~/.irbrc not executed when starting irb or script/console

Question

Here's what I've tried:

1. gem install awesome_print
2. echo "require 'ap'" >> ~/.irbrc
3. chmod u+x ~/.irbrc
4. script/console
5. ap { :test => 'value' }

Result:

NameError: undefined local variable or method `ap' for #

Stian Håklev · Answer 1 · 2011-10-01T04:51:49.873

19

To check what in .irbrc is failing, just execute .irbrc as a normal Ruby script (ruby ~/.irbrc), and Ruby will tell you which line fails. It might complain that IRB module is missing, just require 'irb' in the script (you only need this when testing it, not when actually running IRB).

edited Oct 01 '11 at 04:51

answered Oct 01 '11 at 04:46

Stian Håklev

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Yupp, this definitely helped me debug my situation and lead to a fix. (I'm just puzzled that IRB didn't complain when loading irb when a gem was missing.) – Sam Figueroa Sep 02 '15 at 07:24

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 13 '17 at 14:52

Your Rails Console May Be Using Pry

Based on the suggestions that ~/.irbrc must be invalid, I reduced mine to a single puts "hi", and although it output when I ran irb, it did not when I ran rails console.

I finally noticed that the prompt was pry(main). It turned out that this Rails project is set up with the pry-rails gem, so that's what the console uses. Customizing .pryrc does the trick.

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 24 '10 at 15:56

8

Adding "require 'rubygems'" to my ~/.irbrc file seemed to do the trick.

answered Apr 24 '10 at 15:56

jdeseno

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rombob · Answer 4 · 2010-12-28T23:27:41.493

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In my case it was "If your ~/.irbrc is invalid, it will fail silently." - from Google search - found and fixed errors in ~/.irbrc, all working fine

edited Dec 28 '10 at 23:27

answered Jul 27 '10 at 05:55

rombob

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Had the same problem. In particular, if there are any `require` statements at the top, and they don't work because of the bundler environment, the whole .irbrc will be ignored silently. Solution: `begin / rescue Exception / end` blocks around everything that could fail. – Jo Liss Mar 10 '11 at 17:47

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 03 '11 at 20:50

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You need to add require 'rubygems' as jdeseno wrote.

If you are on Rails3 and use Bundler, you also need to specify the 'awesome_print' gem in the Gemfile too (in the :development group) for it to work.

answered Mar 03 '11 at 20:50

Paweł Gościcki

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~/.irbrc not executed when starting irb or script/console

5 Answers5

Your Rails Console May Be Using Pry