Use Terminitor to get your Rails Development work flow setup quickly

For the average Rails Development project I have the following terminal windows setup:

• Spork for RSpec
• Spork for Cucumber
• Rails Server
• AutoSpec
• RStakeout task for automatically running Cuke Features

Automatic Workflow Setup

That's a lot of terminals to setup and task to execute! In comes Terminitor to automatically open those windows and run the required tasks. I have the following file in ~/.terminitor/rails-dev.yml:

# Rails Server, Rspec, Cucumber with Spork Setup
---
- tab0:
- tab1:
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - spork rspec
- tab2:
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - spork cuc
- tab3: 
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - script/server
- tab4:
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - autospec -f
- tab5:
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - autocuke

All I need to do is change into the directory of the project and execute:

  terminitor start rails-dev

I keep a blank tab, tab0 so I have a terminal window to play with, otherwise the first "tab" uses that window.

Issues

There was a only a couple of issues I came across which were pretty straightforward to work around. First, it didn't respect my default setup for rvm. I added what Ruby and Gemset to use.

The other issue was that it appeared to screw with by $PATH a bit. It added a space to the last path entry which I think was causing havoc. I just added $HOME to my path, I don't care if it messes with that.

Conclusion

I was definitely getting a little tired opening all the terminal windows for each project. This is well worth checking out.