rack-webconsole by codegram

Rack-based interactive console (à la Rails console) in your web application's front-end

Resources

Install

In your Gemfile:

gem 'rack-webconsole'

Rack-webconsole needs JQuery. If you are using Rails 3, JQuery is loaded by default. In case you don't want to use JQuery in your application, rack-webconsole can inject it for you only when it needs it. To do that you should put this line somewhere in your application (a Rails initializer, or some configuration file):

Rack::Webconsole.inject_jquery = true

Usage with Rails 3

If you are using Rails 3, you have no further steps to do. It works! To give it a try, fire up the Rails server and go to any page, press the ` key and the console will show :)

Usage with Sinatra/Padrino

With Sinatra and Padrino you have to tell your application to use the middleware:

require 'sinatra'
require 'rack/webconsole'

class MySinatraApp < Sinatra::Application
  use Rack::Webconsole
  # . . .
end

class SamplePadrino < Padrino::Application
  use Rack::Webconsole
  # . . .
end

NOTE: If you are using Bundler and initializing it from config.ru, you don't have to require 'rack/webconsole' manually, otherwise you have to.

And it works! Fire up the server, go to any page and press the ` key.

Commands

In the console you can issue whatever Ruby commands you want, except multiline commands. Local variables are kept, so you can get a more IRB-esque feeling.

To reset all local variables, just issue the reload! command.

Under the hood

Run the test suite by typing:

rake

You can also build the documentation with the following command:

rake docs

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send us a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.