--- title: Rails 8: How to Auto-Generate Social Media Preview Cards description: A step-by-step guide to auto-generating OpenGraph social media preview images in Rails 8 without paying for third-party APIs. The approach uses a dedicated... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/rails-8-how-to-auto-generate-social-media-preview-cards-atispnhpj twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Rails 8: How to Auto-Generate Social Media Preview Cards | daily.dev og:description: A step-by-step guide to auto-generating OpenGraph social media preview images in Rails 8 without paying for third-party APIs. The approach uses a dedicated... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/rails-8-how-to-auto-generate-social-media-preview-cards-atispnhpj og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/ATispnhpJ.png og:image:alt: Rails 8: How to Auto-Generate Social Media Preview Cards og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Rails 8: How to Auto-Generate Social Media Preview Cards **[Ruby Flow](https://daily.dev/sources/rubyflow)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A step-by-step guide to auto-generating OpenGraph social media preview images in Rails 8 without paying for third-party APIs. The approach uses a dedicated 1200x630 HTML/Tailwind card view, the Ferrum gem to take headless Chrome screenshots of that view, Solid Queue to run generation as a background job after post creation, and ActiveStorage to persist the resulting PNG. Finally, og:image and twitter:card meta tags are added to the post layout to surface the image on social platforms. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Open Graph Image Generation in Rails](https://daily.dev/posts/open-graph-image-generation-in-rails-5vecgi43k) · RUBYLAND · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [How I generate an Open Graph image for every post](https://daily.dev/posts/how-i-generate-an-open-graph-image-for-every-post-fouqece4o) · Flavio Copes · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Active Storage Image Optimization: 1,916 Photos, One Box](https://daily.dev/posts/active-storage-image-optimization-1-916-photos-one-box-kxpavbe7v) · Ruby Flow · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Self-updating screenshots](https://daily.dev/posts/self-updating-screenshots-6qhtiffea) · Hacker News · 4 upvotes · 1 comments - [Why GitHub’s Default Social Cards Are a UX Anti-Pattern](https://daily.dev/posts/why-github-s-default-social-cards-are-a-ux-anti-pattern-txq5pbqqc) · ITNEXT · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#rails](https://daily.dev/tags/rails), [#tailwind-css](https://daily.dev/tags/tailwind-css) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/rails-8-how-to-auto-generate-social-media-preview-cards-atispnhpj) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Rails 8: How to Auto-Generate Social Media Preview Cards","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/rails-8-how-to-auto-generate-social-media-preview-cards-atispnhpj","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/rails-8-how-to-auto-generate-social-media-preview-cards-atispnhpj"},"datePublished":"2026-04-27T05:31:55.015Z","dateModified":"2026-04-27T05:32:18.630Z","description":"A step-by-step guide to auto-generating OpenGraph social media preview images in Rails 8 without paying for third-party APIs. 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