About 6 months ago I started using Pow for serving my apps in development mode. It loads any RACK compatible app, and allows you to access your projects via the .dev and named symlinks stored in ~/.pow (for example http://my_project.dev). No need to specify a port either!

Very shortly afterwards I ran into a problem. When I'm working on a Sinatra app, normally I use the shotgun gem for automatic reloading. I can't do that when I'm running Pow. So I dug into Pow's documentation.

Pow supports passenger-style reloads via these commands:

touch tmp/restart.txt
touch tmp/always_restart.txt

That's somewhat helpful. However, remembering to run touch tmp/restart.txt every time I make a change is a pain. Creating tmp/always_restart.txt reloads every time, but makes the app painfully slow. I don't need a reload for every css / image / js asset that is fetched.

Guard to the rescue! Guard is a simple tool. Watch files; run commands on change. There is already a guard-pow gem. Which touches tmp/restart.txt on file change.

To use it, add guard-pow to your Gemfile. Then define a Guardfile telling it which files to watch. Your specific files may differ, but this works for my needs.

Finally, run bundle exec guard. It will print when it restarts pow. I like this approach because it can be adapted to any RACK compatible app by changing which files get watched. Also, it doesn't require you to change any application specific code; It's only necessary to add guard to the Gemfile.