Incremental Migration from Rails to SPA: A Step-by-Step Guide

Table of Contents

Background

Provide a simple mechanism from creating a base Rails application with an incremental path to migrate to a SPA backing based on a namespace switch to /api.

The goal will be to keep all of the core business logic for persisting data in Rails but gradually move features to the front-end in either Angular or React.

Scenario

Create a mock Rails application

rails new appmigapi

Scaffold several objects

Document the external POST and GET endpoint

Create initial consumer of mock API

yeoman new react-app

Return JSON rather than HTML

respond_to :json

Load mock data

group :development, :test do
  gem 'faker'
end

Validate the implementation with cUrl

Create the Swagger documentation

Create the route mocks for the Python

Links

Tools

Swagger

rake routes

Author: Jason Walsh

j@wal.sh

Last Updated: 2025-07-30 13:45:27

build: 2025-12-23 09:12 | sha: e32f33e