I wanted to do a quick write up of how I use Pow to run several rails/rack apps and provide subdomains for the rails / rack apps as well as node.js servers! I’ll even throw in a Livereload plug in Rails/rack.

The why

We have several rails projects – an API server, a queue’ing rails project running Sidekiq, an admin dashboard using Rails & angular, and a node.js server running a PhoneGap mobile app run in express.

I needed an easy domain set up, something like:

• project.dev
• my.project.dev
• jobs.project.dev
• m.project.dev

I also needed Livereload due to the time it saves, who doesn’t right? I do ok, quit asking questions. (But seriously please comment and ask)

What I did

After installing POW, I created a few symbolic links and a file containing the port that I would run the node.js server. As seen in the the POW documentation and listed in the same order as above.

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ln -s ~/Dev/RM/web ~/.pow/project

ln -s ~/Dev/RM/my ~/.pow/my.project

ln -s ~/Dev/RM/jobs ~/.pow/jobs.project
echo 5000 > ~/.pow/m.project

Awesome. So now Pow got the rails/racks apps up. Just need to start my node server by simply running node app.js

Ensure its there

Now that I’ve got the servers all running, i’ll hit them up to check A-OK. Navigate to http://my.project.dev, http://m.project.dev, http://project.dev. Yep, all A-OK.

Now to set up Livereload.

Snag up a few gems to help Rails/rack do some livereloads automatically for me.

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gem 'rack-livereload'
gem 'guard'
gem 'guard-livereload'

Two things to configure before livereload will work in the rails/rack apps – the first is a config setting in our development.rb file and our Guardfile with a host definition.

The first is development.rb:

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MyProjectCom::Application.configure do
  #comments
  config.middleware.use Rack::LiveReload
  #the comments are a lie
end

Now the magic for the rails/rack apps is the Guardfile:

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guard 'livereload', host: 'my.project.dev'do
  watch(%r{app/views/.+\.(erb|haml|slim)$})
  watch(%r{app/helpers/.+\.rb})
  watch(%r{public/.+\.(css|js|html)})
  watch(%r{config/locales/.+\.yml})
  # Rails Assets Pipeline
  watch(%r{(app|vendor)(/assets/\w+/(.+\.(css|js|html|png|jpg))).*}) { |m| "/assets/#{m[3]}" }
end

Boom! Now I’ve got Livereload being injected into each of the rails/rack apps I configured and handling all the other business. I just have to sit back and code.

Hope this helps any who may be wanting a similar set up with subdomains with rails/rack & node.js hosted apps.