Shell Spinner

Gem provides animated spinner for UNIX shell and could be used with rake tasks and any console scripts. It basically wraps any code and show spinner until code isn't completed.

gem install shell-spinner

In Rails 3, add this to your Gemfile and run the bundle command.

gem "shell-spinner"

The main gem function ShellSpinner accepts text string as first argument, which is not required, but it's better to have it for pretty output. And it accepts block of code. So spinner will be presented while block is running.

require 'shell-spinner'

# With message
ShellSpinner "Positive result" do
  Rake::Task["foo:bar"].invoke
end

# Spinner without message
ShellSpinner do
  sleep 1
end

# With exception
ShellSpinner "Code with exception" do
  sleep 2
  raise "Some exception"
end

This code produces output similar to:

> Positive result... done
> Code with exception... fail
> <exception message and backtrace>

I can't show you a spinner there, but promise - it appears :)

To see an example of the code in action you can execute bin/example from your terminal.