Launch! Alfred - A Rails app for monitoring other Rails apps
I finally made Alfred official! In my current position as UI Architect I’m always putting together little HTML or dynamic prototypes and mockups. For me the quickest way to do this has been with Rails. As I started getting three, four, five apps that I needed to keep running in order for others in the company to play with, I found that starting and stopping these apps (and keep tracking of which port they were running on, whether they were already running, etc.) got to be a huge chore.
So I wrote on more Rails app called Alfred. Alfred (named after Batman’s faithful butler) watches over your Rails apps, let’s you know if they’re running or not, and gives you one central place to start, restart and stop them. It’s been very handy at work and I couldn’t live without it now.
It still needs quite a bit of work (it has no idea what to do in the case of an error with your app or how to gracefully recover from it) but that’s coming soon enough! I also plan on adding a public view so that you can give out the link to others if they want to check out one of your prototypes, but don’t want them having access to start/stop, new project creation, etc.
Head over to github and check out the README for instructions on getting a copy and installing. Since this is an open source project everyone out there is welcome to contribute and improve with features that they themselves find handy.