How to I start a rails console with pry turned off?

Question

Sometimes I have reason to want to start the rails console as an irb repl rather than pry (as awesome as pry is). It will default to pry because pry has in the Gemfile. Hows is that done nowadays?

I think there used to be a --irb option when running rails console but that seems to be gone now. I get a deprecation error message when I try it.

More details

If I just run "rails console" it takes me to pry.

If I run "rails console -irb=irb":

$ rails c -irb=irb                                                                                                                                                                         
--irb option is no longer supported. Invoke `/your/choice/of/ruby script/rails console` instead

Relevent lines from my Gemfile:

gem 'rails', '3.2.18'
gem 'pry-rails'
gem 'pry-plus'

pry is awesome in some aspects, yet IRB remains more stable/reliable when doing some operations (especially copy-paste) — Cyril Duchon-Doris, Oct 02 '17 at 14:00
Reverse: If `rails c` opens up `irb` but you want `pry` to open, then do `pry -r ./config/environment` — krozaine, Sep 29 '18 at 19:45

score 38 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 26 '15 at 13:18

38

Launching pry when calling rails console or rails c is set up by the pry-rails gem. If you look in the pry-rails issues there is one that describes a solution.

Define the environment variable DISABLE_PRY_RAILS as 1.

So you can call rails console without pry with:

DISABLE_PRY_RAILS=1 rails c

answered Oct 26 '15 at 13:18

ReggieB

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8

This is very nice. Note that you'll also need to run `spring stop` first, before calling the above. – nonrectangular May 27 '17 at 01:25

Alex Levine · Answer 2 · 2015-09-02T22:50:54.300

6

Works in Rails 4: In your application.rb, inside your Application class, drop this puppy in.

# Use the IRB console instead of the Pry one
console do
  require 'irb'
  config.console = IRB
end

I couldn't take the Pry console anymore. It kept putting my cursor in odd places at unpredictable times. I can't even describe it but if you know what I'm talking about and know the solution, please let me know.

edited Sep 02 '15 at 22:50

answered Aug 20 '15 at 23:21

Alex Levine

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 15 '17 at 23:09

Inspired by the answers above, I added the following to the class definition in application.rb so that Pry is toggleable from the console:

console do
  if ENV['IRB']
    require 'irb'
    config.console = IRB
  end
end

You can then run rails c to get a Pry console, and IRB=true rails c to get an IRB console. This is easily modified if you want the inverse. Works in Rails 4 and 5.

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 07 '14 at 14:41

For the benefit of anyone who runs into the same problem, this is my (crappy) workaround.

I wrapped the pry gems in Gemfile with this:

...
unless ENV['NOPRY']
  gem 'pry-rails'
  gem 'pry-plus'
end
...

Then run this from the unix terminal:

NOPRY=true bundle install
NOPRY=true rails console

Not pretty, but gets the job done...

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 17 '23 at 11:56

0

You can also do it once console has already been started via IRB.start method.

answered Jan 17 '23 at 11:56

knagode

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How to I start a rails console with pry turned off?

5 Answers5