--- title: Chatbot with Ruby on Rails, Turbo Streams, and OpenAI slug: chatbot-with-ruby-on-rails-turbo-streams-and-openai published_at: 2023-10-20 11:00:33 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:12:55 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, we build a chatbot in Ruby on Rails using Turbo Streams to create a real-time chat experience. 00:00 - Introduction We generate a Chat controller, model, and migrations to get started. Then we create the main chat index and show pages. 02:35 - Implement Chat Messaging We build out sending and displaying chat messages using Turbo Streams to update the page without reloading. We also add a background job to process the chat messages. 05:30 - Integrate OpenAI API We send the chat message history to the OpenAI API to generate responses. Then we display the \"thinking\" message before replacing it with the actual response via Turbo Streams. 09:10 - Refactor for Live Feedback We refactor the OpenAI job to immediately show the \"thinking\" message, then later replace it with the final response. This provides live feedback as the response is generated. 12:30 - Next Steps Some ideas for future improvements like authentication, fine-tuning an AI model, and streaming the OpenAI response. Overall, we build a real-time chatbot with Rails and OpenAI using Turbo Streams for a smooth user experience. The code is available on GitHub to try it out yourself! #rubyonrails #openai tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, active record, ruby on rails tutorial, openai, turbo streams, action cable, chat, chat gpt, api] views: 5044 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/chatbot-with-ruby-on-rails-turbo-streams-and-openai youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEIEQwrK2Q8 youtube_id: VEIEQwrK2Q8 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/VEIEQwrK2Q8 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VEIEQwrK2Q8/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Chatbot with Ruby on Rails, Turbo Streams, and OpenAI *Published: October 20, 2023* *Views: 5044* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEIEQwrK2Q8) [![Chatbot with Ruby on Rails, Turbo Streams, and OpenAI](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VEIEQwrK2Q8/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEIEQwrK2Q8) ## Description In this episode, we build a chatbot in Ruby on Rails using Turbo Streams to create a real-time chat experience. 00:00 - Introduction We generate a Chat controller, model, and migrations to get started. Then we create the main chat index and show pages. 02:35 - Implement Chat Messaging We build out sending and displaying chat messages using Turbo Streams to update the page without reloading. We also add a background job to process the chat messages. 05:30 - Integrate OpenAI API We send the chat message history to the OpenAI API to generate responses. Then we display the "thinking" message before replacing it with the actual response via Turbo Streams. 09:10 - Refactor for Live Feedback We refactor the OpenAI job to immediately show the "thinking" message, then later replace it with the final response. This provides live feedback as the response is generated. 12:30 - Next Steps Some ideas for future improvements like authentication, fine-tuning an AI model, and streaming the OpenAI response. Overall, we build a real-time chatbot with Rails and OpenAI using Turbo Streams for a smooth user experience. The code is available on GitHub to try it out yourself! #rubyonrails #openai ## Transcript what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to build a little chat bot using Ruby rails and turbo streams and it'll feel somewhat like chat jbt so let's start off by generated a controller and a little model here so I'm just going to say rails G controller chats and that's going to have an index method and a show method we are going to also have a create but this should give us a good start we're also going to have a model called a chat and this will just have a session ID for now it's just going to be some like random string so that should be fine so create chats this is going to be n false okay and then in our chats or our chat model we can say before validation on create do and we'll set our session ID equal to uh secure r random uh. heex and we'll make it 10 or something okay uh and the next step is in our chats controller here we're just going to have chats return chat. all no there's no like users or anything so that's fine and then instead of find we're going to use find by and we'll pass in that session ID and that'll just make it so that we don't have like Auto incrementing numeric number attach but it won't really matter since you'll be able to see them all here anyways okay in our routes file we want to add resources chats so now we need to rails DB migrate the database and we should be able to see Slash chats now yeah okay we got chats it looks gross but that's fine now we can go to our one of these index pages and just grab that chats index super easy boring no need to reinvent the wheel and here we'll just call this like chats with me I don't know uh kind of funky but whatever the idea is I want to be able to talk to myself my past self and remember things okay articles. each I'm just going to change articles to chats and that's funny this one became chat that should be article same with this one and chats with me some of my long form thoughts on programming and whatever whatever I don't know maybe we'll add a subheading later maybe we won't maybe we'll add pagination later okay so for each of these chats we'll have we'll just print out chat. session ID and then we'll have some button at the top we we'll just say create chat and the