Rack::Console

Find yourself missing a rails console analogue in your other Ruby web applications? This lightweight gem provides a Rack::Console class that will load your Rack application's code and environment into an IRB or Pry session. Either use Rack::Console.new(options).start directly, or run the provided rack-console executable.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "rack-console"

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it system-wide:

$ gem install rack-console

Usage

Rack::Console ships with a rack-console executable that will load your application in an IRB shell (or Pry if that's included in your Gemfile and you specify the --pry option). Assuming you have a config.ru file in the current directory, simply run:

$ bundle exec rack-console
Loading development environment (Rack::Console 2.0.0)
irb(main):001>

Rack::Console supports some of the same things that rails console provides, as well as some of the options used in rackup:

• An app method that will return your underlying Rack application with rack-test methods mixed in. You can perform fake requests to your app (e.g. response = app.get('/'))
• A reload! method to discard new code or defined variables/constants
• The -c option (or --config) to specify a non-standard config.ru file
• The -e option (or --environment) to specify the Rack environment to load
• The -r option (or --require) to require a file/library before Rack::Console loads
• The -I option (or --include) to specify paths (colon-separated) to add to $LOAD_PATH before Rack::Console loads
• The -P option (or --[no-]pry) to specify whether to use Pry instead of IRB (Pry must be installed in your project)

Framework CLI Example

Because Rack::Console is just a class, it's easy to provide a console subcommand to a CLI for your own Rack framework. For example, here's how you could hypothetically implement a console subcommand for a generic Rack CLI using Thor:

require "rack/console"
require "thor"

module Rack
  class CLI < Thor
    desc "console [ENVIRONMENT]", "Start a Rack console"

    method_option :config,  aliases: "-c", type: "string", desc: "Specify a Rackup file (default: config.ru)"
    method_option :require, aliases: "-r", type: "string", desc: "Require a file/library before console boots"
    method_option :include, aliases: "-I", type: "string", desc: "Add colon-separated paths to $LOAD_PATH"

    def console
      # Set a custom intro message:
      #   ENV["RACK_CONSOLE_INTRO"] = "Loading Rack::Console..."
      #
      # Or, to prevent an intro message from being printed at all:
      #   ENV["IGNORE_RACK_CONSOLE_INTRO"] = "true"
      Rack::Console.new(options).start
    end
  end
end

Rack::CLI.start(ARGV)

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request