Rails project launcher

Jesper asked on the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade mailing list what scripts and tricks use to launch their environment when developing Rails projects on OS X.

iTerm shell script

A bunch of people pointed to this handy iTerm shortcut, which uses Applescript invoked from a shell script to start the environment. I use roughly the same approach, however it’s wrapped in an Automator workflow, which I launch using Quicksilver.

Automator workflow

Basically what the workflow does is ask me to pick a project, then it fetches the most recent version of the application, runs any missing migrations, starts script/server and autotest, launches TextMate with the project source, and iTerm with the most recent commit messages, the test log and the development log. This saves me so many keypresses.

It’s a modified version of a workflow I found somewhere on the net. Unfortunately I cannot find the original source now, so I cannot even give credit where it’s due. Download it here.

View it in action

You can see it in action below (the text is terribly hard to read unfortunately, but it shows how the process looks at least):

Launch Rails project from Jakob Skjerning on Vimeo.