Question

I’m having hard time debugging the flow of the code on “Ruby on Rails”. Please give me some tips. I’m new to “Ruby on rails”. Like in php we use var_dump,print_r and die, just to check where the data has reached.

Answer 1

Comparable tricks in Ruby:

Output something to the server log (log/development.log by default).
I usually keep one terminal window watching the log whenever I’m developing. (tail -f /log/development.log)

You can use puts or logger.info to print things into the log, but personally I like this gem, lll, which logs out nicely highlighted versions of whatever you pass it.

To stop execution, you can use abortor raise. E.g.:

raise "something terrible happened."

When you do this in development mode, as with any other exception, Rails renders a page with a bunch of handy stuff on it – the exception, a stack trace, and the current state of parameter, session and environment variables.