Compromising development mode and production mode

Hi,

I have a very stupid question.

I run my rails application on phusion passenger.
As you know, in production mode I need to ‘touch tmp/restart.txt’ when
I’ve changed some files.
In development mode, it’s not needed.

Can I run the production mode application like it’s development mode so
that I don’t need to ‘touch tmp/restart.txt’?
Of course, I can set it to run in development mode.
However, I don’t want any other development mode feature except that
‘touch tmp/restart.txt’ thing.

The application doesn’t have to be fast.
So speed is not an issue here.

Thanks.

Sam