method will be post and data we'll turn off turbo for this one and let's see if co-pilot wants to write some classes for us here and yeah sure okay I don't know if we needed all that but that looks good okay all right and there's no prams or anything we just have like this this button here I guess it didn't actually look like anything special okay when we click on create chat it should send a post request to the chats controller in the create method and we want to create a new chat so we're going to say at chat is chat. create bang and then redirect to chat path based on the session ID sure okay let's see if this does its thing it does not why not create it Network tab what's going on here let's present reserve the log and when we click on this it is sending a request uh sending a get request I thought we said method post oh it needs a it needs a path chats path I think that should work all right where is it going there we go create chat boom all right now we're landing on the chat show page so let's go to article show and we'll rip that off chat show and and we'll paste it in here actually the chat show is going to be similar to the index so chat index gosh we're just like copying and pasting a bunch of HTML but that's fine chat and then maybe we'll print out at chat. session ID so we can see what's up okay chats. each and then in here we want to iterate over some chat messages so for now we'll just kind of like delete this and we'll just say messages go here okay so this is going to be our chat show page we don't need a button to create a new chat anymore and this is just going to be our list of messages here okay the way that we're going to store messages is in the database so rails G model chat message that is going to refer back to the chat object and then it will have some content and a role so the role is really for chaty BT know like is this a system message assistant message or user or function we're not going to do anything with functions but create chat messages this should this should be like default to maybe user or something we'll you we'll create an enom for this and we'll just use as a string um okay rails DB migrate all right we'll migrate that and we want to generate another controller and this one's going to be called the chat messages controller the chat messages controller will be purely for creating messages and before we go too far we need to add it to our routes file so we'll say chat messages only yeah only create sure yeah it's listening to me wouldn't that be so cool chat message pams yeah we're actually just going to take in the content okay so we're going to say at chat is chat. find pams chat ID and then on the chat show page here we we're going to create a new um we'll create a new form and this form will just be old school vanilla uh form method is going to be post action is going to be chat messages and let's see we're going to have a input that is hidden for our authenticity token um and the value is going to be this Ruby method that comes from rails form authenticity token we're going to have a text area where the name is chat message content and the yeah that should be a good start okay and then maybe we'll have our like button type is submit and we'll have a send cool that looks good and then maybe we should copy I don't know let's see if it can write the CSS for us again here co-pilot no I want I want it to look like the other one button button primary is not going to work all right Tailwind UI we'll go grab some buttons okay button well let's grab this middle one here I almost always do okay and then my color is teal so I'm going to switch Indigo for teal and just see how that looks okay we've got something going on here the text area we need to Sauce this up a bit so let's go back over here and grab a text area okay and it just needs to look just like a simple text area that would be wonderful and we'll add that there okay so now we've got a text area we've got a button we'll change into to go back to teal again and we'll give this some space okay looking pretty good so we're going to stick our messages here so when we say messages go here we're actually going to say like at chat. chat messages. each do message and I want to use a partial so I'm going to render a partial here called chat messages chat message that looks fantastic then I also want to make this div I want to give this div an ID so that we can Target it with turbo streams later so we're going to say this the ID here is chat messages uncore and then the ID of the chat at chat. ID that way anytime that we are adding new messages we can just like pop them into this div here so if we refresh chat doesn't have that association association yet chat and we're going to so we're going to have to say like has many chat messages I think that should work right chat has it yeah belongs to and has many okay sweet when we create a new message this should send a post request to the chat messages endpoint and maybe it did but we didn't get any feedback because our create method doesn't actually do anything so we want to create a new chat message if the chat message. saave then we want to we want to render with a turbo stream so here we're going to say render turbo stream that's a format that we're going to send back and we want to append we want to append to that chat messages div that we created so we're going to say chat messages uncore and then the ID of at chat and the partial we want to render is the chat message partial those are the locals that looks pretty good if there was no if we weren't able to save for some reason then we're just going to say like render Json of chat message. errors and then say it was unprocessable whatever like that should be that should