We actually use God in our development environment, as well as in production, simply because it makes managing unicorn/resque etc simpler.
I've just scaled down our default unicorn config to a single worker in dev, as most of the time this is enough. However, I've added shell scripts wrapping the commands:
# Add an extra unicorn worker
kill -TTIN `cat /path/to/unicorn.pid`
# Remove a unicorn worker
kill -TTOU `cat /path/to/unicorn.pid`
Rather than starting/stopping/restarting unicorn with god, but adding new workers through an ad-hoc shell script, is there a way to have God support a couple of custom commands, like:
god incr unicorn
god decr unicorn
I looked in the documentation and found nothing, but it feels like something it would probably 'unofficially' be able to do.