Monitoring your application is important - full stop. When the response time plummet’s you want to know before your customers do…and certainly before you bother to check your twitter feed. There are lots of options here, and a lot of them require a ton of upfront investment in terms of time and effort. However, a simple way to get started is to simply log total request durations and track the number of successful and failed responses.
I use vagrant (along with chef, a vagrant plugin and my dotfiles) for my development environment. I do this for a number of reasons, but mostly, I find it’s the easiest way to get everything installed and configured properly regardless of which physical box I’m working on. There are a number of issues I needed to address to get this all working. One of those, was getting a simple rails server from inside the VM to be available from my host’s browser.
Frequently I find myself creating basic rails apps to demonstrate a new feature, or prototype something for a spike test. Every time I created an app, I would run rails new -T, then add RSpec, Cucumber, Haml, possibly Bootstrap, etc. After the 10th app in a month, I decided that there must be an easier way. Then I saw this post: http://everydayrails.com/2011/02/28/rails-3-application-templates.html I started reading up on generators and application templates, then I thought I’d write my own, to see how it works.