~/.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 #

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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).

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.