---
title: Turbo Streams Tic Tac Toe
slug: turbo-streams-tic-tac-toe
published_at: 2021-09-10 14:00:30 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:55 +0000
summary: 
description: Implementing a multi player tic tac toe game with turbo streams and ruby on rails. #LearnInPublic   https://github.com/cjavdev/turbo-streams-tic-tac-toe #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, ruby on rails tutorial, turbo, turbo streams, turbo tic tac toe, turbo streams tic tac toe]
views: 1856
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/turbo-streams-tic-tac-toe
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxs8tKIOKU4
youtube_id: Zxs8tKIOKU4
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zxs8tKIOKU4
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Zxs8tKIOKU4/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Turbo Streams Tic Tac Toe

*Published: September 10, 2021*
*Views: 1856*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxs8tKIOKU4)

[![Turbo Streams Tic Tac Toe](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Zxs8tKIOKU4/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxs8tKIOKU4)

## Description

Implementing a multi player tic tac toe game with turbo streams and ruby on rails. #LearnInPublic 

https://github.com/cjavdev/turbo-streams-tic-tac-toe
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to implement tic-tac-toe using turbo's streams it should be pretty fun and we should at the end have a multiplayer tic-tac-toe game that we can play across different browsers so i'm going to start off by just creating a brand new rails application so i'm going to say rails new tic tac toe and we'll call this one v3 and we'll skip tests and we're going to use postgres so i always get this error about not having the right node version installed so i'm going to jump into our directory here and use node n to update my local version of node to a higher version my globally installed one is a super old version of node it doesn't play well with webpacker i'm going to say rails web packer colon install and re-run that bit now i'm going to open up package json here and there's a weird thing that happens with webpack cli being on an old version and so i've found that i need to actually change this to 4.4.0 not sure if that's something you'll run into the next thing i want to do is go through the process of installing turbo rails i'm going to say bundle add turbo dash rails this will install the turbo rails gem and it will bundle install next we're going to run rails turbo colon install all right that's going to set up turbo inside of our application you'll notice here at the very top we see this message that says you must import hotwired turbo rails in your javascript entry point file so let's open up application.js and import that here that's going to wire up all of the front end pieces that we're going to need for listening to those websocket notifications on the client we actually want to run rails turbo install redis to use redis as our backing store all right let's fire up the rails server and we will also fire up our webpack dev server so we're going to run bin slash webpack dev server to run the dev server then in another in another tab here what i'm going to do is go back into this directory i'm going to generate a new model we'll say railsg model game and all that game model is going to have is a single column called state for uh for our game state and then another column for our current symbol and the idea is that we'll maintain all of the game state for tic-tac-toe inside of this json blob where we will have sort of rows and columns and whether like what the symbols are in there and then our current symbol will just be kind of like what is the current who who's going next is it x or is it o and that should be a good start okay so let's open up actually let's uh run the migration so rails db create db migrate now we can open up the game class and take a look so before validations we want to sort of set up a default game state and so we're going to say before validation on create we want to set up the state self.state is equal to some hash where maybe we have the rows and those are going to point at some columns which will pre-populate with nil so 0 1 uh and 2. alright so we've got our initial game state and then our current symbol can be set up as maybe just like x or o dot sample so just we'll start off with some random symbol and then inside of our game state what we'll probably want to do is have a method called move which will take in um some like x and y value or like row and column value and we want to actually update the state in this case so we'll say something like state at row.2s and column.2s is equal to whatever the current symbol is and then we want to swap the current symbol so it turns out that it's a different um so the next player's turn so in internally we're going to have something like this where we might have like if if we were to make a move with say like 0 0 then we want to sort of go into here at 0 0 and set that value equal to whatever the current symbol is basically hopefully that makes sense so that's kind of like us making the actual move the reason we want to call 2s on these is i expect that we're going to want to pass them in as integers sometimes and sometimes as string values if we're receiving them from the front end so we're going to convert them into strings and then use those as key values also the underlying state object when we store this json it's going to store these as string keys instead of integer keys so we're kind of just yeah we're using integers here but they'll be stored as strings later on so um the next step or the next step here is to swap the current symbol which we can do by saying like self.current symbol is equal to the thing that's not the current symbol so current if the current symbol is equal to x then we want to switch it to o otherwise we want to switch it to x so if it's not equal to x we want to switch it to x otherwise we want to switch it back to o then we want to call self.save bang here and that should actually like make our move so if we were to open up the rails console and then create a new game so we should be able to say g equals game dot create then we have a g dot current