Rails Server is not finishing inside terminal

Question

I am new to Rails and working my way through RonR3 Tutorial. Everything has worked perfectly except by page 59

$ rails generate scaffold Micropost content: String user_id:integer. 

When I try to run rails s or rails server my terminal application never seems to end. When I ctrl-c to shut down the server after 10+ hours the site can not be found on localHost. Any help would be much appreciated.

Everything seems to stall out around:

Started GET "/assets/users.js?body=1" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-09-20 13:33:54 -0400
Served asset /users.js - 304 Not Modified (0ms)


Started GET "/assets/jquery_ujs.js?body=1" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-09-20 13:33:54 -0400
Served asset /jquery_ujs.js - 304 Not Modified (0ms)

After this the terminal just sits there doing nothing...

Answer 1

With programs run from the terminal, they will run there unless they stop or have a daemon option. When you press ctrl-c, the rails webbrick server stops, so of course localhost won't show anything.

When the server is sitting there, it's waiting for a user to visit the site. It won't render views, for example, unless there's a request to render views.

If you want to run the webserver while still using the same terminal window, you need to run rails s as a daemon (background process). Instead, run the command as rails s -d which will "detach" the server process.

On a side-note, why not open multiple terminal windows, if your operating system has a GUI/Window Manager. I normally keep three terminal windows open to run the server, make git commits, check rake routes , etc.

Related Question: Running Webrick server in background?