Getting Around OSX Bash Fork Issues

Please note that all opinions are that of the author.

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine!

If you’ve ever seen this error under OSX:

-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
-bash: cannot make pipe for command substitution: Too many open files

then you know that it usually signals “Oh crap - restart the box”. If you’re a Rails developer then you may be hitting this due to problems with the new Puma development server and the evented listener.

The solution is to change the listener in config/environments/development.rb from:

config.file_watcher = ActiveSupport::EventedFileUpdateChecker

to:

config.file_watcher = ActiveSupport::FileUpdateChecker

You might also want to kill the listen gem as well (read the linked issue above).