Pry wtf
Every day at AcademicWorks, the Engineering Team has a Dev Sync where we share something we learned from the day before. Here is what I learned yesterday...
What I learned
This week, we've kicked off a new development cycle but we are also still QAing our newest release version. So in addition to jumping into some brand new features, I've been bug hunting and bashing.
:bug: :bug: :bug: :bug: :bug: :bug: :bug: :bug: :bug: :bug:
The essential tools for debugging in Javascript & Ruby are the debugger keyword for Chrome Dev Tools, and <% binding.pry %> for the Rails console. I've been learning a lot with these two tools but I wanted to focus on learning more about Pry. So I watched this conference talk from RailsConf2014.
In addition to this great video (which really focuses on Pry as a feature building, general purpose tool, not just as a debugger), I stumbled across the wtf? command. Emblematic of a developer's sense of humor, the wtf? command will show you the stack trace of your last Exception Error. And the more ? or ! you throw at the end of the command, the more lines in your stack trace are shown.
[1] pry(main)> called_this_method_without_defining_it_first
# NameError: undefined local variable or method `called_this_method_without_defining_it_first' for main:Object
# from (pry):1:in `<main>'
[2] pry(main)> wtf?
# Exception: NameError: undefined local variable or method `called_this_without_defining_it_first' for main:Object
# --
# 0: (pry):1:in `<main>'
# 1: /Users/jjackson/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/gems/pry-0.9.9.3/lib/pry/# pry_instance.rb:249:in `eval'
# 2: /Users/jjackson/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/gems/pry-0.9.9.3/lib/pry/pry_instance.rb:249:in `re'
# 3: /Users/jjackson/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/gems/pry-0.9.9.3/lib/pry/pry_instance.rb:227:in `rep'
# etc..