Binding pry and the power of the rails console

The most powerful tool I use on a daily basis is the binding.pry gem.

Setup

Put the pry-rails gem into your Gemfile for dev and test.

Gemfile

group :test, :development do
  gem 'pry-rails'
end

You will now need to run

  $ bundle install

at the command line.

How to use

Put the phrase ‘binding.pry’ without the quotes into a piece of your code that you want to investigate and binding.pry will open up a rails console at your command line. This even works in test files. If you need this in the middle of a haml file, be sure to obey the tabbing convention required by haml, and also put a ‘-‘ dash in front of the binding.pry, like so:

Ruby file syntax

  binding.pry

Haml file syntax

  - binding.pry

Remember, you will need to type exit out of the rails console and to return your server to whatever it was doing before it hit the binding.pry.

This is particularly useful to see the current scope of variables and also to look at what is in the database.

Company.find(7).users.find(24)

Company.find(7).team_memberships

Company.find(7).users.find(26)

Company.find(7).users

Company.all

c = Company.find(7)

c.users

User.where(id: 45)

User.where(email: "susan@example.com")

User.where(id: 73).pluck(:first_name, :last_name)