Rails quick tips #2: Project-specific .pryrc

Like many Ruby and Rails developers I use Pry instead of IRB for almost all of my projects.

Recently I realized that many people are not aware of the fact that pry supports project-specific .pryrc files, which can come in very handy, for example when trying things out in a Rails console. Just add a .pryrc file at the root of your application and add code you want to be available in each console session there. Here’s a modified example from one of our applications:

def admin
  @admin ||= Admin.first
end

def user
  @user ||= User.first
end

This way when I start a new rails console session, I can always access admin or user and the caching will ensure the database only gets hit the first time the method is called:

[1] (rails_new) main: 0> user
  User Load (2.1ms)  SELECT  "users".* FROM "users" ORDER BY "users"."id" ASC LIMIT $1  [["LIMIT", 1]]
#=> #<User id: 1, email: "test@example.com", created_at: "2018-06-26 07:22:18", updated_at: "2018-06-26 07:22:18">
[2] (rails_new) main: 0> user
#=> #<User id: 1, email: "test@example.com", created_at: "2018-06-26 07:22:18", updated_at: "2018-06-26 07:22:18">

I find using project specific .pryrc files in this way to be a huge productivity boost when trying things out in a Rails console, since they do away with a lot of repetitive setup.