IRB

IRB stands for “interactive Ruby” and is a tool to interactively execute Ruby expressions read from the standard input.

The irb command from your shell will start the interpreter.

When executing irb, prompts are displayed as follows. Then, enter the Ruby expression. An input is executed when it is syntactically complete.

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> 1+2
#=> 3
irb(main):002:0> class Foo
irb(main):003:1>  def foo
irb(main):004:2>    print 1
irb(main):005:2>  end
irb(main):006:1> end
#=> nil

The singleline editor module or multiline editor module can be used with irb. Use of multiline editor is default if it’s installed.

Session variables

There are a few variables in every Irb session that can come in handy:

  • _: The value command executed, as a local variable

  • __: The history of evaluated commands. Available only if IRB.conf[:EVAL_HISTORY] is not nil (which is the default). See also IRB::Context#eval_history= and IRB::History.

  • __[line_no]: Returns the evaluation value at the given line number, line_no. If line_no is a negative, the return value line_no many lines before the most recent return value.

Another popular Ruby interactive console is pry.