A few months ago the creator of my favorite rails server (puma) announced a version of puma called puma-dev. This new server bears more than a passing resemblance to pow, because of its goal of making local rails development stupendously easy.

I was a big fan of pow when it first came out but I eventually stopped using it when it as development on it slowly crawled to a halt then eventually stopped. Having come to Rails development from a PHP background, where the server was always available,

• I didn’t like having to type `puma` or `rails s` to start working on a local application, or …
• having to remember and assign different port numbers if I was working on more than one app at a time. So I was definitely excited about having puma-dev pick up where pow left off.
• it also made playing around with subdomains easier

So I was definitely looking forward to having it pick up from where I left off with pow

Setup is super easy. First make sure to include puma in your Gemfile

gem 'puma'

Then run `puma` at the command line and make sure your app starts up with no problems.
Next install puma-dev

brew install puma/puma/puma-dev
sudo puma-dev -setup
puma-dev -install

To setup yourdomain.dev (for example), you’d just run

puma-dev link yourdomain /path/to/your/app

And voila!

I’ve been using this setup for a few months now, and I must say, I find this immensely useful because I have an apache server running on port 80 for my PHP work, so I can actually access a domain on https://mydomain.dev. It also supports websockets!

Things to note

• puma-dev will spin down the server after a few minutes of inactivity, so don’t be surprised if your app takes a few seconds to startup after you’ve been gone for a while
• To restart the server (in case you’re working on something that doesn’t auto load or isn’t loading correctly)  just run `touch tmp/restart.txt` from rails root