#48 Console Tricks

Ryan, very useful !

Another cool and powerful thing is that you can load (web)session objects straight into your console.

The how-to on this is written on:

http://tektastic.wordpress.com/2006/12/06/ruby-on-rails-how-to-load-session-objects-into-console/

You say your models don't always show up in autocompletion. This is just a case of lazy loading, console doesn't know your classes until you've loaded them (you did Project.new in the beginning, which loaded it). Once console's loaded/required your model, it'll auto-complete

Ryan, app.assigns doesn't seem to work with symbols. app.assings['projects'] works!

Great stuff -- I had no idea that 'y' method existed, very handy!

Re assigns -- you can use a symbol if you call the assigns method: app.assigns(:projects)

You can also do inline logging of SQL right in irb:

http://toolmantim.com/article/2007/2/6/system_wide_script_console_logging

If you think exiting and re-entering the console sucks, try

>> reload!

Nice tips! :D

A great source of knowledge (and magic tricks!) for my irbrc has been dotfiles.org

There are a bunch of nice .irbrc posted there, as there are some sweet .bashrc and .vimrc files, which might come in handy to some of you :)

I have a link to this screencast in http://thinkingeek.com/index.php?/archives/17-Customizing-IRB.html because I think it's a great one! :)

script/console isn't being "flaky" -- I believe the reason why your "name" method on your project didn't autocomplete until you accessed it because the method is created in the class by ActiveRecord::Base when it notices it doesn't exist (through a call to method_missing) See ActiveRecord::Base define_read_methods.

Often I just want to assign something to a variable, but I don't want to see tons of output, e.g. actors = Actor.find_all.

I discovered that I can eliminate the (large) output by appending a "dummy" command that returns nil or something short like 1.

E.g.
actors = Actor.find_all ; 1
or
actors = Actor.find_all ; actors.size

Mike
Mike

Don't forget Wirble!

It's my favorite console trick.

Hey,

Just wanted to point out that script/console production --sandbox can be dangerous. Any models objects you load up that way will lock the database for those rows (assuming your db's transactions use a certain form of lock), effectively stopping your site from running. Use with care!

Just an FYI, I had to add

require 'rubygems'

at the top of my .irbrc file before this would work.

here is lot of console trip n trick in rails

http://madhukaudantha.blogspot.com/2009/12/ruby-on-rails-part-3-console-tips.html

FYI: http://errtheblog.com/post/43 link is dead.

How can I load the .irbrc file after the application gets initialized?

First two links had changed their address to:

http://errtheblog.com/posts/24-irb-mix-tape
http://errtheblog.com/posts/41-real-console-helpers

This episode has been updated for Rails 5 as a blog post. Console Tricks in Rails 5