symbol and that should give us back some letter so that gives us x then if we want to say like g dot move we can give it zero zero that should update the state and save it and now g dot current symbol should be o and is correctly o so we're swapping the current symbol correctly and then g dot state does have 0 0 populated with an x and everything else is nil so i think this is all working well enough that we can go talk about the next step so let's generate a games controller so we'll say rails g controller games and that's going to have an index and a show page so we'll have like just a list of all the games and then we'll have a show page that will have um the game board the actual game board and you'll sort of copy and paste the game show page to someone else so they can play with you so if we open up the games index here this is gonna have maybe a button at least to start we'll just have a button that says like um new game or something so we'll just say like new game that'll send a post request to the games controller and here we'll say at games is equal to game.all um at game is game.fine params id and then in the case that we're going to create a new game we want to that was a little more than i wanted uh what do we want to do we want to say at game is game. create i think that's fine and then redirect to um actually we can just redirect to game.create we have like no inputs or anything so that should be fine for now let's also go to our routes and make sure that we have some of these set up so resources games and then we'll route to games index so if we land on the root we should see games index okay webpacker is trying to compile stuff okay so we see this new game button when we click on the new game button we are redirected to games slash 2 and we see the game show page so let's go implement this so on the game show page this is going to have our actual game board now when we're working with turbo streams we actually want to like put the game board inside of some div that we can target by id so in this case what i'm going to do is create a div with id equal to the dom id for a given game so actually we're going to use dom id this is a helper method for pulling out the dom id for a given active record model and inside of this div we're going to render a partial for the game so in order to render a partial we need a new file a new template a view here called underscore game.html.erb and this is where we will actually render out the game stuff so i think what we want to do is something like three times do row and three times do column and for the rows and columns let's see so for the rows we want a like block level object um so we want a div right we're gonna have some like div and for the that's gonna be each row let's give it a class row and then inside of each column inside those rows we actually just want like a cell so let's use a span and we'll give this class cell and in here for now we'll just put like an x so that we can have something to look at on the page we'll refresh the page here we see all these x's they look pretty good let's make them a little bigger though by modifying some scss so game as css so we're going to write a little bit of css here for the row class display flex so the row is the container we want that to be flex and then the cell we want that to flex row one i think and then let's make the this have a border of like one px solid red just so we can see it on the view okay cool so this is sort of growing the full width let's make the row max width of like i don't know 300 pixels if we refresh that's looking pretty good now we want the height of the row to be maybe 100 pixels i don't know if there's a better way to do this but this is giving us a pretty good looking board i actually want to maybe cut this in half 150 and 50. okay and then let's also make it so that our cell is also using display flex so that we can put the content of the cell like smack in the middle so display uh flex and i think we want like justify content center great okay and then i think we want justify items center or something oh gosh what is it how do i align them vertically centered uh let's see um align items center there we go align items okay so we've got oh gosh we're writing css be careful um i don't actually know if this is the if there's any best practices about css i don't know them so yeah buyer beware when you're looking at css that i've written but this should at least give us some cells and then what we actually want is inside of those cells we want the content from our game so here we want to say something like uh if there's uh there is something at that cell so game.state row column i this is okay so something that's getting a little ugly is like reaching into the state and then passing in row and column here so what i think i want to do is actually go back to the game class and add a little helper method here so let's override the square bracket operator so that it accepts in the row and column and then we can just use then we should be able to just use the square bracket operator here and say pass in row and column and that should give back state at row.s and column dot 2s that way we have one place where we can do sort of the input validation and cleanup and then we also have this nice kind of like pretty square bracket operator thing so if it's not nil then we want to like actually put that content otherwise if it is nil then we want to do something else so if it is not nil then we want to print out whatever is inside there otherwise i think we want something like a button but we'll come back and look at that in a second so that we have just so that we have a sort of a placeholder and now if we refresh the page okay so in this case these are all going to be buttons but we'll come back and mess around with those because we need a route that's going to handle our moves so how we're going to keep track of our moves well i think what we want to do one one option would be to go into the games controller here and add some method here maybe like an update method to game or some other method to game right where you could send in some specific maybe you send in all the json to update the entire game or something like that but i think i want to separate a game from a move so