Port Mapping Development Servers
As a developer its not uncommon to juggle multiple servers that interact with each other during development. Ensuring that each server has the correct port set while working off of localhost is a cumbersome and error prone issue. port_map is a ruby utility that provides a simple and almost automatic solution to this problem.
I developed this utility gem to solve a personal problem of mine while dealing with multiple web servers during development. The next section (Example Scenario) comes directly from port_map’s README.
You are developing a service that uses multiple web servers. You have two rails applications and one ember application.
| Application | Directory | Command | Local URL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rails API | /api/ | rails server | http://localhost:3000 |
| Rails Background Jobs | /jobs/ | rails server --port 3001 | http://localhost:3001 |
| Ember Application | /ember/ | ember server | http://localhost:4200 |
In each of these applications there is some configuration work required to ensure that they communicate on the correct ports. There are two issues here:
port_map to the Rescue!We’re going to transform this unwieldy scenario into an organized and easy to manage one using port_map.
| Application | Directory | Command | Local URL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rails API | /api/ | port_map rails server | http://api.dev |
| Rails Background Jobs | /jobs/ | port_map rails server | http://jobs.dev |
| Ember Application | /ember/ | port_map ember server | http://ember.dev |
The domain names can be configured with environment variables, but by default they are based on the directory’s name.
You can close and restart each web server multiple times and they will continue to use the same domain names. port_map provides an easy way to logically name each web server, as well as remove the need of specifying ports.
I have been using port_map for a little over 6 months (as of writing this), and it has served me quite well. The beauty of port_map is that it works on any shell command that accepts a --port <number> or -p <number> flag. I enjoy finding new uses for port_map in other web servers like middleman and jekyll.
There was one issue that I have hit, although its not a deal breaker kevinjalbert/port_map#7, although I suspect I can fix this eventually.
As port_map is a wrapper around the command there are interesting issues that can arise. I use Zsh as my shell along with a bunch of aliases it was necessary for port_map to support running commands that contain aliases. I recently moved to zplug as my Zsh plugin framework, where I encountered the following issue zplug/zplug#209.
One last inconvenience is that port_map is a RubyGem, which is effectively tied to a specific Ruby version. When dealing with multiple Ruby version projects using rvm/rbenv sometimes port_map is not installed. It is a slight detour to install port_map for the current Ruby version when I switch to a new Ruby version. Ideally port_map would not be tied to Ruby, and instead is a transportable executable (for example one written in Bash or Go).
I will continue to use port_map until I can spend some time to dig deeper into Vagrant and Docker. These two technologies isolate and containerize environments (web services). I can see the benefits in such technologies as they are not dependant on the host environment, which in my case is my laptop.