RubyLLM 1.3.0: Smarter Attachments, Multi-Tenancy, and No More Manual Model Tracking

RubyLLM 1.3.0 ships three things: attachments that figure themselves out, isolated configuration contexts for multi-tenant apps, and the end of manually tracking model capabilities.

Attachments

Before, you had to tell RubyLLM what kind of file you were sending:

chat.ask "What's in this image?", with: { image: "diagram.png" }
chat.ask "Describe this meeting", with: { audio: "meeting.wav" }
chat.ask "Summarize this document", with: { pdf: "contract.pdf" }

Now just hand it the file:

chat.ask "What's in this file?", with: "diagram.png"
chat.ask "Describe this meeting", with: "meeting.wav"
chat.ask "Summarize this document", with: "contract.pdf"

# Multiple files, mixed types
chat.ask "Analyze these files", with: [
  "quarterly_report.pdf",
  "sales_chart.jpg",
  "customer_interview.wav",
  "meeting_notes.txt"
]

# URLs work too
chat.ask "What's in this image?", with: "https://example.com/chart.png"

RubyLLM detects the type and does the right thing. You shouldn’t have to think about file types when the computer can figure it out.

Configuration Contexts

Global config is fine until you need different API keys per customer. Passing config objects everywhere is tedious. So we built contexts:

tenant_context = RubyLLM.context do |config|
  config.openai_api_key = tenant.openai_key
  config.anthropic_api_key = tenant.anthropic_key
  config.request_timeout = 180
end

response = tenant_context.chat.ask("Process this customer request...")

# Global configuration stays untouched
RubyLLM.chat.ask("This still uses your default settings")

Each context is isolated, thread-safe, and garbage-collected when you’re done with it. Works for multi-tenancy, A/B testing providers, or anything where you need scoped configuration.

Ollama

Your dev machine shouldn’t phone home to OpenAI every time you want to test something:

RubyLLM.configure do |config|
  config.ollama_api_base = 'http://localhost:11434/v1'
end

chat = RubyLLM.chat(model: 'mistral', provider: 'ollama')
response = chat.ask("Explain Ruby's eigenclass")

Same API, local model. Good for development, testing, compliance, costs.

OpenRouter

One API key, hundreds of models:

RubyLLM.configure do |config|
  config.openrouter_api_key = ENV['OPENROUTER_API_KEY']
end

chat = RubyLLM.chat(model: 'anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet', provider: 'openrouter')

No More Manual Model Tracking

Update: RubyLLM has since moved from Parsera to models.dev for model data.

We’ve been maintaining model capabilities and pricing by hand since 1.0. Every time a provider changes pricing or ships a new model, someone updates a file. That’s over.

We partnered with Parsera to build a continuously updated API that scrapes model information from provider docs. RubyLLM.models.refresh! now pulls from that API. Context windows, pricing, capabilities, and modalities are always current.

We kept our capabilities.rb files for older models that providers don’t document well anymore. Between the two sources, virtually every model worth using is covered.

More on the Parsera API here.

Rails

ActiveStorage now works properly with attachments:

class Message < ApplicationRecord
  acts_as_message
  has_many_attached :attachments
end

chat_record.ask("Analyze this upload", with: params[:uploaded_file])
chat_record.ask("What's in my document?", with: user.profile_document)
chat_record.ask("Review these files", with: params[:files])

Full parity with the plain Ruby implementation.

Also in 1.3.0

• Custom embedding dimensions: RubyLLM.embed("text", model: "text-embedding-3-small", dimensions: 512)
• Enterprise OpenAI: Organization and project ID support
• Ruby 3.1–3.4, Rails 7.1–8.0: Officially tested
• 13 new contributors across foreign key fixes, HTTP proxy support, and more

Thanks to @papgmez, @timaro, @rhys117, @bborn, @xymbol, @roelbondoc, @max-power, @itstheraj, @stadia, @tpaulshippy, @Sami-Tanquary, and @seemiller.

gem 'ruby_llm', '1.3.0'

Full backward compatibility. GitHub.