rails/spring

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2815 stars · 342 forks observed · 2026-09-26

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Spring is a Ruby gem that preloads Rails applications into a background process to speed up development commands. It automatically reloads application code and restarts when configuration or dependencies change.

Use cases

• speed up running rails tests without booting the app each time
• avoid slow boot times for rake tasks and migrations
• keep a rails app warm in the background during development
• reduce iteration time when running rails commands repeatedly
• automatically reload changed application code between runs

When to choose

• you develop a Rails 7.1+ app on macOS or Linux and run tests, rake tasks, or migrations frequently
• you want a zero-configuration preloader that manages itself automatically
• your environment supports forking (MRI Ruby, not Windows or JRuby)

When to avoid

• you are on Windows or JRuby, which lack the fork support Spring relies on
• your Rails version is older than 7.1 or Ruby is older than 3.1
• you need predictable memory usage, since the background server keeps the app resident
• you run reloading-disabled or exotic configurations that conflict with Spring's assumptions

Facets

library · maturity active

developer-tools build-tool cli web-development developer-tools backend ruby cli rails preloader forking test-speed development-workflow linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rails/spring")