Emacs Remote Rails Console

As a rails dev, it’s very helpful to connect to a remote instance within your os editor (which is Emacs, of course!). Let’s add a nice binding to our Doom Emacs config.

Connecting to a rails instance running in docker

Since the servers I’m connecting to are usually running docker, I want to use the following command inside of Emacs:

ssh -tt my.server.com 'docker exec -it rails c'

coupled with a ssh config that manages my bastions and user names/keys.

Adding a new file to keep our Doom config clean

To prevent my config from becoming an unreadable mess, I split it into a few private files. A new layer would be too much overhead ;)

;; ~/.doom/+rails.el -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

(setq
  rails/app '("app-1" "app-2")
  rails/server '("my.server.com" "my.other-server.com"))

(defun rails/remote-console ()
  "Start a remote console"
  (interactive)
  (let ((app (completing-read "App: " rails/apps))
        (server (completing-read "Server: " rails/servers)))
    (compile
       (format "ssh -tt %s.com 'docker exec -it %s %s'"
               server app "rails c") t)
    (rename-buffer (format "*rails %s@%s*" app server))))

I also rename the buffer so I can connect to different servers with rename-buffer without closing the existing connections.

Keybindings & Adding to the config

Thanks to a great short blog article by Rameez Khan, I figured out how to add the bindings to the rails file conveniently:

;; ~/.doom/+rails.el -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

(map! :leader
      (:prefix-map ("R" . "rails")
       (:prefix "c" . "console")
        :desc "remote" "r" #'rails/remote-console'))
               
(provide +rails)

This will enable our function under SPC R c r at any point. Now, we only need to link our file in the main config.el:

;;; $DOOMDIR/config.el -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-
(load! "+rails")

That’s it! This integration gave me a pretty nice efficiency boost over going through the shell since I have my source code and an org buffer with some snippets available.