#412 Fast Rails Commands

Apr 04, 2013 | 8 minutes | Tools

Rails commands, such as generators, migrations, and tests, have a tendency to be slow because they need to load the Rails app each time. Here I show three tools to make this faster: Zeus, Spring, and Commands.

Click to Play Video ▶

Download:
source codeProject Files in Zip (44.5 KB)
mp4Full Size H.264 Video (21.7 MB)
m4vSmaller H.264 Video (9.71 MB)
webmFull Size VP8 Video (10 MB)
ogvFull Size Theora Video (22.4 MB)

Neil Marion dela Cruz over 11 years ago

Will this make tests in autotest or guard faster?

Ashley Connor over 11 years ago

Take a look at https://github.com/qnm/guard-zeus for Guard integration.

Neil Marion dela Cruz over 11 years ago

Wooohoo!!!

michaelseo over 7 years ago

Thanks !

baby90 over 7 years ago

Thats awesome

Ava Marie almost 7 years ago

Christiane Valejo almost 7 years ago

Top !!!!

Canet almost 7 years ago

Not too difficult this integration?

Marie Gouv almost 7 years ago

Not at all, very simple

Pierre GD almost 7 years ago

Geoffroy Montel over 11 years ago

One tip to fasten Rails' startup : buy a SSD drive ! It will make your life easier ;)

Denis over 11 years ago

With rvm, startups also much faster when optimization patches are used, for example ruby-1.9.3-p392-railsexpress or ruby-2.0.0-p0-turbo.

foo over 11 years ago

Hmm, I'm not able to find turbo patch for ruby 2.0, are you sure about that ?

Ruud Seydel over 11 years ago

Wow this is crazy:

1.9.3 unpached:
bundle exec rake -vT 18,51s user 2,03s system 94% cpu 21,768 total

1.9.3 pached:
bundle exec rake -vT 5,05s user 1,08s system 99% cpu 6,166 total

That is a big difference!

Alain Alari almost 7 years ago

Kai over 11 years ago

Andy Waite over 11 years ago

Do you have some evidence for this?

Beyond the first run, the files should be paged into RAM anyway, so I would expect CPU to be the bottleneck, rather than disk.

(SSDs are great of course, I'm just not sure that it helps in this case).

Geoffroy Montel over 11 years ago

no evidence, but when I made the switch, I really felt the difference !

Kai over 11 years ago

time rake db:migrate with normal macbook pro hdd: 2.x seconds
time rake db:migrate with samsung 840 pro ssd: 1.x seconds

I also feel the difference :)

9zb over 7 years ago

Yeah of course !

punaise-de-lit over 7 years ago

Yeah SSD rulez !

Artur Roszczyk over 11 years ago

If you would like to use zeus, guard and parallel tests together check out https://github.com/sevos/zeus-parallel_tests

Arthur Gunn over 11 years ago

Consider https://github.com/jugyo/rails-sh - works amazingly!

Michael Elfassy over 11 years ago

Daniel Doezema over 11 years ago

If you're a TMUX user I've found the Tmuxinator Gem to be fantastic way to setup and control multiple Rails dev environments.

Starting and/or attaching to an app's session is as simple as $ mux my_app; Adding Zues or Spring into the into Tmuxinator config is something I might try in order to further automate my dev environments.

If you frequently work on only 1 or 2 projects then you might not get a lot of milage out of TMUX. However, if you're like me -- I have 9 rails apps that I'm constantly switching between -- then it can make your life a lot easier.

Happy coding all :)

Vighnesh over 11 years ago

I'm trying to set up my tmuxinator config file to start zeus before it runs zeus c, zeus s in my panes.

Adding zeus start to the pre: config fails, because Zeus prevents tmux from loading.

I tried starting it as a daemon with zeus start &, but zeus tries to refresh the screen, which screws up the tmux display.

How did you work with this?

Daniel Doezema over 11 years ago

Unfortunately I've been swamped with a ton of work and have not attempted to get it working yet.

If I get some free time this weekend I'll try and give the implementation a shot :)

Daniel Doezema almost 11 years ago

Well, it took 10 months but I finally got around to creating a gem to do this :)

https://github.com/veloper/zeusd

run zeusd restart --block in your pre block and enjoy!

Jonathan O'Connor over 11 years ago

Sadly, neither zeus or commands work under JRuby. This is because JRuby does not support Kernel#fork.

commands does work for running generate, and rake commands will also start quickly. rake 'test' also runs, but although it starts quickly, I believe it starts a separate process for the sub-tasks test:unit and test:functional.

