Before today, I was using Thin to host my development servers. This was a bother because I had to remember to start/stop Thins as required when I switched tasks. Well, not anymore…
Reading my feeds today, I found Passenger Preference Pane, by Fingertips.
- Download the preference pane itself
- Untar
- Follow the directives in the README about RubyCocoa (either Leopard 10.5.2 or install RubyCocoa yourself from source)
- Double click the prefpane: this will install the preference pane
- Open System Preferences, then Passenger in Other
- Drag and drop your Rails (or Rack-based) application folder into the list
- Click Apply
- Go back to System Preferences, and open Sharing
- Stop and start Apache using the checkbox for Web Sharing
- Visit http://your-apps-base-name.local/ and enjoy!
One caveat I found was that my home directory had to change permissions. I had to grant a+rx before it would work:
1 $ ls -ld ~
2 drwxr-xr-x+ 78 francois staff 2652 9 fév 11:13 /Users/francois
Of course, if you have a multi-user machine, that opens an interesting can of worms for security. A quick fix would be:
1 $ chmod a-rx * && chmod a+rx the-apps-base-name
Modify as needed.
