Tuesday 17 January 2012

Automating Rails Development Environment Startup

I'm a fan of using Window Batch to automate repetitive tasks, so put together a little script that launches all the components of my Rails development environment.

On my system, all my Rails applications are stored in a base directory, along with a folder containing the following batch scripts. To launch the development environment for a particular Rails application, I can simply supply the batch file with the name of that application.

Each batch file contains the command to launch that component:

Thursday 12 January 2012

Starting up my Ruby on Rails Development Environment

  1. Open a command prompt and navigate to project directory.
  2. Start Spork server:
    • bundle exec spork rspec
  3. Open a second command prompt and navigate to project directory.
  4. Start Autotest:
    • bundle exec autotest
  5. Open a third command prompt and navigate to project directory.
  6. Start development server:
    • rails server
  7. Open a fourth command prompt and navigate to project directory, use this for Git operations while working.
  8. Open code IDE/text editor of choice (mine's currently Komodo Edit 6.1)
  9. Start working on RoR application!
I'm currently looking at ways to automate this startup procedure, possibly using a batch file or similar - any suggestions? Update: Post detailing startup using Windows batch scripts here

Thursday 5 January 2012

Creating a Rails Application from Scratch

  1. Navigate to base Rails applications folder and execute:
    • rails new newAppName -T
      • The -T prevents rails generating Test::Unit files - we'll use RSpec
  2. Copy/create three required files from a base application:
    • .autotest
    • .gitignore
    • Gemfile
  3. Install new gems with:
    • bundle install