Ivan Enviroman

When I reboot my mac, or need to switch projects, I had quite a few clicks and mouse movements to go through. I found it rather repetitive, so I set up a shell script (in ruby) to open Firefox, Textmate, and start the rails server.

Here’s the script. I called it open_dev_environement and used chmod 755 open_dev_environment to make it clickable and executable from the project directory.

# make sure your path to ruby is the same as above by typing 'which ruby' at the command line
app_directory_name = "persfin"

# start mongrel, using -c to change the directory
system 'mongrel_rails mongrel::start -c ~/Sites/' + app_directory_name + '&'

# change Minefield to Firefox if you're not using the latest Firefox Nightly Beta
`open -a /Applications/Minefield.app http://localhost:3000`

# make sure your textmate project file has the same name as the directory
system 'open -a TextMate ~/Sites/' + app_directory_name + "/" + app_directory_name + ".tmproj"

It would be interesting to know how to extend this to open up multiple tabs in Terminal (for example, ’script/console’) Or, if there is a better way to do these commands with osascript for applescript. If you know, let us all know in the comments.
see also Ruby may replace Applescript.