The Ruby Debugger
The console is fun for tinkering and can be extremely useful for trying things out, but it’s a completely separate process from the way you (and your users) normally run Rails applications.
If you do a search on Rails debugging, you’ll find lots of information on the Rails breakpointer. Unfortunately, the breakpointer depended on a bug in Ruby itself, one that was fixed in Ruby 1.8.5, so the breakpointer is now defunct. Instead, the most common current approach uses the Ruby debugger. It’s installed as a gem called ruby-debug. From the command line, you can install it with:
$ sudo gem install ruby-debug
Password:
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed linecache-0.43
Successfully installed ruby-debug-base-0.10.1
Successfully installed ruby-debug-0.10.1
3 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for linecache-0.43...
Installing ri documentation for ruby-debug-base-0.10.1...
Installing ri documentation for ruby-debug-0.10.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for linecache-0.43...
Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-debug-base-0.10.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-debug-0.10.1...If you’re on Windows or certain Linux installs, the sudo part may be unnecessary.
Note
If you get a “Can’t find header files for ruby” error message, your Ruby install has left off some of the developer-only components. Header files are not installed automatically with Mac OS X, for example. ...
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