On Ruby on Rails, how do we print debug info inside of a controller?

Question

In PHP, CGI, or in RoR's View, we can easily print out debug information. How about in the Controller, how can we just say, print "hello world" (to the webpage output) and return to continue with the view, or stop the controller right there?

Answer 1

In the controller you can:

render :text => @some_object.inspect 

But your view won't be rendered.

You could also:

Rails.logger.debug("My object: #{@some_object.inspect}") 

and run tail on log/development.log to see the output.

In the view the recommeneded way is:

<%= debug(@some_object) %> 

Answer 2

Don't know about print, but puts never failed me. Your hello world will be in console and logs and normal flow will continue.
Did I understand you correctly?