Okay, so today I messed around with Puma. I’d heard of it before, you know, as a Ruby web server, but I’d never actually used it. Thought I’d give it a shot and see what all the fuss was about.
First things first, I needed to get it installed. I already had Ruby set up, so it was pretty simple. Just popped open my terminal and typed in:
gem install puma
Boom! Done. That was easy. Now, I needed something to actually run with Puma. I didn’t feel like building a whole Rails app, so I grabbed a super simple Sinatra app I had lying around from another project. It basically just says “Hello, world!” Nothing fancy.
Getting it Running
Next, I needed to figure out how to actually start the server. I looked at the Puma documentation real quick, and, no big surprise, it’s also pretty straightforward. I navigated to my Sinatra app’s directory in the terminal and typed:
puma
And…it started! I saw some output in the terminal, telling me it was listening on a certain port (I think it was 9292 by default?). So, I opened my browser, typed in localhost:9292, and there it was! My “Hello, world!” message. Okay, cool, it works.
Playing Around
Now I wanted to see what else I could do. I remembered something about a configuration file. So, I created a new file called config/*. Inside, I played with a few options, like changing the port and the number of threads:
- Threads: I messed around with the
threadssetting. From what I understand, this controls how many requests Puma can handle at the same time. I set it to something like min 1, max 4, just to see if it would break. It didn’t. - Port: I changed the port to 3000, because, why not? Just had to add a line like
port 3000to the config file.
After making those changes, I stopped the server (Ctrl+C in the terminal) and restarted it using the config file:
puma -C config/*
Checked the browser again (now at localhost:3000), and it still worked! So the config file was definitely doing something.
Wrapping Up
So, that was my quick and dirty experience with Puma. Seemed pretty easy to use and set up. I didn’t dive into anything super complex, like deploying it or setting up workers (which I know it can do), but for a simple local development setup, it seems great. I’ll probably use it again for my next small Ruby project. It’s nice to have options, you know?