be fine okay let's test this again and we get nothing no feedback no errors no nothing all right check the server logs what do we got here record not found can't find chat without ID ah we're trying to find the chat by Pam's chat ID but we don't even have that over here so we need a an input type of hidden with the name chat ID and the value is going to be chat. okay all right cool all right now if we say test ah crashed we're missing the partial for the chat messages okay so over here we're going to add chat message. html.erb into our chat messages views directory and here we'll just render chat or yeah chat message. content for now and that should be a good start boom test test two test three ah four okay couple couple errors or or like issues when we click Send it's not clearing out the form so we'd have to like refresh the page to clear it out clear me so if we click Send it's it's creating messages but it's not clearing out the form until we hit send yeah send so let's use stimulus client side side to clear that out on submit so we'll say rails G stimulus chat message form and inside of our chat message Form controller stimulus controller we'll make a method here called reset and this will just say like this. element. reset on the form so then if we go back to our chat me or chat show where we have our form down here we will load up the data controller is going to be chat chat message form and on turbo submit end our chat message form reset okay I think that should work so let's say boom okay so now it's clearing it out and our messages are getting added here to make those look a little nicer let's grab the sort of like article view from article index and we'll just grab like the contents of this so that it looks sort of Chatty I don't know chat message chat message chat message and okay so instead of article anywhere actually yeah I think we can take we can take out well let's make this the the role the chat message rooll no do we want to do that no all right we're just going to blow away the header and then we have yeah we don't need the link to go read the article and this should just be like chat message. content here and then the long date will be the chat message. created at and I don't know if we need that one either all right let's just see what we get here all right looking pretty good looking pretty good what does this one give us chat message. created at okay that's kind of nice being able to see that I like that that's cool okay so now we've got these messages they're going through they're a little bit fat or like tall but whatever uh I think that's fine so now if we add a new message it just appears there okay so now we've got sort of a UI that doesn't Jump Around as we're adding things to it the next step is to talk to open AI because we're storing all of the messages with a given conversation so if we went back to like chats or whatever and that exploded okay so chats index ah this is expecting there to be a bunch of stuff okay I don't know did that fix it no display summary we'll just make that also like messages. first. content. truncate 100 or something I don't know chat messages okay and there might not be one so we'll say like you know if there's not one then don't do the thing cool so now we've got like this read chat thing undefined method session ID so does our oh our link is probably going to yeah okay so let's go back here and make it so that our link goes to the one that has the ID great and if we create a new one cool now we have this like Blank Slate you know long ago something happened okay great but we want to send this to we want to send this to open Ai and I think we want to do it in a background job so that it doesn't take forever for the the controller to respond there are ways to do the streaming thing with the open AI ruby gem and we can look at that in a future episode but for now we're going to say rails G job chat message created and in the chat message created job we're going to take in the new message and what what we want to do here is we want to like collect the messages for this chat we want to send those to open Ai and then we want to yeah send the response back to chat now before we do any of that we can tell the chat like oh we're thinking of a response or something but yeah we could do that later we can do that later so we'll say at chat message is chat message and what are the messages that we want to send so the messages are going to be at chat message. chat. chat messages do order by created at ascending or something I think we want them in order and then we want to map over those and for each one we want to create a message in the format that open AI is expecting so in the API reference for creating a new uh chat completion the messages request body needs um couple of things content and the role so thankfully we have skillfully crafted our chat message object to also have content m. content and roll being m. roll and inside of our chat message we can also just like add an En here if we wanted but for now I think we're yeah I think we're fine by default the the role is going to be user and then otherwise we're going to set it to system okay so that is the messages so we'll do that here and then we want to send those to open AI so I already have a summarization job that has a couple things one of them being reference to an open AI client another one being how to actually send this so this is an example in fact we'll grab this whole thing here and we'll just plop it in there okay so we're going to use GPT 3.5 turbo the messages that we're going to send is just going to be messages and we'll turn the temperature here to I don't know 09 sure I don't know and then this is the response that we're going to