Very often I find myself sharing a link to my new Rails project on Twitter, Discord, or LinkedIn. But when I paste the link, the preview just shows a blank, boring gray box.

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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.

Rails 8: How to Auto-Generate Social Media Preview Cards

STEP 4: Attaching the Image (ActiveStorage)