Conditionally using memcached in Rails development mode

Problem: sometimes you want Rails to use the MemCacheStore in development mode, but only when memcached is running. Otherwise you want to fall back to the regular memory store.

Solution: Drop this gist into your development.rb file. It checks to see if memcached is running on the default port on localhost and sets config.cache_store appropriately.

With this code in place, not everyone on your team has to be running memcached, and you only have to run it when you're testing something that involves memcached.

This saved me some aggravation and I hope it helps you too.