Older Rails and Mongrel

One of the useful features of Rails servers (Webrick, Lighttpd, and Mongrel) is to see the development log going to standard out. However when using Rails before version 1.2 and Mongrel, you don’t get that nicety.

I had to dip into a few applications using pre Rails 1.2, and having a separate terminal open for the log became annoying. This minor change keeps you from tailing in another terminal.

In RAILS_ROOT/config/environments create a new environment called mongrel.rb. Copy the contents of development.rb into it and throw this line at the bottom.

config.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

Then start Rails with mongrel_rails start -e mongrel