Logical Friday

Pow is the hot new zero-config server released by the benevolent guys at 37signals. They created it to make all of our lives easier because you no longer have to think about application servers in development with Pow. Obviously thin, unicorn, passenger or whatever your choice of production server is are still important, but Pow makes your local environment easier to deal with.

But is it really easy enough?

Like any lazy developer, that was the question and I asked ourselves when we first installed Pow, and our answer was no. Adding a project to Pow, restarting the project, opening the project in a browser, even installing Pow itself; all these tasks seemed so much harder now that Pow had made everything else so easy. So the only sensible thing to do was write something that would make it easier again.

Later that day we released the first version of Powder and everything became easier again. If you want to use Pow, install Powder first with a quick

gem install powder

and then installing Pow is as easy as

powder install

Then, if you had a Rails project called chunky-bacon, just

cd path/to/chunky-bacon
powder
powder open

and your web browser will open your app at http://chunky-bacon.dev. Easy.

Check out the Readme for more of what Powder can make easier for you. And if you think of anything else to do with Pow that could be easier, open an issue, or fork Powder and send us a pull request.

Tagged: gem, pow, powder, ruby, rubygems

§ 5 Responses to Powder: making Pow even easier!

• Powder: making Pow even easier! « [tloring retain]; says:

  May 26, 2011 at 12:34 am

  […] via Powder: making Pow even easier! « Logical Friday. […]

  Reply
• Ron Green says:

  May 30, 2011 at 4:10 am

  This is great. Thank you.

  Reply
• The Simplicity that is Pow says:

  June 14, 2011 at 1:03 pm

  […] with a gem named Powder.  I haven’t had the chance to play around with this tool yet but a blog post by one of it’s creators says they wanted to make Pow “ridiculously easy”.  The commands supported help make […]

  Reply
• CC Links 27 « crispycode says:

  January 15, 2012 at 8:24 pm

  […] Powder: making Pow even easier! « Logical Friday: Powder is a gem that makes using 37signals’ handy Pow server even easier […]

  Reply
• Thin or Pow or Powder: Which is next Rails Web Server? | SimpleTechBlog says:

  March 26, 2013 at 11:49 pm

  […] that doesn’t put to an end. The guys at LogicalFriday wanted something more easier and thats when got launched POWDER: making Pow even easier! The blog […]

  Reply