Procfiles provide a way to run web applications that consist of one or more processes. Developed by David Dollar of Heroku, Procfiles are most commonly used with the Ruby library Foreman:
Foreman is an attempt to make this easier. Using foreman you can declare the various processes that are needed to run your application using a Procfile.
web: bundle exec thin start -p $PORT worker: bundle exec rake resque:work QUEUE=* clock: bundle exec rake resque:scheduler
To get started, simply run gem install foreman. If your project is using both Bundler and Foreman, launching it should be as simple as
$ bundle install $ foreman start
Ruby is not the only way to use Procfiles. Honcho is an excellent Python-based alternative that will work with the Python libraries already on your Mac or Linux environment. Norman is a Node.js port, forego uses the Go language, and shoreman is written in bash script.