If you’re building Rails apps you probably found yourself installing many external dependencies to run it. A database, a full text search engine, an in memory cache, background worker processes and many other tools that run as separate processes in your machine. If it’s a mac, you probably used homebrew or MacPorts to install these dependencies and at the end you did something like:

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/postgresql/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

To install it as a service that runs when your machine starts.

But think about it for a bit. You’re not actually running this all the time. If you’re maintaining a gem that depends on a tool like that you might not even really need it for anything other than running your test suite, why should you have it running all the time like that?

Well, you don’t!

That’s where foreman comes into action. Foreman is:

a manager for Procfile-based applications. Its aim is to abstract away the details of the Procfile format, and allow you to either run your application directly or export it to some other process management format.

And what is a Procfile-based application? It’s an application that has a Procfile with instructions to start various processes it needs to run correctly. Here’s how a Procfile might look like:

rails: bundle exec rails s postgres: postgres -D /Users/mauricio/databases/postgresql elasticsearch: elasticsearch -f

It’s a list of name: command-to-be-run for the dependencies you have. In this case we have the rails app, a PostgreSQL database and then elasticsearch. You could have any other process you depend on running from here and never again install anything to run as a service in your machine.

Procfiles and Heroku If you're going to deploy your app to Heroku or some other service that uses a Procfile to prepare the environment for your app you should rename your development Procfile to something else like Procfile.local or Procfile.dev so it won't be picked up by your production environment. In this case, instead of foreman start you would do foreman start -f Procfile.local .

Starting out with the database

Now that you’re not installing stuff as services anymore, you can go a step further and have isolated configurations for them as well. Let’s start with a simple Rails app:

rails new foreman-example -T -d postgresql

I’m going to assume you’re using homebrew , if you’re not, just use the command for the package manager you’re using:

brew install postgresql

Once it’s is installed, to go the Rails app directory and run:

pg_ctl init -D vendor/postgresql

This creates a full PostgreSQL database (config files and data files) inside the vendor/postgresql directory (you could even include the db version at the directory name since PG is well known for changing the DB format rather frequently). By default, PG allows access to anyone locally, if you would like to fine tune the access control, check vendor/postgresql/pg_hba.conf and update the configuration as needed. Remember, this is a full PosgreSQL install, you can change anything here and it will be visible only this app.

First service ready, let’s create our Procfile , at the root of the Rails app directory create a file called Procfile with the following content:

postgresql: postgres -D vendor/postgresql

PostgreSQL starts with only your own user included, so if you want to use the default postgres user to sign in, you must create it. First, start PostgreSQL from foreman ( foreman start ) and once it’s running, sign in:

psql -p 5432 -h localhost -d postgres

You must do this as the same user that created the database (your own user). Once you’re in, just create the postgres user:

CREATE USER postgres SUPERUSER;

You should now be able to sign in as postgres at this server (type \quit to exit psql ). Stop foreman and let’s continue.

Redis and a master slave-setup

Now we need some in memory cache, let’s get Redis for this app:

brew install redis

Redis is even simpler than PG, you just have to reference it’s config file, and override the keys you need to change. The file is usually at /usr/local/etc/redis.conf , if it isn’t run brew info redis and check where it is. Let’s prepare the redis folder at our app:

mkdir -p vendor/redis/db

Now let’s create our vendor/redis/redis/redis.conf file:

loglevel notice logfile "" dir vendor/redis/db/

This guarantees you’re not writing to other places for this specific redis-server instance. Everything else assumes the defaults, you can see the defaults here.

Now let’s update our Procfile :

postgresql: postgres -D vendor/postgresql redis: redis-server vendor/redis/redis.conf

Since we’re at it, why don’t we also configure a redis slave? Our app in production might need to send reads to a slave redis and we can just get our config to do the same here, can’t we? Let’s create a separate folder:

mkdir -p vendor/redis-slave/db

And here’s the vendor/redis-slave/redis.conf file:

loglevel notice logfile "" dir vendor/redis-slave/db/ slaveof localhost 6379 port 6380

This instructs this redis slave to connect to the master that will be running at the default port and bind itself at port 6380 .

Here’s our Procfile updated again:

postgresql: postgres -D vendor/postgresql redis: redis-server vendor/redis/redis.conf redis-slave: redis-server vendor/redis-slave/redis.conf rails: bundle exec rails s

Now we have PG, redis, a redis slave and the Rails webapp process running. Can we do more? Of course, we could include Nginx, another database, anything else you might want to do here and they will all be booted when you type this at the directory where the Procfile is:

foreman start

Given you will be writing this a lot, you should probably include an alias at your shell profile for this command, I did:

alias fs="foreman start"

So it’s just fs and everything is running.

Remember to include the vendor/redis and vendor/postgresql to your .gitignore , you don’t want to push these folders to all your colleagues. And I prefer not to force my own Profile on the whole team as well, it’s simpler to have a Procfile-example file at your repo and let people decide to use it at their own will.

Isolating the configuration

But we’re not done yet, there’s yet another trick at your disposal when using foreman , the .env files. If you’ve heard about The 12 factor app you probably know there are many uses to environment variables, what you might not know is that there are better ways than to declare all environment variables for all apps and gems that you maintain than at your shell’s profile script.

With foreman you can use .env files to declare the environment variables for your app (and it’s dependencies) and maintain them isolated from the rest of your environment. So, if you’re using the aws-sdk gem, your .env file would look like:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=this-is-some-access-key AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=this-is-some-secret AWS_REGION=us-west-2

And foreman automatically loads the .env file that is at the same directory as your Procfile . This way you can make all environment specific configuration for your app to live at this .env file and let every developer set their own specific configurations here. All variables declared here will be available for all processes started by foreman as environment variables.

Use it everywhere

And while I used a Rails app for this example, foreman doesn’t care about what is being started. You can run anything that can be called from the command line and run in the foreground, so you could possibly use it to run the dependencies for your Java, Ruby, Go, Python or any other language. It’s an awesome tool to have under your toolbelt wherever you go.

So, stop installing stuff as services and use foreman instead.

Foreman offers a bunch of other cool features like running many instances of the same process at the same time, setting automatic values for ports to bind and it also exports your Procfile to many other formats (like Ubuntu’s upstart), so it isn’t just for development, you can actually use it at your production environment as well. Once you’re happy with your Procfile ’s, you should go to the website and dig deeper into what else it can do to help you out.

The source code for this example is here.