How to get nice formatting in the Rails console

Question

I want to get something like this to look nice:

>> ProductColor.all
=> [#

        

Answer 1

You should try hirb. It's a gem made to to pretty format objects in the ruby console. Your script/console session would look like this:

>> require 'hirb'
=> true
>> Hirb.enable
=> true
>> ProductColor.first
+----+-------+---------------+---------------------+---------------------+
| id | name  | internal_name | created_at          | updated_at          |
+----+-------+---------------+---------------------+---------------------+
| 1  | White | White         | 2009-06-10 04:02:44 | 2009-06-10 04:02:44 |
+----+-------+---------------+---------------------+---------------------+
1 row in set
=> true

You can learn more about hirb at its homepage.

Answer 2

Use irbtools gem.

It will automatically format the the console output plus you'll get tons of great features.

Answer 3

I had some troubles making it work so I'll add my two cents to awesome_print add this to your Gemfile, preferably in :development

gem 'awesome_print', require: 'ap'

then in

rails console

you can do

> ap Model.all That's it. However you can also add

require "awesome_print"
AwesomePrint.irb!

to your ~/.irbrc, this way awesome_print will be required anytime you open the console and you can simply do

Model.all without the need of typing ap

Answer 4

You may also try the following for a group of objects

Object.all.map(&:attributes).to_yaml

This will give you much nicer output, like

---
id: 1
type: College
name: University of Texas
---
id: 2
type: College
name: University of California

Calling to_yaml on attributes rather than the object itself saves you from viewing the full contents of the object in the output

Or puts Object.last.attributes.to_yaml for a single object

Shorthand is also available: y Object.last.attributes

Answer 5

The y method is a handy way to get some pretty YAML output.

y ProductColor.all

Assuming you are in script/console

As jordanpg commented, this answer is outdated. For Rails 3.2+ you need to execute the following code before you can get the y method to work:

YAML::ENGINE.yamler = 'syck'

From ruby-docs

In older Ruby versions, ie. <= 1.9, Syck is still provided, however it was completely removed with the release of Ruby 2.0.0.

For rails 4/ruby 2 you could use just

puts object.to_yaml

Answer 6

>> puts ProductColor.all.to_yaml

Simply works fine!

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4830096