Bored of waiting on rails server or rake routes? No more! This gem provides three commands, waiting-on-rails, waiting-on-rake, and the generic waiting-on. The first two are meant as replacements to rails and rake, respectively, so you can call them like this:

waiting-on-rails server
waiting-on-rake db:migrate

What's the difference? Aside from running the required task, they also play some relaxing elevator music, so you'll never get bored of waiting again. Problem solved!

You can use the third one, waiting-on with any command and it'll play music until it's done:

waiting-on rspec spec
waiting-on cap deploy

Okay, so waiting-on-rails only plays music for the server task, not for the similarly long-loading console cousin, but I have no idea how to run the console in a child process and control its IO. Pull requests welcome. And waiting-on-rake only plays music for long-running tasks (see slow_tasks method in this file), but that's intentional.

Also, it only works for the following webservers:

• WEBrick
• Mongrel
• Thin
• Puma

It should be possible to add support for more by adding to the matches_server_start? method in this file. Again, pull requests welcome.

The first thing you need to do is install the gem (note the underscores):

gem install waiting_on_rails

The gem requires mplayer to play its music. On a Mac, you can install mplayer with homebrew:

brew install mplayer

On Linux, you should use your distribution's package manager. For Arch Linux, the command would be:

pacman -S mplayer

You could run waiting-on-rails without using bundle exec (unless it's run by a bundle-exec-ed script, like with a Procfile), but you probably won't be able to with waiting-on-rake. So if you're serious about battling boring loading times, you're going to have to add it to your Gemfile with a require: false. If you just want a quick laugh, install the gem globally and start your project with waiting-on-rails s. Preferably in front of your unsuspecting coworkers. Amusement not guaranteed, but very likely.

• Implement continuing from a point. Could save a temporary file somewhere with the time at which the music was stopped.
• Implement simple configuration, controlling what song to play, or even something different to do (like show a notification). Warning: might make the project actually useful, consider carefully.

Both music sources are CC-licensed and can be found at the following urls:

• Elevator music: http://www.jamendo.com/en/list/a98147/echoes-from-the-past
• Elevator ding: http://soundbible.com/1441-Elevator-Ding.html