esbuild-rails VS Foreman

Here's the setup I use for reloading with esbuild: https://github.com/excid3/esbuild-rails/blob/main/examples/esbuild.config.mjs

// config/esbuild.mjs import path from 'path' import esbuild from 'esbuild' import rails from 'esbuild-rails' import babel from 'esbuild-plugin-babel' esbuild .build({ bundle: true, // Path to application.js folder absWorkingDir: path.join(process.cwd(), 'app/javascript'), // Application.js file, used by Rails to bundle all JS Rails code entryPoints: ['application.js'], // Destination of JS bundle, points to the Rails JS Asset folder outdir: path.join(process.cwd(), 'app/assets/builds'), // Enables watch option. Will regenerate JS bundle if files are changed watch: process.argv.includes('--watch'), // Split option is disabled, only needed when using multiple input files // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#splitting (change it if using multiple inputs) splitting: false, chunkNames: 'chunks/[name]-[hash]', // Remove unused JS methods treeShaking: true, // Adds mapping information so web browser console can map bundle errors to the corresponding // code line and column in the real code // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#sourcemap sourcemap: process.argv.includes('--development'), // Compresses bundle // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#minify minify: process.argv.includes('--production'), // Removes all console lines from bundle // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#drop drop: process.argv.includes('--production') ? ['console'] : [], // Build command log output: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#log-level logLevel: 'info', // Set of ESLint plugins plugins: [ // Plugin to easily import Rails JS files, such as Stimulus controllers and channels // https://github.com/excid3/esbuild-rails rails(), // Configures bundle with Babel. Babel configuration defined in babel.config.js // Babel translates JS code to make it compatible with older JS versions. // https://github.com/nativew/esbuild-plugin-babel babel() ] }) .catch(() => process.exit(1))

Finally, if you're using esbuild with Rails and Stimulus, you'll probably find the esbuild-rails plugin from Chris Oliver useful.

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.