Using Foreman to start services in development

In any development environment it's usually needed to start many background services to be able to code properly.

I don't like to keep all necessary services running in my machine all the time to save resources, so I start them only when needed; and starting them one-by-one it's too much work.

Comes Foreman to the rescue! Foreman is a gem (for Ruby, but it already ported to many others languages) that will load a Procfile and start/stop the services configured by demand.

For example, every time I start coding in a project, I need to run all those services:

• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Webpacker
• Rails server
• Rails worker

Automation of this procedure is simple. Lets first create a Procfile and save it on the project root directory.

./Procfile

postgres: postgres -D /usr/local/var/postgres
redis: redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf
webpacker: bundle exec bin/webpack-dev-server
rails: bundle exec rails server
worker: bundle exec rails jobs:work

As you can see, it's easy. Just follow this simple rule:

service_name: command to run it

Then type:

$ foreman start

20:30:42 postgres.1 | started with pid 42458
20:30:42 rails.1    | started with pid 42459
20:30:42 worker.1   | started with pid 42460
20:30:42 redis.1    | started with pid 42461
20:30:42 webpack.1  | started with pid 42462

and you are ready to go!

Thanks David Dollar for this awesome gem.