get back and I think here we want to create a new chat message with the response yeah actually it did it hear me again create a new chat message with the response okay so we're going to say chat message. create the RO now is system and the content is going to be the answer okay whoops all right so now we have a new like system message and we need some way to send that back into the chat right back into the same chat also we need the chat that this thing is related to which we can grab from that instance variable that we said earlier okay so I think what we want to do is broadcast so we want to do like a turbo streams Channel broadcast append to the chat messages uh chat message Chat ID okay that is going to be the div that matches our chat show that matches this this div ID right here I think I'm pretty sure I don't know turbo stream from it could also be this is it this or is it this I don't remember oh you know what this is our Target and why am I second guessing I don't know this is now okay okay we also need a Target so this this this first one is the streamable thing right the target is going to be chat messages chat message ID this is what we're going to append to right append is show up at the bottom and then what we want to render is the partial for chat message chat message and we need the locals in this case to be the system message that we just talked about um okay cool ra C let's just try and throw a message at it so chat message created a job. perform now with chat message. last and and I think this might be okay something crashed what do we what do we got going on here undefined method UTC for nil class perform start active Java event blah blah blah hey we got some content back that changed the course of history BL da okay so we got some content back but it did not actually update the page and we needed to refresh broadcasting to chat messages 2 with append chat messages 2 blah blah blah H why was this upper part so sad it looks like it through could not log perform start dat active job no method UTC for nil class what is this about no idea okay first of all I want to make sure that we're not getting too many tokens so we'll say Max tokens 150 that should be fine for now and then in our controller chat messages controller after we create our message and save it to the database I want to kick off this job that will be performed later for that that chat chat message so if we refresh the page here and we say like tell me why Apple Pi is so good boom send okay now now oh boom all right apple pie is considered delicious for a variety of reasons boom so it showed up but it kind of surprised me and I didn't know like what was going on right like we had no feedback feedback is important right when you type into chat gbt it starts spitting stuff out for you it streams the response back we're not going to do that right now but it starts streaming it like one character or block or chunk or whatever at a time and so what I think we want to do is refactor our job here so that that it gives people feedback and by people I mean me feedback as it's going so let's flip this whole thing on its head and we're going to do something a little different what we're going to do is we're going to create the message first we're going to create this new system message first and the reason is that what we're going to do is we're going to broadcast this append to immediately right when the job is being performed we're going to broadcast cast this this append now in the content to start out we can just say thinking right uh now the tricky part is later when we get the answer back we want to broadcast a replace that will update the message sort of in place and that we can do by saying all of this the target this time is now going to be chat message singular and this will be the message ID for the system message so the reason we actually want to like create and save this in the database right now is so that we can Target the Dom element on our chat message partial so let's say this article if we give it like an ID of chat message chat message. then when we render the system message the first time this ID should match the system message ID and then later on when we broadcast a replace we can replace that one oh also because we're passing all of the messages from this conversation we should be able to say like how do you bake it and it should know we're talking about apple pie by saying it because we have the previous messages let's see okay we've got a thinking it tells us that it's doing something [Music] and maybe did we explode oh okay we got a we got a response back but it didn't didn't update oh shoot we forgot a step okay we got to update the response imagine that so system message. update content is the answer okay well if we refresh the page it's going to be there but no it's not going to be there all right let's say like how do you bake it okay thinking thinking thinking boom to bake apple pie you'll need the following ingredients sick okay so now we have a basic little chat bot using turbo streams active job Ruby on Rails all the good stuff uh I think I'm going to throw this endpoint behind uh username and password at least for now and I have been watching lots of content about how to F tune so we'll be trying to use our trunks we created in the last episode to go through and fine-tune our own GPT 3.5 model based on that content so that when we have a conversation here it will have the context of all of the content that we've created so far thank you so much for watching really appreciate it appreciate your time and attention and yeah we'll see you online cheers --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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