Automating The Development Environment

Gianni

May 11th, 2008

I’m a ruby developer, and every morning when I arrive at work I find there is a whole lot to do before I can actually begin coding. Here’s my list of morning chores:

Delete yesterday’s log files
Open several terminals
Update my code form the subversion repository
Start autotest, memcached, mongrel, and various other servers
Open my project in my editor

This can become very tedious when you have to repeat it every day, but thankfully it can be simplified into a 1-click process with Apple’s Automator. First things first, I need to delete my old logs. To do that I use the Get Specified Finder Items action and pass it to the Move Finder Items to Trash action:

Next I need to update my working copy from the main repository. You might even have a couple projects that need updating. Again I use Get Specified Finder Items, but this time I pass it to a Run Shell Script action where I use subversion to update each of them:

At this point I’d like to open up Terminal.app, create a few tabs, and start my servers. Before we can use an Automator action, we need to grab a copy of terminit from ELC Technologies. Terminit is a cool little ruby script that lets us initialize Terminal.app tabs and commands to run in each tab. This is my terminit config file:


# Initialize Terminal
- tab1:
  - cd ~/Projects/rails/gigparkapp
  - memcached &
  - script/server
- tab2:
  - cd ~/Projects/rails/gigparkapp
  - rake facebook:tunnel:start
- tab3:
  - cd ~/Projects/rails/gigparkapp
  - autotest
- tab4:
  - cd ~/Projects/rails/gigparkapp

To execute our terminit config we need to use the Run Shell Script action again:

Finally I need to open up my Textmate project so I can begin coding. I grab the Texmate project file with the Get Specified Finder Items action then pass it to the Open Finder Items action:

Of course you can always throw in a few actions to spice things up a bit:

Or:

All you have to do now is save your worlflow as an application and you’re done. I put my new application right in my dock so I can always access it quickly.