I started fiddling with the neat, lightweight Ruby web application framework “Sinatra” the other day. It seemed like a nice alternative to Rails and since I had also been playing with Slim for PHP, I wanted to see what it was like on the Ruby side of the fence.

I got the whole thing set up in Vagrant after no small amount of fiddling with Chef. I wanted to run it under Unicorn with Nginx in front, as is recommended by many for production deploys. After getting it all lined up, the app finally ran! Awesome, time to do some development!

So I started editing my index controller, saved, reloaded the browser. No change. Ugh. Caching, maybe?

To make a long story short, there isn’t enough information about this, and it’s even harder when you don’t know who’s causing the problem. I tried cutting out Unicorn and connected Nginx up to WEBrick directly… No love.

Some searches turned up this thing about the “sendfile” setting in Nginx having real problems with VirtualBox, so I tried turning that off. Nope. Still no refresh.

Finally, I found this article on Stack Overflow. Sinatra doesn’t reload files for each request because… Wait for it… It was “too complicated” to do. So developers just have to, what, restart their app after each change? I personally think that this decision is kind of dumb.

Anyway, install the “sinatra-reload” gem in your app and everything is gold. As one commenter suggested, you should probably check the environment and load it only in development, but do what you want.

I hope that all of the words in this post help it to find its way to other suffering souls on Google because I was just about to “vagrant destroy” for the last time.