Useful Rails Console Commands

I work a lot with the rails console and learned a few cool things you can do inside the console that I wanted to record. If you're unfamiliar with the rails console, it's a command that lets you interact with your Rails application from the command line.

Useful Things You Can Do In Rails Console

To clear the console: CMD + R

To list available methods on an object: ls

Reload console: reload!

View method's source: show-source object

Shortcut for value of last successful expression: _ This is useful when you run a command and then you decide you want to reference it. Instead of typing the entire command again or going back to assign it to some variable, you can just use _.

To view all commands available from the pry gem, in the console type help

To access high level methods in the application such as path helpers or HTTP methods, you can call those methods on app:

app.root_path
app.get(app.root_path))

Similarly, you can call helper to get access to view helpers defined by you and also by rails (such as link_to)