A Local Rails Server in a Local Network

Note To Self Rails Ruby No Comments

I’m currently working on a Rails app, that I want to have available in my local network on the default port that Ruby on Rails uses: 3000.

To do that, I added a line to the development config (config/environments/development.rb):

config.hosts << 'hostname.local'

Update: Apparently adding the line config.hosts.clear works as well. Details about this are explained in the Rails Guides.

I started using Foreman to achieve this, and installed it using:

gem install foreman

Note that, according to a Wiki Page on Github, it’s not recommended to put foreman into the Gemfile.

Then I created a Procfile that Foreman uses to start the web server (which currently is the only process I need it to start):

web: bundle exec rails s -b 0.0.0.0 -p 3000

The -b 0.0.0.0 binds the process to that IP address and -p 3000 instructs it to use port 3000.

With that set up foreman start can be used to start a Rails server in development which is available in the local network.

This way I can check the layout and functionality on a mobile phone or one of my iPads.

Monitoring Tomcat

Tools for Testing No Comments

Recently, I faced an issue with an application which is deployed in a Tomcat web container: In one of the environments it started to consume a lot of CPU cycles and memory.

My first attempt to investigate, is to run things locally and have a look at the Activity Monitor that comes with macOS. Often enough it’s enough to notice which app uses a lot of memory or CPU cycles.

This time though, I wanted some deeper insight and I already knew what I was looking for. Some searching in the net brought up Glowroot.

Even though I’m not experienced in using Tomcat, it was pleasantly easy and quick to get going:

  • Download a zip file and unpack it.
  • Copy the folder to a place where it’s convenient. I copied it into an existing folder I’m using to keep configuration info for Tomcat anyway.
  • Set up a way for Tomcat to find and use the Glowroot jar file.
  • Start Tomcat
  • Open a Browser at http://localhost:4000

The details for these steps are nicely explained on the GitHub Wiki of this project.

An example graph is this, taken from the projects demo site at https://demo.glowroot.org/

The my project this (so far) only confirmed that memory consumption can increase a lot when the system gets some traffic. Using well over 10GB of memory within a few minutes is a lot, especially when that memory isn’t released any time soon.

Are you using a tool that was particularly easy to use and provided what you were looking for? Which one?

© 2012-2023 Stephan Kämper — Mastodon

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