Shepherd Theme – Property Management UI for Rails

Shepherd Theme Hands-On: Build Property SaaS in Rails

Shepherd - Calendar UI

What Is the Shepherd Theme?

Shepherd is an Airbnb-inspired property-management and tenant-communication theme built with Tailwind CSS, Stimulus JS, and Ruby on Rails, designed to live directly inside your Rails app without copy-pasting external snippets . It ships as part of RailsUI’s swappable theme lineup, alongside Hound and others, and is completely free to try .

Features ✨

50 + reusable Tailwind-styled components (buttons, tables, modals, etc.)
20 + pre-designed page views covering dashboards, marketing, and auth flows
Dark-mode support across every component and email template
Built for Rails 7/8 with Hotwire & Stimulus interactivity baked in
Tailwind v4 ready as of RailsUI v3.1.0
Fully responsive layouts tested on common break-points

Included Components 📒

Accordion • Alert • Badge • Breadcrumb • Button • Card • Datalist • Dropdown • Flash • Modal • Pagination • Tabs • Toast • Tooltip—and 30 + more, all accessible in /app/views/rui after install.

Pros and Cons

Pros ✅

Rapid MVPs: replaces weeks of UI work with plug-and-play templates
Rails-first: nothing to wire up; runs with rails railsui:install
Themeable: swap color palettes or entire layouts in seconds
Active project: frequent updates & 430 + GitHub stars

Cons ⚠️

Premium licence required for some advanced layouts
Opinionated Tailwind styling may clash with existing Bootstrap UI
Documentation for Importmaps installs still thin
Limited to Rails—developers on Phoenix/Laravel must look elsewhere

Integration

Add the gem and run rails railsui:install to pick Shepherd
Works with cssbundling-rails / jsbundling-rails (esbuild, bun, rollup, webpack) out of the box
Stimulus controllers included for dropdowns, tooltips, and wizards
Compatible with Tailwind presets if you already have a design system

FAQ

Is Shepherd open-source?

Yes—the core theme is MIT; paid licence unlocks extras.

Does Shepherd support Turbo/Hotwire?

Absolutely—Stimulus controllers and Turbo-ready views are included.

Can I replace Shepherd’s colors?

Yes—brand palettes live in config/initializers/railsui.rb.

Which Rails versions work?

Officially Rails 7 & 8; older versions need manual tweaks.

Shepherd