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Using your Rails Console

These are some beginner tips that might help you get started with irb and the Rails console.

Getting Started

  1. Open you command prompt and cd path/to/my/app
  2. type rails console and press enter

This opens an instance of irb with all your Rails app goodies. Be sure to back up your database before proceeding. The easiest way is to mv db/development.sqlite3 db/development.sqlite3.backup or similar.

Viewing your tables

You can view your data directly through the console. Say I have an Events model. Just like in my events_controller, I can grab all my events in the console by typing Event.find(:all). Assign it to a variable like @events.

$ @events = Event.find(:all)

That was easy enough. But the console might spit out a bunch of unformatted data at you. To make things easier to read type

$ y @events

y is short for yaml (the cutest markup lanquage, sorry markdown). Think of it like an object's puts function. It displays your data with fancy newlines and indentation. Neat huh?

Let's Get Creative

Let's keep going with this Event model thing. Some of our data fields might be :title, or a datetime start_at. We can manually create an event by typing

$ my_birthday = Event.new( :title => 'Alex\'s Birthday', :starts_at => 'April 29, 1988, 11:45PM' )

let's check out my_birthday

$ y my_birthday

Neat! Let's save it to our database.

$ my_birthday.save

Easy enough. You can save a step by using the create method instead

$ Event.create( :title => 'Alex\'s Birthday', :starts_at => 'April 29, 1988, 11:45PM' )

Isn't Rails fantastic?

Let's Get Destructive

I hope you backed up your database. Type

$ Event.destroy_all # to kill all your events
$ my_event.destroy # to kill a specific event

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