What is the function of a Spring server in RoR?

Question

I've just finished Chapter 3 of Micheal Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial. At the last portion of this chapter, he asked to configure the gitignore file to not run in conflict with the spring server "supplied by Rails to speed up loading time". I'm entirely new to programming, and want to get a slightly clearer picture of what this Spring server is. I tried googling it but there are no laymanized answers. Thanks!

Rightist

Answer 1

In the Spring GitHub page, it is clearly mentioned that:

Spring is a Rails application preloader. It speeds up development by keeping your application running in the background so you don't need to boot it every time you run a test, rake task or migration.

This simply means that Spring is the unit in charge of reloading your code any time you make changes to it so that you don't have to restart the server each time you make those changes.

Natiha