Overmind 🪬, a better bin/dev for your Procfile

This is, by far, the article you all enjoyed* the most. Thousands of Rails devs have read it, and rightly so! Overmind is an incredible tool and a massive level-up from foreman and the bin/dev script.

Like foreman, Overmind is a process runner — you give it a Procfile.dev with processes like web: and worker: inside, and it runs them for you in your local development environment.

Where Overmind shines is its depth, and its tmux integration. Overmind has heaps of settings for you to configure, so you can set what processes run, which ones can fail, etc. Its killer feature though is its tmux integration — Overmind uses tmux under the hood, and it runs all your processes in different tmux instances.

This lets you connect directly to your processes, while they’re running! It makes debugging 100x easier than with foreman, since you can just connect directly to a debugger instance in your main Rails server. There’s some other cool stuff too, which I’ll let you discover 😉 You can also check out the Overmind newsletter issue (#5).

_{* I can’t measure enjoyment, but this is the most popular article i’ve included in a newsletter and the most-viewed article on my blog.}

→ 🗑️ Learning to love bin/dev in Rails 7 (nickhammond.com)

If Overmind is more than you need, this article will walk you through bin/dev and foreman, which both ship by default with Rails 7.

They’re a massive upgrade over rails s, and Nicks's article is a great intro to getting started with them. Like Overmind, bin/dev (and foreman under the hood) run processes from a Procfile.dev. You include processes like web: and worker:, and you can run them all with a single command.

If you’re interested to learn more about bin/dev after reading Nick’s article, I’ve written about it too —Procfile.dev, bin/dev, and Rails 7

→ 🕹️ Writing better StimulusJS controllers (boringrails.com)

I’ve included so many BoringRails articles in the newsletter, but this one remains my favourite. Matt Swanson dives deep into Stimulus controller design — specifically, how to stop writing hyper-specific controllers, and how to start writing reusable, generic ones.

This totally changed the way I write Stimulus controllers! If you use Stimulus yourself, I’d consider this article a must-read (and even if you don’t, you’ll learn something, I promise 🙏).

I’ve used the techniques from this article in some of my own Stimulus controllers — my tabs controller, and my toggle controller.

→ 🦆 When is indexing a model appropriate? (ducktypelabs.com)

This article was a bit of a dark horse! I didn’t expect an article on database indexes to garner so much interest, but it seemed to strike a chord. Plus, it’s a great article!

This article dives into database indexes, in the context of Ruby on Rails apps. It’s a perfect place to start if you “kinda know a bit about indexes….” but don’t understand how to actually use them. It’s a higher-level article, but it links out to a couple more excellent ones which go deeper.

irb(main):001:0> User.first
=> <User id: 3, email: "[email protected]" >

# result stored inside _
irb(main):002:0> _        
=> <User id: 3, email: "[email protected]" >

# use previous result
irb(main):003:0> _.email    
=> "[email protected]"