When I write code in Ruby, I spend a decent amount of time in irb poking API’s, doing spikes, and testing out some logic.
The first couple times it’s a little annoying that I need to require whatever gems and ruby files I need a play with, but after about the fifth time I’m raging at my keyboard yelling “WHY HAVEN’T I AUTOMATED THIS YET!?”
You might be thinking: “Just type rails c, duh!”
And I would tell you I don’t do Rails… on principle!
I picked up a trick a couple years ago that lets me automate this process and give me a nice rails c like console… and it’s only 3 lines of code.
I’ll assume you have a Rakefile:
desc 'Start IRB and load the app'
task :console => :load_app do
require 'irb'
ARGV.clear
IRB.start
end
Okay, it’s actually 6, but the meat is only 3.
Now I can type rake console and bam, I’m sitting at an irb prompt, inside the context of my application (I’m also assuming either your Rakefile or that load_app task loads up all the things you want to play around with at your console).
The above example is for a Sinatra app I’m working on. The next example is for a git server migration script (that I wrote about a little while ago). It doesn’t have an application to load, but does have a couple handy files to require, and then it even instantiates a class and tells me how to access it:
desc 'an irb console with export data and the gitlab api available.'
task :console do
require 'irb'
ARGV.clear
@importer = setup_importer()
puts "The importer is available here: @importer"
puts "The gitlab instance is available here: @importer.gitlab"
IRB.start
end
This is extremely useful for nearly any ruby project I’m working on, whether it’s a web app/api, import/export script, or a gem.
Let me know how it works out for you! @jon_fuller