How do I start a Rails server programatically from a Ruby script

Question

I want to start my Rails server in a background thread from within a Ruby script. I could use Kernel#system but I want to be able to kill the Rails server when the thread is stopped. Is there a way to execute the Rails server using some Rails API call instead? I'm thinking something it would be nice to be able to put something like Rails.run_server(:port => 3000, ...)

I'm on Windows Server 2008.

Answer 1

Check out the file gems/rails.x.x.x/lib/commands/server.rb. It looks like that's the starting point that script/server uses.

Since script/server is itself a ruby script, it stands to reason that you ought to be able to start a server by doing something similar to what's in server.rb. But I imagine you might have some difficulty getting your ruby environment right...

Note that I'm looking at rails 2.3.8 here, so if you're on 3.whatever your results will probably be different.

Answer 2

I eventually decided to avoid any ickiness and start the rails server in its own process, as detailed in this post. (Being able to kill it plus its child processes consistently was the main blocker and the original reason I'd considered starting it in a thread instead.)