Hey, where’s my Procfile?
Most visits to this page are from folks who are simply trying to view a local Procfile. If this is you, have a wonderful day 👋
What is a Procfile?
A Procfile contains instructions for a web server that details services and configurations on boot. It’s common practice to maintain Procfiles for different environments, so a project may have a Procfile.dev and a standard Procfile - the latter of which would serve as instructions for a production environment, and the former serving local development. They’re common in Rails and Node apps.
Sometimes, folks click on a link to their local Procfile.dev, and accidentally open a browser, which is why this site exists.
Example of a Procfile
# Procfile.dev
web: bin/rails server -p 3000
css: bin/rails tailwindcss:watch
redis: redis-server
sidekiq: bundle exec sidekiq -C config/sidekiq.yml
This file runs a puma webserver, a Tailwind watcher, Redis, and Sidekiq all with one command. Much better than running all these services in their own terminal windows~