Can I view Rails documentation with pry?

Question

Is it possible to view/browse Rails documentation with pry? How?

(pry-rails appears to be for project source, and pry-doc covers Core Ruby.)

Is ri the preferred local doc browsing tool for Rails?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Pry will only show you documentation for dependencies that you have explicitly loaded. The easiest way to get all the Rails dependencies is to run pry in a Rails project's directory like so:

pry -r ./config/environment

Now you're ready to see Rails' internal documentation through pry. However, as you noted Rails' documentation is written with ri in mind. So instead of using show-doc if you run ri ActiveRecord::Base you should see:

ActiveRecord::Base < Object

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Includes:
(from gem activerecord-4.1.1)
  Core
  Persistence
  NoTouching
  ReadonlyAttributes
  ModelSchema
  Inheritance
  Scoping
  Sanitization
  AttributeAssignment
  ActiveModel::Conversion
  Integration
  Validations
.... it eventually gets to the actual documentation but you get the idea ...

(I believe show-doc does not work for ActiveRecord::Base because there's a #:nodoc: directive in that file's source code. Perhaps someone can chime in in the comments or add an edit.)

Alternatively, you can load each dependency you want manually. If you opened up a normal pry session and run require 'active_record' the same ri command will work.

This should work with the rails console as well if you use the pry-rails gem or a custom initializer to set pry as the default REPL.