Ability to activate specific Gemfile groups

[vemv]

The project I'm working on has pry declared in non-conventional Gemfile group, e.g.:

group :non_conventional_name do
   gem "pry"
   gem "pry-rails"
   gem "pry-doc"
end

It would be nice to be able to tell Robe to activate :non_conventional_name – this way I can kept the Gemfile untouched, which tends to be kind in a team setting.

Cheers - V

[vemv]

I found out, the name (which I had redacted in OP) is not exactly unconventional, it's :console, which Rails activates by default.

Seems a clean way to affect console environments but not all dev environments. But it seems that Robe doesn't activate it.

Some usages: https://grep.app/search?q=group+%3Aconsole+do

[dgutov]

Hi!

What happens (or should happen), is robe-start delegates to inf-ruby-console-rails, which in turn calls bin/rails console -e development - if you indeed choose that environment.

In my testing, that results in gems from group :console being loaded as well.

Are you saying that it's not the case for you? Could you find out which of these steps has a different result?

[vemv]

Hi @dgutov !

I tried bin/rails console -e development over a brand new Rails 8.0.2 project. It doesn't activate these:

group :console do
  gem "pry"
  gem "pry-rails"
end

rails console won't activate :console either.

[dgutov]

What if you set up the local config to have this group in use?

bundle config set with console

and then run bin/rails console?

[vemv]

I tried a few combinations just now – no luck unfortunately!

[dgutov]

Ok, how are you testing the result? Something like

bundle config set with console
bundle install
bin/rails console
require 'pry'

?

[vemv]

require 'pry' works, but there's still a difference:

• with pry/pry-rails in :development, pry is there since the very beginning, I don't need a require. The console just starts as a proper pry session
• with pry/pry-rails in :console, I can require pry, but the session starts as IRB.

I can check in a bit how important the difference actually is for me in Emacs.

[dgutov]

I think that happens due to this call: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/main/railties/lib/rails/generators/rails/app/templates/config/application.rb.tt#L7C1-L7C31

Rails.groups is affected by the env var RAILS_GROUPS: https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails.html#method-c-groups

So it should help to set it to a custom value, then the gems would be require-d.

[dgutov]

So, check this out:

~/e/trails7 (main|✓) $ bin/rails c -e development
Loading development environment (Rails 7.2.1)
trails8(dev)> 

~/e/trails7 (main|✓) $ RAILS_GROUPS=console bin/rails c -e development
Loading development environment (Rails 7.2.1)
[1] pry(main)>

And using it with inf-ruby or robe will require a wrapper around inf-ruby-console-auto - or robe-start - which temporarily changes process-environment to set this variable.

Maybe it could be a user option in inf-ruby as well - not sure which shape it should be in, though. inf-ruby-console-process-environment?