Micah Chalmer

New "Mr. Sparkle" Gem for an Auto-Reloading Rack Development Server

Posted on December 23, 2012 at 04:00 PM

After reading a thread on auto-reloading ruby code for Sinatra/Rack apps on the nesta mailing list, I read through the “magical reloading sparkles” blog post that was mentioned, and realized there’s no reason you need a bunch of project-specific code to use that approach. But I couldn’t find an easy-to-use package already written, so I wrote it myself. The resulting new gem is called “mr-sparkle.”

The full README is at the GitHub page but the short version is this: install the gem with gem install mr-sparkle and then run mr-sparkle in the root of your project. Your app will be served at localhost:8080. It will auto-reload when a file changes (like rerun) but it won’t stop l istening when it does so, and it only reloads your own code, so the result should be faster than shotgun or rerun.