02 May 2012
Many Rails developers have many apps and think nothing of switching between them as necessary with the trusty rails server command. Each morning cosists of the familiar routine: open terminal, start auto-running tests, and boot the dev server. The Pow server makes this final step unecessary.
Pow is a super simple to set-up solution for serving Rails apps on your dev machine. By simple, we’re talking a single command, and by Rails, we’re talking Rack apps which extends to any Rack solution you muster up. The Pow Screencast will get you up to speed in no time. Watch the video, symlink your Rack apps and hit {folder}.dev in your browser, where {folder} is the name of the newly created symlink that should be within ~/.pow/ by default.
Tip: As mentioned above, by default Pow is set up to use .dev, which Google Chrome doesn’t recognise and will ‘helpfully’ treat it as a search query. The solution here? End the call with a forward slash / e.g hamster.dev/. Finally, a solution for using debugger with a Rails app served through Pow can be found here.