I know that Pry is the new hotness for command line Ruby work in a repl – but I've never felt comfortable with it. I stick with the tried and true AwesomePrint. I recently bootstrapped up two new boxes and I found that I've been using AwesomePrint so long that I don't actually remember how to make it work. And that, dear reader, is how I write a post – if I can't rememeber it then I need to write it down. Here are the steps:

  1. You need awesome_print in your Gemfile so add **gem 'awesome_print' **. I put it into development and test groups only generally but it is awful convenient in production (but you need to follow step 3 server side on ALL servers which sucks).
  2. Do the bundle install dance

  3. Create a file ~/.irbrc and add the following two lines:

    require "awesome_print" AwesomePrint.irb!

For more information of AwesomePrint, I've been going to this web page for years now.