (non-TTY)
• Running inside an LLM agent (CLAUDECODE env var)

Requirements

• Ruby >= 3.1.0
• Rails >= 7.2 (including 8.x)

Development

bin/setup          # Install dependencies
bundle exec rake   # Run tests + linting (RSpec + Standard)
bin/console        # Interactive prompt

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome at github.com/amberpixels/railbow.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE.txt.