Can I drop to an IRB prompt from a running Ruby script?
I want to run a script, but then have it give me an IRB prompt at a point in the program with the current state of the program, but not just by running rdebug and having a breakpoint.
Open up IRB (which stands for Interactive Ruby). If you're using macOS open up Terminal and type irb, then hit enter. If you're using Linux, open up a shell and type irb and hit enter.
From the main menu, choose Tools | Load file/selection into IRB/Rails console.
In order to start the Ruby debugger, load the debug library using the command-line option -r debug. The debugger stops before the first line of executable code and asks for the input of user commands.
Pry (an IRB alternative) also lets you do this, in fact it was designed from the ground up for exactly this use case :)
It's as easy as putting binding.pry
at the point you want to start the session:
require 'pry'
x = 10
binding.pry
And inside the session:
pry(main)> puts x
=> 10
Check out the website: http://pry.github.com
Pry let's you:
edit obj.my_method
syntaxA tonne more great and original features
you can use ruby-debug to get access to irb
require 'rubygems'
require 'ruby-debug'
x = 23
puts "welcome"
debugger
puts "end"
when program reaches debugger you will get access to irb.
apparently it requires a chunk of code to drop into irb.
Here's the link (seems to work well).
http://jameskilton.com/2009/04/02/embedding-irb-into-your-ruby-application
require 'irb'
module IRB
def self.start_session(binding) # call this method to drop into irb
unless @__initialized
args = ARGV
ARGV.replace(ARGV.dup)
IRB.setup(nil)
ARGV.replace(args)
@__initialized = true
end
workspace = WorkSpace.new(binding)
irb = Irb.new(workspace)
@CONF[:IRB_RC].call(irb.context) if @CONF[:IRB_RC]
@CONF[:MAIN_CONTEXT] = irb.context
catch(:IRB_EXIT) do
irb.eval_input
end
end
end
This feature is available from Ruby 2.4. You can just use binding.irb
E.g.
require 'irb'
a = 10
binding.irb
puts a
If you run above code, you will get irb console, so that you can inspect values of local variables and anything else that is in scope.
Source: http://blog.redpanthers.co/new-binding-irb-introduced-ruby-2-4/
Ruby commit: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/493e48897421d176a8faf0f0820323d79ecdf94a
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