Presented at the Ruby Drink-up of Sophia Antipolis on the 7th of February 2012 by Philippe Antras (@_philant_).

1. A quick overview Philippe Antras
@_philant_

2. Pry
REPL
Can be invoked at runtime
Object exploration
Source and documentation access
Shell command execution
Gist integration - not shown today
Syntax highlighting, completion
Extensible: plugin, commands - not shown today
Remote session with pry-remote gem and DrB
http://pry.github.com

3. > gem install pry

4. Some Pry commands
To get a list of all commands:
Pry(main)> help
show-doc space to escape command:
show-method pry(main)> cat = "fido"
history
<your commands here>
play -f <file>
edit <file>
edit [input buffer]
ri Array#each

5. Pry interactions
●;
●!
● edit
● <space>
● _ <underscore>
● history
● history --replay 101..105

6. shell commands
Pry assumes commands prefixed with a dot are shell commands
pry(main)> .ls -l
pry(main)> .svn update
pry(main)> .cat #{temp_file}
pry(main)> shell-mode #limited completion

7. Object exploration
pry(main)> pry-version
Pry version 0.9.7.4 on Ruby 1.8.7
pry(main)> cd Pry
pry(Pry)> ls
pry(Pry)> cd @history
pry(Pry)> ls -m
pry(Pry)> show-doc save
pry(Pry)> show-method save
pry(Pry)> filename = 'history'
pry(Pry)> save filename
pry(Pry)> .cat #{filename}
pry(Pry)> cd @history
pry(Pry::History)> p size
pry(Pry::History)> puts size
pry(Pry::History)> nesting
pry(Pry::History)> cd ../..
pry(main)

8. debugging with Pry
runtime invocation
binding.pry
<object>.pry
whereami

9. Documentation and source browsing
install the pry-doc plugin:
> gem install pry-doc
pry(main)> a = [1, 2, 3]
pry(main)> ls a -m
pry(main)> show-doc a.nitems
pry(main)> ls Array -M
pry(main)> show-doc Array#shelljoin
pry(main)> show-method Array#shelljoin

10. Pry as rails console
1. gemfile:
gem "pry", :group => :development
2. bundle install
3. config/environment/development.rb
silence_warnings do
require "pry"
IRB = Pry
end
4. rails console
pry(main)>

11. Pry customization
~/.pryrc and ./.pryrc files
Pry.config.input
Pry.config.prompt
Pry.config.output
Pry.config.print
Pry.config.exception_handler
Pry.config.color
Pry.config.pager

12. Room for improvement
Pry 0.9.8.1
● no completion everywhere
no file/path completion on shell commands
shell-mode
● how to retrieve the output of a shell command
● object exploration does not support
pwd # use nesting
cd -
● cd .. issued from top level context exits # fixed in 0.9.8.1
● issue with rspec - binding.pry => NULL pointer given

13. Thank you.