Load app in IRB (like rails console)

[davekaro]

I've been playing with Roda and curious how folks enter a quick "console session" like rails console provides. I've been moving require statements around between config.ru and app.rb and testing different strategies with Zeitwerk and rack-unreloader.

I thought easiest would be to make app.rb load everything, then I added an .irbrc file with require_relative "app" and it worked. However, now that I have more requires in app.rb, I can't follow the advice at the bottom of https://github.com/jeremyevans/rack-unreloader#dependency-handling- to load dependencies in config.ru so they aren't reloaded every time app.rb changes.

Curious how others handle this. Thanks!

[jeremyevans]

It seem like you could have your .irbrc file load the dependencies that config.ru loads before loading app.rb. Is that possible?

I haven't tried to do this in my own apps. Generally for an irb shell, I just load the models (irb -r ./models), and I don't have the irb shell do reloading.

[davekaro]

Ah yes that makes sense. I was stuck thinking I wanted everything loaded with one require.

You have a good point about just loading the models since most IRB sessions are interacting with those. Hard to get my head out of the sand after blindly following rails conventions for years ;)

[adam12]

I'm not sure if this would still work, but at one point in time racksh was fairly popular. I looked over the source and cant' see any reason why it wouldn't still work today.

[davekaro]

racksh looks neat. I also found the Rakefile from the roda-sequel-stack includes a nice task rake dev_irb - see https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda-sequel-stack/blob/f3d555f978c4bc56e38ddfea643faabaeccea2d7/Rakefile#L69