Sinatra won’t reload your files. So if you’re developing your app and want to see any changes made in the browser, install the shotgun gem.

gem install shotgun

You can then use shotgun to run your server

shotgun your_sinatra_ditty.rb

Presto, your ditty will never be out of key :)

Check it out http://sinatra.seanbehan.com/
This assumes Apache2 and the Phusion Passenger module have already been installed. If not you can get up to speed w/ this resource http://seanbehan.com/ruby-on-rails/new-ubuntu-slice-apache-mysql-php-ruby-on-rails-git-and/

First you need Sinatra, so install the gem

gem install sinatra

We need a home for Frank, so create the minimum number of directories in our web directory. The public directory is where we’ll server images, stylesheets, javascript etc. The tmp directory will be where we control Passenger.

cd /var/www/sinatra
mkdir myapp
mkdir myapp/tmp
mkdir myapp/public

cd myapp
vim index.rb
#in index.rb
get '/' do
  "Fly me to the moon..."
end

Next we need a configuration file for Rack, important the file extension is “.ru” not .rb!

vim config.ru
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

Sinatra::Application.default_options.merge!(
  :run => false,
  :env => ENV['RACK_ENV']
)

require 'index'
run Sinatra.application

Set up the virtual host

<virtualHost *>
  ServerName www.myapp.com
  DocumentRoot /var/www/sinatra/public
</virtualHost>

Now you can restart the app if you make adjustments!

touch tmp/restart.txt

Keep on singing :)

Inspired by http://blog.zerosum.org/2008/7/4/passenger-3-sinatra