Rails Console and Test Mode

This one is a short one but a good one. One really useful trick is to launch Rails console in test mode:

❯ RAILS_ENV=test rails c
Running via Spring preloader in process 41705
Loading test environment (Rails 6.0.2.1)
irb: warn: can't alias context from irb_context.

You can check the Rails environment this way:

2.7.0 :001 > Rails.env
"test"

The benefit to this is that you can work directly with FactoryBot and experiment with factories:

2.7.0 :002 > project = FactoryBot.create(:project, name: "Scott's Project")

FactoryBot is installed via Gemfile and locked into test environment only (which is why you need to launch Rails console in test mode):

group :test do
  # Adds support for Capybara system testing and selenium driver
  gem "capybara", ">= 2.15"
  gem "selenium-webdriver"
  # Easy installation and use of web drivers to run system tests with browsers
  gem "webdrivers"
  gem 'factory_bot_rails'
  #gem 'database_cleaner'
  # gem 'shoulda'
  # gem 'shoulda-matchers'
end