I wrote before about using foreman to manage you app’s processes. An additional feature is that it enables you to configure your unix environment when starting an app, by reading environment variables located in a .env file at the root of your project, that looks something like this:

I recently setup a new Mac (running Lion) for development using jruby. As I have done many times in the past, I installed Xcode (4.4) and proceeded to install the command line tools. Next comes rvm, and we are humming along, until it complains that gcc-4.2 is not in my path. But it is. I can see it with gcc --version. In any case, the notes for rvm suggest using homebrew to install gcc-4.2 like so:

On simple web applications, it’s common to talk about a “develpment server” which one starts before coding. Any rails developer is familiar with rails s. It boots up your application and it’s ready to view on your favorite browser. As applications start to grow, so do the number of processes that your application depends on. Using memcached? Make sure it’s running. Need background processing? Better start your background worker. Pretty soon, you have half a dozen terminal tabs open and you haven’t begun coding yet. There is a better way.

Heroku offers a great hosting platform that abstracts away most of the system administration tasks inherent in running an app. I have generally been very happy hosting productions apps in Heroku and have managed to do very well with it’s platform and it’s available add-ons to increase functionality. I really like the way the handle Postgres databases, which makes things like followers, clones and backups a simple 1-off command.

UPDATE: These benchmarks where updated in 2013 and 2014.