Foreman
In my last post, I went through the process of setting up Sidekiq to run background jobs in my app. In order to run background processes, separate processes need to be started. Spinning up these separate processes can be tedious, manually starting each one. It’s no longer as simple as running rails s
.
Enter Foreman
Foreman is a Ruby gem that is aimed at making developing locally with multiple processes as easy as running one command. It does so by managing your app through a Procfile
:
Your Rails project doesn’t come with a Procfile
out of the box, so you can create one in the root of your project directory. It’s just a plain text file, so no file extension.
The above are commands that you would normally have to run manually in your terminal. By running foreman start
, all of the processes specified in your Procfile
are automatically started. Also, you aren’t restricted to what I’ve written in this Procfile
- you can run any arbitrary process, like an API caller.