Turbolinks makes following links in your web application faster. Instead of letting the browser recompile the JavaScript and CSS between each page change, it keeps the current page instance alive and replaces only the body and the title in the head. Think CGI vs persistent process.
This is similar to pjax, but instead of worrying about what element on the page to replace, and tailoring the server-side response to fit, we replace the entire body. This means that you get the bulk of the speed benefits from pjax (no recompiling of the JavaScript or CSS) without having to tailor the server-side response. It just works.
Do note that this of course means that you'll have a long-running, persistent session with maintained state. That's what's making it so fast. But it also means that you may have to pay additional care not to leak memory or otherwise bloat that long-running state. That should rarely be a problem unless you're doing something really funky, but you do have to be aware of it. Your memory leaking sins will not be swept away automatically by the cleansing page change any more.
It depends. The more CSS and JavaScript you have, the bigger the benefit of not throwing away the browser instance and recompiling all of it for every page. Just like a CGI script that says "hello world" will be fast, but a CGI script loading Rails on every request will not.
In any case, the benefit can be up to twice as fast in apps with lots of JS and CSS. Of course, your mileage may vary, be dependent on your browser version, the moon cycle, and all other factors affecting performance testing. But at least it's a yardstick.
The best way to find out just how fast it is? Try it on your own application. It hardly takes any effort at all.
Turbolinks is designed to be as light-weight as possible (so you won't think twice about using it even for mobile stuff). It does not require jQuery or any other framework to work. But it works great with jQuery or Prototype or whatever else have you.
With Turbolinks pages will change without a full reload, so you can't rely on DOMContentLoaded or jQuery.ready() to trigger your code. Instead Turbolinks fires events on document to provide hooks into the lifecycle of the page:
Load a fresh version of a page from the server:
page:fetchstarting to fetch a new target pagepage:receivethe page has been fetched from the server, but not yet parsedpage:changethe page has been parsed and changed to the new versionpage:loadis fired at the end of the loading process.
Turbolinks caches 10 of these page loads. It listens to the popstate event and attempts restore page state from the cache when it's triggered. When popstate is fired the following process happens:
Restore a cached page from the client-side cache:
page:changepage has changed to the cached page.page:restoreis fired at the end of restore process.
So if you wanted to have a client-side spinner, you could listen for page:fetch to start it and page:receive to stop it.
document.addEventListener("page:fetch", startSpinner);
document.addEventListener("page:receive", stopSpinner);
DOM transformations that are idempotent are best. If you have transformations that are not, hook them to happen only on page:load instead of page:change (as that would run them again on the cached pages).
Turbolinks will be enabled only if the server has rendered a GET request.
Some examples, given a standard RESTful resource:
POST :create=> resource successfully created => redirect toGET :show- Turbolinks ENABLED
POST :create=> resource creation failed => render:new- Turbolinks DISABLED
Why not all request types? Some browsers track the request method of each page load, but triggering pushState methods don't change this value. This could lead to the situation where pressing the browser's reload button on a page that was fetched with Turbolinks would attempt a POST (or something other than GET) because the last full page load used that method.
By default, all internal HTML links will be funneled through Turbolinks, but you can opt out by marking links or their parent container with data-no-turbolink. For example, if you mark a div with data-no-turbolink, then all links inside of that div will be treated as regular links. If you mark the body, every link on that entire page will be treated as regular links.
<a href="/">Home (via Turbolinks)</a>
<div id="some-div" data-no-turbolink>
<a href="/">Home (without Turbolinks)</a>
</div>Note that internal links to files not ending in .html, or having no extension, will automatically be opted out of Turbolinks. So links to /images/panda.gif will just work as expected.
Also, Turbolinks is installed as the last click handler for links. So if you install another handler that calls event.preventDefault(), Turbolinks will not run. This ensures that you can safely use Turbolinks with stuff like data-method, data-remote, or data-confirm from Rails.
If you have a lot of existing JavaScript that binds elements on jQuery.ready(), you can pull the jquery.turbolinks library into your project that will trigger ready() when Turbolinks triggers the the page:load event. It may restore functionality of some libraries.
Add the gem to your project, then add the following line to your JavaScript manifest file, after jquery.js but before turbolinks.js:
//= require jquery.turbolinksAdditional details and configuration options can be found in the jquery.turbolinks README.
You can track certain assets, like application.js and application.css, that you want to ensure are always of the latest version inside a Turbolinks session. This is done by marking those asset links with data-turbolinks-track, like so:
<link href="/assets/application-9bd64a86adb3cd9ab3b16e9dca67a33a.css" rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css" data-turbolinks-track>If those assets change URLs (embed an md5 stamp to ensure this), the page will do a full reload instead of going through Turbolinks. This ensures that all Turbolinks sessions will always be running off your latest JavaScript and CSS.
When this happens, you'll technically be requesting the same page twice. Once through Turbolinks to detect that the assets changed, and then again when we do a full redirect to that page.
Turbolinks will evaluate any script tags in pages it visits, if those tags do not have a type or if the type is text/javascript. All other script tags will be ignored.
As a rule of thumb when switching to Turbolinks, move all of your javascript tags inside the head and then work backwards, only moving javascript code back to the body if absolutely necessary. If you have any script tags in the body you do not want to be re-evaluated then you can set the data-turbolinks-eval attribute to false:
<script type="text/javascript" data-turbolinks-eval=false>
console.log("I'm only run once on the initial page load");
</script>You can use Turbolinks.visit(path) to go to a URL through Turbolinks.
Like pjax, this naturally only works with browsers capable of pushState. But of course we fall back gracefully to full page reloads for browsers that do not support it.
Turbolinks is designed to work with any browser that fully supports pushState and all the related APIs. This includes Safari 6.0+ (but not Safari 5.1.x!), IE10, and latest Chromes and Firefoxes.
Do note that existing JavaScript libraries may not all be compatible with Turbolinks out of the box due to the change in instantiation cycle. You might very well have to modify them to work with Turbolinks' new set of events. For help with this, check out the Turbolinks Compatibility project.
- Add
gem 'turbolinks'to your Gemfile. - Run
bundle install. - Add
//= require turbolinksto your Javascript manifest file (usually found atapp/assets/javascripts/application.js). - Restart your server and you're now using turbolinks!
- Flask Turbolinks (Python Flask)
Thanks to Chris Wanstrath for his original work on Pjax. Thanks to Sam Stephenson and Josh Peek for their additional work on Pjax and Stacker and their help with getting Turbolinks released. Thanks to David Estes and Nick Reed for handling the lion's share of post-release issues and feature requests. And thanks to everyone else who's fixed or reported an issue!