Rails Console-like Environment for a Plain Ruby Project · Daniela Baron

I've been working on a Ruby project without Rails. It's a CLI tool that simulates retirement drawdown strategies for Canadians (I'll write a future blog post with more details on that). While building it, I found myself missing the convenience of the Rails console (bin/rails console), which loads all application code, for interactive exploration and debugging. In my project, for instance, I have both a tax calculator and a reverse tax calculator. Beyond running unit tests, it's often helpful to poke at these classes interactively. I also have market return sequence generators that I sometimes want to explore directly. A console makes this kind of exploratory coding easy, not a substitute for tests, but a fast way to validate ideas. This post will explain how I setup a Rails-like console environment, for a plain Ruby project.