I’ve just recently set up my rails development environment to be managed by Passenger, and I have to say I like being able to type in real URL’s for my domains and not have to manually start my sites.
However, having formerly done my development by first running “script/server” and then going to town, I miss having the log output handy for whenever I blow something up.
If you’ve made the transition to Passenger I imagine you might also feel the same way, so let’s get that back! The easiest way is to use
tail -f log/development.log
Much better! Now we can see the server log output again so it’s easy to view the stack traces for our bugs. However, now that we’re up and running with our super slick hyped-up toy called ‘Passenger’… we’re still having to take just as many steps to get the same results! In fact, typing that command takes longer than script/server used to take.
Well let’s just fix all of our problems in one fell swoop. Add the following to your .bash_login file:
alias go='cd ~/Sites/newcoolsite.com;> log/development.log;mate .;open -a FireFox http://newcoolsite/staff;tail -f log/development.log;'
…where ‘newcoolsite’ is the directory/domain that you’re interested in. Now when we open up our terminal, we just type ‘go’, hit enter, and in about half a second we’ll find the following has happened:
- Our terminal has moved to the proper folder for our site (~Sites/newcoolsite.com)
- The development log is cleared
- TextMate opened our code
- FireFox opened our site (http://newcoolsite/)
- Our terminal started monitoring the server log output
Much better! However there’s still one thing bugging me. We used to just hit Ctrl+C then Up and Enter to restart script/server. It was a very quick and easy way to restart the server and keep our terminal window showing us the activity that we want to see. At this point we still have to type
Ctrl+C touch tmp/restart.txt tail -f log/development.log
Unacceptable!! We can easily remedy this situation. Just add a new line to our .bash_login file resulting in the following:
alias go='cd ~/Sites/newcoolsite.com;> log/development.log;mate .;open -a FireFox http://newcoolsite/staff;tail -f log/development.log;' alias rs='> log/development.log;touch tmp/restart.txt;tail -f log/development.log;'
Now we just hit Ctrl+C, then rs to restart the server and resume our server log monitoring.
Very smooth and painless. Happy coding!