esbuild-live-reload VS Foreman

Today we created an esbuild config file that enables live reloading (but not HMR) for our jsbundling-rails powered Rails application. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, this is very much an experiment and this configuration has not been tested on an application of any meaningful size. You can find the finished code for this example application on Github.

I was confused because there is https://github.com/ddollar/foreman and https://github.com/theforeman/foreman

Are you looking for something like https://github.com/ddollar/foreman?

Btw, there's a large number of tools that use the Procfile file format, including what appears to be the original one, written in Ruby https://github.com/ddollar/foreman (the readme has links to a partial list of foreman clones)

But I agree that overmind is the best of the bunch

We ran our app via bin/dev. You can find the div file inside ./bin/dev folder. It is a ruby wrapper over the process manager forman which manages Procfile-based applications. Rails automatically install foreman gem but it doesn’t bundle it because forman recommends NOT to do 🚫

Note: Alternatively, you can install Foreman on your computer and execute the ./bin/dev command to simultaneously generate the TailwindCSS classes and also run the Rails server in a single terminal.

using foreman with the foreman start -f Procfile.dev command to start my app.

Obviously, we still need to install a runner to handle this procfile. Meet foreman, or one of it's forks. Foreman is a Ruby script, so for that you'll need to have Ruby installed. There are many forks though. Such as shoreman, which is a dependency free shell script, or node-foreman, which is a javascript fork. I go with node-foreman, for the simple reason that I'm a node guy and I like that I can npm install it to the dependencies of my node projects.

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.

A bin/dev file - This should be how you run your application in development. It runs (and optionally installs if you don't have it) Foreman, so you can run your server and build Javsacript on the fly

So far, whenever I started the Rails app, I launched these supporting processes in multiple terminal windows. This week, I learned a new way to do this using a single command using the Foreman gem, which has saved me a lot of time.