Working with Rails from the Console

Rails is so thoroughly web-facing that it can be difficult to imagine working with it from the command line, but it does indeed offer rails console. When you run rails console rather than rails server, Rails starts up a special environment using the Interactive Ruby Shell (irb) instead of firing up a web server. This shell has the full context of your application, so you can load data from your databases, play with models, and generally take a look around.

The console shell lets you interact with your application from the command line with the full powers of Ruby at your disposal. Most Ruby books include a lot more detail about irb, some even running all of their examples there, but in Rails it’s good mostly for playing with models and testing methods.