Quicksilver Action : Open Rails Project

I’ve been doing tonnes of rails coding lately and absolutely loving it! I noticed that my work flow wasn’t all that DRY though; Every time I start working on an app I open up the same stuff:

• The app as a project in Textmate (mate .)
• The app server (script/server)
• The app console (script/console)
• A blank terminal (sc… wait.. no)
• Firefox (http://localhost:3000/)

So I wrote a quicksilver action that does it all for me!

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "rubygems"
require "appscript"
include Appscript

# Grab the project location from the command line / quicksilver
project = ARGV[0]

# Initialize variables
term = app("Terminal")
ff   = app("Firefox")
threads = []

# Activate terminal and firefox
# This will open a new window if the app was not already
# open, which can result in one too many windows
term1 = term.activate

# So we'll close the first window if there is one
term.windows[0].close unless term.windows.get.to_s == ""

# Open up a terminal window at the project.
# Then open the project in textmate from
# the terminal, all in it's own thread
threads << Thread.new do
  term3 = term.do_script("cd " + project)
  term.do_script("mate .", :in => term3)
end

threads << Thread.new do
  term1 = term.do_script("cd " + project)
  term.do_script("script/server", :in => term1)
end

threads << Thread.new do
  term2 = term.do_script("cd " + project)
  term.do_script("script/console", :in => term2)
end

threads << Thread.new do
  ff.OpenURL("http://localhost:3000")
end

# Join all of the threads to the main one
# This stops the script exiting before all
# threads have finished
threads.each do |thread|
  thread.join
end

To Install:

• Install the appscript gem with “gem install rb-appscript”
• Copy script to “~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/Open Rails Project.rb” (you’ll need to create the file)
• Restart quicksilver

To Use:

• Use Quicksilver to navigate to your project folder
• Select “Open Rails Project” as the action.

Enjoy!