Guard::Shotgun automatically starts and restarts Rack applications (through rackup) when needed. As useful as Shotgun when developing a Rack app.

Tested on:

• Ruby 1.9.2-p290
• Ruby 2.0.0-p247

• You are developing with Rack and you have to restart your development server each time you change your source code?
• You are using Shotgun to do this, but well, the latest version is not showing the logs anymore in your console, which makes developing a little harder?
• Reloading your whole Rack app with each request seems a bit overkill? Seems better to only reload it on a file change?

If you have answered 'yes' to any of these questions, you may find some use to this plugin.

Please be sure to have Guard installed before continuing.

Install the gem:

gem install guard-shotgun

Or add it to your Gemfile (inside development group):

gem 'guard-shotgun', :git => 'https://github.com/rchampourlier/guard-shotgun.git'

Add guard definition to your Guardfile by running this command:

guard init shotgun

This guard plugin is intended to be used when developing a Rack application, loaded through rackup.

It allows automatic reloading of your Rack server when a file is changed.

It provides the same service as the Shotgun gem, relying on Guard to watch for your files.

Please read Guard usage doc

For example, to look at the main.rb file in your application directory, just set this guard:

guard 'shotgun' do
  watch('main.rb')
end

Common config

Here we watch Ruby files within the app and lib directories, as well as the config.ru file. We also use Thin as a server instead of the default WEBRick.

guard 'shotgun', :server => 'thin' do
  watch %r{^(app|lib)/.*\.rb}
  watch 'config.ru'
end

Please read Guard doc for more info about Guardfile DSL.

• server: the name of the server to use. The option is passed to the rackup command. You may use for example WEBrick (default), thin...
• port: the port on which to run the server, the option is also passed to the rackup command.

There is currently no spec :S. I intend to write some (won't need much). You may however go to the spec/dummy_app directory and run:

bundle install
bundle exec guard

This way, you can check it's working correctly. You can play with the spec/dummy_app/app/base_app.rb file and introduce some bug so that you may see a failing start is correctly handled too.

• 0.2.0 is compatible (and dependent on) Guard ~> 1.0

• Merged PR with the changes to make it compatible with Guard 2. Thanks to @jnv!

• Merged PR fixing issue with Spoon

• Adding dependency on Guard ~> 1.0
• Fixed an issue when autoloading the Notifier class
• Minor changes to README, repo and dummy_app

• Merged an update by Colin Rymer

• Essentially repository cleanup and README update.

• Improved start/stop management:
  • Exiting Guard will trigger INT signal instead of TERM, stopping WEBRick gently.
  • Failure to start will be detected too after a 10 seconds timeout, and the app will just get reloaded when you change a file.

Killing Rack when reloading on change without waiting for requests to be completed.

Initial release

• Add some options: host, port...
• Allow starting Rack applications without using rackup.
• Tests.

Help is welcome!

• Source hosted at GitHub
• Report issues/Questions/Feature requests on GitHub Issues

Pull requests are very welcome! Make sure your patches are well tested. Please create a topic branch for every separate change you make.

Romain Champourlier Colin Rymer

This gem has been built from guard-webrick of Fletcher Nichol.