Damien Wilson over 11 years ago

For JRuby, you can use JRuby's bundled Nailgun server as an alternative to Spork. It'll be very familiar if you've ever run RSpec with a DRB server: http://blog.headius.com/2009/05/jruby-nailgun-support-in-130.html

Ankur Sethi over 11 years ago

Commands works fine with Jruby, I use it.

Mike over 11 years ago

i'm getting "exit status 1" for jruby

          bash
        
Available Commands: [waiting] [crashed] [ready]
zeus destroy (alias: d)
zeus generate (alias: g)
zeus rake
zeus server (alias: s)
zeus console (alias: c)
zeus dbconsole
zeus runner (alias: r)
zeus cucumber
zeus test (alias: rspec, testrb)
exit status 1

but on a high note works great for ruby-1.9.3

Andy Waite over 11 years ago

If you want to run tests from within Sublime Text, check out the RubyTest package. The README has instruction on configuring it for Zeus.

Onno Faber over 11 years ago

Great suggestion - did not know about this. You can also change the settings to use spring, by just prepending the rspec command with it...

Diego d'Ursel over 11 years ago

This is great ! Thank you, I was looking for that.

Onno Faber over 11 years ago

Thanks - good tips. So far I've been using "spin, combined with the kicker gem for autotests:
https://github.com/jstorimer/spin

Seems though Zeus and Spring are even easier to use.

Glenn over 11 years ago

Are there any gem that speeds up rspec/capybara testing under Windows (besides Spork)?

Gabe over 11 years ago

These tools have a few issues if you're using vagrant:

They will try to create a socket file on your share, which doesn't support that file type. You can get around this in spring with the SPRING_TMP_PATH, but I don't think zeus has a configuration option for this.
notification fs events don't work, so they need to fallback to fs polling instead.

Chip Castle over 11 years ago

Ryan,

Great screencast as always. Have you checked out https://github.com/nviennot/irb-config yet? It allows running tests from within the console as well, but it seems faster than the other tools.

Torey Heinz over 11 years ago

Another solution is GoGo, it creates a pseudo-shell with the Rails environment preloaded. https://github.com/brianhempel/gogo

Sounds similar to https://github.com/jugyo/rails-sh

Jonathan Kolyer over 11 years ago

Jobby (https://github.com/Spakman/jobby) is useful for running multiple daemons under a shared environment. Allows you to spin off new processes without reloading entire rails env each time.

johnwilde over 11 years ago

Any suggestions for getting Zeus and Thor to work together?

johnwilde over 11 years ago

Adding a thor command to thor.json and the following method in custom_plan.rb seems to do the trick

          ruby
        
  def thor
    require 'thor/runner'
    $thor_runner = true
    Thor::Runner.start
  end

John Wright over 10 years ago

This seems to be the only reference I can find on the net to run thor through zeus. However, I'm slightly unsure what you mean. What's thor.json? I've had a ganders through thor's docs and can't find a reference to it. And what's custom_plan.rb? Is that one of your own commands?

John Wright over 10 years ago

Ah. zeus.json. Got it.

imme5150 about 11 years ago

Best way I've found for running migrations is from the console: http://stackoverflow.com/a/18782615/423384

Daniela44a about 8 years ago

serjboykousa about 8 years ago

one of the interesting post thanks for share this

Roselmak about 8 years ago

carolsantiago almost 8 years ago

I am very happy to find this post! It's useful for me, and contains lot of information.

Candice Clings almost 8 years ago

Find so relevant stuff thanks

Candice Clings almost 8 years ago

Find so relevant stuff thanks

lily652 almost 8 years ago

This is the type of information I’ve long been trying to find. Thank you for writing this information

lily652 almost 8 years ago

Thank you for this incredible information. It was very useful for me, I ll be looking forward your new posts.

Gaia1956 almost 8 years ago

Code Triche Clash Royale over 7 years ago

This is perfect

Lucy Taylor over 7 years ago

That's interesting, but didn't work for me. Perhaps it's due to the fact that the version we are using is newer. Any suggestions for that?

StevenChamberlain over 7 years ago

Good Post

litaliti18 over 7 years ago

Very good post! We will be linking to this great content on our website. Thank so much!

Pierre GD almost 7 years ago

Thanks for the information

Anna Shetty almost 7 years ago

This is so irritating. I can find anything on this website. No fan-club registration info anywhere.