Welcome to Hanakai

If you’ve followed Hanami for a while, you’ll know we’re rather fond of flowers. Today our garden has grown: Hanami, Dry, and Rom — three projects that have lived alongside each other across a decade and billions of downloads — are finally coming together as one. Welcome to Hanakai!

With Hanakai, we’re building a single shared community around the gems you know and love. The gems will carry on, now cared for by a bigger, unified team. And with our beautiful new website, now you can discover our vision for Ruby more easily than ever.

Loosely translated from the Japanese 花会, Hanakai means “flower fellowship”, sharing its first character 花 with Hanami, “flower viewing”. With this name, we carry forward Hanami’s spirit of nature and community. From today, our blossoms bloom together, and we invite you to join us!

A new look for our family

To go with our new name, we’re unveiling our new look. This is a brand that truly reflects who we are as a community: friendly, humane, and a little bit fun!

Our logos share a common spirit, while letting each project preserve its own identity. That’s how we want Hanakai to feel — for everyone.

A huge thank you to Aaron Moodie for bringing this vision to life. Aaron first joined us to design the welcome screen for new Hanami apps, and now he’s extended this welcome to the whole world. Thank you, Aaron, this is everything I could have hoped for!

A new home on the web

You’re reading this on our brand new website, now at hanakai.org. Here we’ve brought everything together: project and community info, our blog posts, and guides for every aspect of using our gems. Our refined typography and rebuilt search function make finding what you need a pleasure.

Fittingly, this site is a Hanami app! It’s fully open source, so you can check it out to see how we build Hanakai with Hanakai. All our guides now live together as Markdown files inside this repo, ready for your contributions!

Another huge thank you goes to Max Wheeler — every pixel of this site is Max’s work. He designed and built the entire frontend, and has been a thoughtful, generous collaborator the whole way through. It brings me so much joy just to click around and see everything fitting so well together. Thank you, Max, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Getting this site together has been a big effort, so I have many more thanks to share. For starters, thank you to Josephine Hall for taking over work on this while I focused on shipping a Hanami release; I needed that help! And thank you to Paweł Świątkowski, Philip Arndt, Mathew Button, Marco Roth, Adam Lassek, Jane Sandberg and Paul Oguda for their contributions along the way!

What’s next

Bringing Hanakai to you is a momentous shift for our corner of the Ruby world, and one we’ll certainly celebrate!

But we haven’t stopped moving — there’s plenty to look forward to:

• A new release of Dry Operation with a slew of niceties.
• A feature-packed Hanami release. Keep an eye out for a release candidate soon!
• New “Hanami for Rails developers” guides.
• Our sponsorship drive for 2026. Your support has brought us this far — help us take the next steps!

Join us

Our new garden is open, and we’d love for you to join us:

• Chat with us on Discord.
• Start a thread on our forum.
• Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with our announcements.
• Follow along on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Of all our projects, our community is by far our most important. With Hanakai, it’s stronger than ever, and ready to welcome you in. Here’s to many seasons ahead!