Reloading code

When developing a web application, you will often want your code changes to take effect as soon as possible. In this section we will discuss code reloading mechanisms that Passenger makes available, and how they compare to code reloading mechanisms provided by web frameworks such as Rails.

Table of contents

Introduction

Some frameworks – most notably Rails – provide built-in code reloading mechanisms. They usually work by installing a hook so that whenever a non-existent class is referenced, the hook code attempts to locate and load the file associated to that class. For example, when code is executed that references the User class, Rails will infer that a user.rb file should be loaded from one of its load paths. After every request, Rails removes all user-defined classes from memory so that fresh code can be loaded on the next request.

Such mechanisms are much faster than restarting the server. Restarting the server may take a few seconds, but builtin reloading take a few miliseconds. But they have a drawback too: not all code can be reloaded, especially initialization-related code. For example, Rails cannot reload code in config/application.rb without a server restart.

Other frameworks – such as Sinatra – do not provide a code reloading mechanism at all, requiring you to restart the server after every code change. Needless to say, performing a restart after every change is cumbersome.

Passenger provides a number of restarting mechanisms to make life easier for you, in case the builtin web framework code reloading isn't good enough for you (if it exists at all).

passenger-config restart-app

You can use the passenger-config restart-app command to restart an application that is being served by Passenger. This is more convenient than stopping and starting Passenger, which requires two commands.

Default invocation

If you invoke passenger-config restart-app without arguments, it will ask you which application you want to restart. Here is an example:

$ cd /path-to-your-app
$ bundle exec passenger-config restart-app
Please select the application to restart.
Tip: re-run this command with --help to learn how to automate it.
If the menu doesn't display correctly, press '!'

 ‣   /Users/phusion/testapp/public (development)
     Cancel

Use the Up and Down arrow keys to navigate the menu. Press Enter and it will restart the selected application.

The reason why it asks you is because Passenger is designed to be able to handle multiple apps in the same Passenger instances, although in this tutorial you will only be using Passenger to serve a single app.

Non-interactive invocation

You can also tell passenger-config restart-app to restart a specific application instead of asking you with a menu. The command accepts an application path prefix as first argument. When given, it will restart all applications whose path matches the given prefix.

For example, suppose that your application is located in /Users/phusion/testapp. You have tell Passenger to restart the application like this:

$ cd /path-to-your-app
$ bundle exec passenger-config restart-app /Users/phusion/testapp
Restarting /Users/phusion/testapp/public (development)

There is an even shorter way. You can tell Passenger to restart all apps that it is currently serving, by specifying / as the argument. This is because all applications' paths start with /.

$ cd /path-to-your-app
$ bundle exec passenger-config restart-app /
Restarting /Users/phusion/testapp/public (development)

Invoking the command quickly

The text passenger-config restart-app / is pretty long to type. But luckily you do not have to type the command over and over.

If you are using the Bash shell, then you can use Ctrl-R to lookup a command in your history. In an empty Bash shell prompt, press Ctrl-R to activate the history lookup mechanism:

$
(press Ctrl-R now)
(reverse-i-search)`':

If you type anything in this prompt, Bash will perform a substring search in its history and show you the first result. For example, type restart-app and you should see this:

(reverse-i-search)`restart-app': passenger-config restart-app /

If you press Enter, Bash will execute the looked up command.

tmp/always_restart.txt

Passenger also supports the magic file 'tmp/always_restart.txt'. If this file exists, Passenger will restart your application after every request. This way you do not have to invoke the restart command often.

Activate this mechanism by creating the file:

$ mkdir -p tmp
$ touch tmp/always_restart.txt

Deactivate this mechanism by removing the file:

$ rm tmp/always_restart.txt

Conclusion

Congratulations, you have almost reached the conclusion of this basics tutorial. Next, we will teach you how to get help in case you need it.

Continue »