let's go create a moves controller rails g controller moves and our moves controller will be certain or like our move routes will be nested underneath game routes so let me show you what i'm talking about so here i'm going to say do so i'm passing now a block to the resources games here where i'm going to nest resources moves and i'm only going to support create and that will make it so that we have this route that's like slash games one slash moves that will accept post requests and those post requests will create a move so we'll go to the moves controller and here we'll say def create and we want to find the game so we're going to say game dot find params game id and the game id we're going to get because it's nested under under this route right so if this actually is game slash for slash moves then this this section of the the path is going to be a dynamic segment where we will get access to this number in the params hash inside of the controller under game id by convention so once we have the game we should be able to call at game.move bang and then pass in params row and params column i think and then i think what we want to do is say something like respond to do format and if the format is html then we will redirect to a game otherwise we might want to also do some stuff with turbo streams but we'll come back and take a look at that in a second so let's see if this if we can get this working so we want to go to game show or no game html erb we want to go into the partial we're going to update this to be a button so we're going to say button 2 game dot current symbol dot yeah and then this is going to send a post request to the game moves path i think for game and the params are going to be row is going to be row and column is going to be column and the method is going to be post all right i think let's see what happens oh nice okay all right so we've got some buttons when we click on the button hey look at that it does update and it's changing what the current symbol is so we can sort of play tic-tac-toe there's no actual like tracking if there's a winner or not but at least things are sort of changing as expected here in the ui okay so now what we want to do is make it so that we can play two games at once so if we take our browser window here and we split it up so now we have two browser windows we actually want to go back to the games index and create a new game this is going to be game three and at this point what we want to start talking about is how we're going to update the other player's browser so when i click on o here it should mark this as o and change all the buttons to x right now that's not happening unless we refresh the browser and so we're going to talk about how we can use turbo streams to send that update directly to all of the browsers okay so the first thing we want to do is go back to our game show path this is where again we're rendering out that partial and we want to register for some streams so here we're going to say turbo stream from at game and that's going to set up something special for us so this will set up a turbo stream like listener for updates that are being published about game and then inside of our turbo stream update that we're broadcasting we're going to tell it how we want the dom to change okay so if we jump into our um our game control our game model and what we want to say is that like after create commit we want to broadcast and update now broadcasting that update should send the turbo stream information that will target that specific dom id and should update that dom i should update that dom id so let's see if this was sort of just enough so let's refresh the browser here in both places looks like we got some sort of notification okay i think we're all right you can also see in the server logs that like we upgraded to websocket it's transmitting it's streaming okay so then if we click x here alright so that x is happening but it's not actually changing over here oh okay i got the i got the hook wrong so this should be after update commit after update commit we want to broadcast an update so not not create commit after update commit so if we refresh both of these and then hit x on the bottom now it's hitting x on top if we do an o on the bottom or i'm sorry an o on top it should have updated the bottom here so let's take a look at what's happening so if we say inspect we are expecting that has game three in it okay that's right and this one should also have inspect this one should also have game three and it does so why didn't that update get passed through to here all right so if we say o x o x okay so all of those worked if we go back to games we create a new game we send it to our friend and we say o on the bottom and then x and then o and then x okay why didn't this one update up here i don't know so this one says unsubscribing from channel stopped streaming from there uh huh so another thing we can do here is add format turbo stream and then inside of our moves view we can add a create that's the same as the action then we can say turbo stream.erb and inside of here we can say turbo stream dot update dom id for at game do render a game all right let's see if this works a little bit more stably all right games seven so we're gonna pull up game seven here we're going to click on the x then the o then the x then the o from the x and the o and the x and the o and this is much more stable and consistent so there are yeah there's a couple different pieces here so what we did was we set it up to automatically broadcast out when we updated the game state and then we set up a listener to just automatically sort of update this board as we were playing so this is how you implement tic-tac-toe or one way that you can implement tic-tac-toe with turbo streams one thing i want you to do is go out and actually implement the logic for telling who won who won the game the other thing that might be cool to add is custom maybe like custom symbols and keeping track potentially of who is x and who is oh so head out and play around turbo streams they're super fun and yeah it's a great way to make real-time applications with ruby on rails thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one [Music]

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