I was eager to start using Hotwire in a project that I thought was a perfect fit. Here I will show you what I had to do, to migrate from Turbolinks to Turbo, and keep using Webpacker as main assets bundler.

Remove turbolinks. Add turbo.

Turbo is basically the new version of Turbolinks, so we need to remove the old npm package and add the new one:

yarn remove turbolinks
yarn add @hotwired/turbo

This will replace the package with the new one.

Turbo Drive

Turbo Drive is that part of Turbo that replaces the functionalities provided before by Turbolinks.

We need to remove the previous initialization of turbolinks and initialize turbo instead.
In your application.js (or wherever you initialized Turbolinks), replace

require('turbolinks').start();

with

import Turbo from "@hotwired/turbo"

With this, you will already have Turbo up and running.

Replace old Turbolinks code.

The event turbolinks:load is now called turbo:load. Replace them wherever you are using them.

If you were using data-turbolinks attributes, they are now called data-turbo. You can replace them as well.

Basically you can search for turbolinks within your project and replace it with turbo.

That's it

I started writing this post thinking "This is going to take a while. Such a guide will be useful for sure!". But it ended up being way easier than I thought 😅
In the next posts, I will show you my experiments with Hotwire and Turbo and show how I refactored the code to use the new framework. As of now, Turbo is up and running! 🥳