Restart rails server on git commit

Question

I'm setting up a shared development server for a Ruby on Rails project.

Is there a good way to set it up to restart, or reload the code every time someone pushes a commit to the master branch (for example)? I don't care about setting up gems etc every time, à la Heroku - I just want to run the new code.

If there are any problems, I can go in and restart the server manually - I just don't want to do it every time.

Answer 1

The post-receive hook runs after the entire process is completed and can be used to update other services or notify users.

In the post-receive hook, you'll most likely need to grep for the Ruby PID, kill that process and then restart the Rails server.

Answer 2

Git Hooks is what you're looking for.

Using these, you can run custom commands based on certain conditions.

Create a file named post-commit under your .git/hooks folder like so:

#!/bin/sh

exec rake deploy

and in your Rakefile,

task :deploy do
  pid = IO.open("ps").grep(/script\/rails/) { |x| x.split(" ").first }.first
  sh "kill -9 #{pid}"
  sh "rails s"
end