Question

How does one launch irb during the runtime of my rspec tests?

Essentially I would like to be able to play with various things and then have my rspec test run on the according instance of the program. I am able to successfully do this during conventional runtime of the program, however I run into issues when I attempt to launch irb during runtime of an rspec test.

conventional runtime

test.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'irb'

puts 'hello world'
IRB.start
puts 'goodbye world'

runtime

$ ./test.rb 
hello world
1.9.3-p194 :001 > puts 'yo'
yo
 => nil 
1.9.3-p194 :002 > exit
goodbye world

rspec runtime

test_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'
require 'irb'

describe "irb" do
  it "should print 'hello world', launch irb, upon exiting irb print 'goodbye world'" do
    puts 'hello world'
    IRB.start
    puts 'goodbye world'
  end
end

runtime

$ rake spec
/Users/username/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/ruby -S rspec ./spec/test_spec.rb
Run options: include {:focus=>true}

All examples were filtered out; ignoring {:focus=>true}
hello world
1.9.3p194 :001 > require 'spec_helper'
 => false
1.9.3p194 :002 > require 'irb'
 => false
1.9.3p194 :003 >
1.9.3p194 :004 >   describe "irb" do
1.9.3p194 :005 >       it "should print 'hello world', launch irb, upon exiting irb print 'goodbye world'" do
1.9.3p194 :006 >           puts 'hello world'
1.9.3p194 :007?>         IRB.start
1.9.3p194 :008?>         puts 'goodbye world'
1.9.3p194 :009?>       end
1.9.3p194 :010?>   end1.9.3p194 :010?>
 => RSpec::Core::ExampleGroup::Nested_2
1.9.3p194 :010 >
goodbye world
.

Finished in 0.10321 seconds
1 example, 0 failures

Randomized with seed 62613
$

Answer 1

Use pry.

Simple, fast, with syntax highlighting. After install, you just need to write:

binding.pry

in your code to stop executing and display developer debugging console

After you fall in love with pry, there is also useful gem called ‘pry-nav’