Jon Cairns

I've set up Nginx with Phusion Passenger to run my Rails apps in a development environment, as opposed to running rails server in a terminal every time. Setting the rails environment variable to "development" means that many code changes can be automatically integrated without a server restart, but every so often a full restart is required.

This involves touching the _tmp/restart.txt _file in the rails app directory. As I spend all my time working in Vim, I created a handy function to do it for me:

command! RestartRails call RestartRails(getcwd())

function! RestartRails(dir)
    let l:ret=system("touch ".a:dir."/tmp/restart.txt")
    if l:ret == ""
        echo "Restarting Rails, like a boss"
    else
        echohl Error | echo "Failed to restart rails - is your working directory a rails app?" | echohl None
    endif
endfunction

All you do is run :RestartRails, and it touches the restart file. It assumes that your rails app directory is the current working directory in vim (:pwd gives you that, and :cd ... changes it). If you want to restart a different rails app, run

call RestartRails('/path/to/app')