Rails Spring breaking generators

Question

I'm setting up my first Rails 4.1 app, which comes with Spring, their new preloader. When I try to install Devise using their generator ($ rails generate devise:install), the command line just hangs and nothing gets generated.

If I remove Spring from the gem file and try again, the Devise generator works.

Anyone have any insight?

Answer 1

Check directories of some other projects that you were working on at that time, chances are that the generated files ended up there.

spring seems to get confused when you work with more than one rails app at a time. That's probably what caused your problem

spring runs as a server and keeps a rails environment loaded. I think what happens is that if you work with more than one project at a time then spring system seems to get confused and uses wrong environment.

I have had a situation where I was running rails g ... in one project and the files were getting generated in another project. What was crazy was that I kept renaming and moving that other folder, and still the generator kept putting the files in that folder. As if spring had latched on the the inode of that folder.

Try DISABLE_SPRING=1 rails g devise:install

or ps aux |grep spring and kill all the processes you see and then run rails g devise:install

We are taking out spring from the Gemfile for now while this broken behavior persists, and in the future use rails new --skip-spring

If you want to keep using spring, then try following these rules

• Use new shells for each new project
• Use a new directory name for each new project (If you do rails new blog, work on it, then mv blog blog.old and rails new blog again, it might not work.
• From time to time keep on killing all the spring servers, for safety's (and sanity's) sake.

Answer 2

You can disable spring for any $ rails command by passing the environment variable DISABLE_SPRING=1.

$ DISABLE_SPRING=1 rails generate devise:install 

Alternatively, you can try $ spring stop to spin down the spring processes. Running $ rails generate afterwards will spin up a new spring process, which might solve the temporary issue.