Question

I was wondering how to exit a controller in rails and get the output up to that point.

In PHP I often used the “exit” when debugging to get only the data processed to that point. I haven’t found a sollution to this in rails.

If you get a error further down in the code the view is locked from displaying <%= debug %> information.

Some would suggest console or rescue, and I know about these. But isn’t there a simpler solution?

Answer 1

In development mode, I often just use puts or awesome_print to print something to the screen that I ran rails server from. That works pretty well for the simple cases.

For anything more complex than that, I use ruby-debug or pry to drop down into an interactive console when it hits the right point.

I have some editor shortcuts to print one of these two snippets:

require 'pry'; binding.pry
require 'ruby-debug'; debugger

Drop these in your code and you can use IRB to inspect (and manipulate) the state of your program.

I highly recommend you give pry a shot. Check it out here:

http://pryrepl.org/

http://railscasts.com/episodes/280-pry-with-rails

There is also the older ruby-debug:

http://railscasts.com/episodes/54-debugging-with-ruby-debug