irb require shortcut

Intro

I've been doing more work with ruby so therefore I've been spending more time in irb.

irb is Ruby's interactive shell. It allows you to quickly bang out some Ruby code from the command line.

This is just a quick note on a shortcut I found to require all your files from one master file which cuts down on the number of manual requires.

My standard work flow

First imagine that you have a couple of classes such as

base.rb

class Base
  def initalize
    puts "base class!!!!"
  end
end

child.rb

class Child < Base 
end

As you can see these classes are nothing special. For the sake of this example they don't need to be.

Now imagine that you are firing up irb from your command line like so

$ irb

That will drop you into an interactive Ruby Shell. From there you could imagine requiring each of your files and then creating an instance of the Child class

irb(main):001:0> require "/Path/To/base.rb"
 => true
irb(main):002:0> require "/Path/To/child.rb"
 => true
irb(main):003:0> child = Child.new
base class!
 => #<Child:0x006e62cb2fbda2>

Of course that isn't too brutal but you can imagine a case where you have many files that you want to require for your irb session. In this case the simple solution is to create a file which as all the desired files required in it and then simply require that one file in your irb session.

Updated work flow

To start off we have the same two classes as before—Base and Child. However now we're adding a third file called requires.rb.

This file acts as a wrapper that we include all of our other requires in like so

require "/Path/To/base.rb"
require "/Path/To/child.rb"

Then from within your irb session just require your requires.rb file

irb(main):001:0> require "/Path/To/require.rb"
 => true
irb(main):003:0> child = Child.new
base class!
 => #<Child:0x006e62cb2fbda2>

Summary

So yeah I actually took the time to write up a post about requiring files for irb. But the truth is it actually proves to be a really nice work flow when working with a bunch of require statements in irb.

Published

Tags

• ruby 7
• irb 1