#awesome_print

Clearly everybody using rails will have this problem. When your model gets bigger and bigger, you will find it difficult to spot your attributes in the rails console. So let's clear this messed up console and format it a little bit. We have a gem called 'awesome_print'. Install it using

gem install awesome_print

Then open your ~/.irbrc file and add these lines to it.

# load libraries require 'rubygems' $LOAD_PATH << '/path/to/awesome_print-x.x.x/lib' require 'awesome_print'

usually if you use RVM and ruby 1.9.3 your path to awesome_print gem will be like

/home/username/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448/gems/awesome_print-x.x.x/lib

now fire up your rails console and try to print any object prepended with 'ap'

ap User.first

Hooray!!! We formatted the console. But wait, we missed something. Printing everything with 'ap' prepended seems inappropriate. So let's make awesome_print our default formatter. Now, open your ~/.irbrc again and add this line after requiring awesome_print.

AwesomePrint.irb!

Now you will be able to format everything you print beautifully. And you can add options to awesome print. See the documentation for more details.

I love opinionated software. I love it. For most of us building end user products it's much better to just rely on people to build technology while we provide the business logic glue. No one has the time or resources to develop both technology and product. On top of this, aside from the fact that we rely on stacks of technology that would take teams of good engineers years to reconstruct themselves, it also exposes us to the good ideas that other groups of people have and allows us to incorporate that in our technology.