The On Blog

When dealing with Rails apps logging debug statements is one of first methods turned to when trying to diagnose a problem.  A lot of times logger.debug is used and will write its output to log/development.log.  This is great when you are running the server, but when you fire up the console and want to work there, you previously had two options. One is to change all of the logger.debug statements into puts so they show up in the console’s terminal window.  The other is two just keep switching back and forth between the console and a tail of the file.

Now you can toggle the app’s logger so that it writes to STDOUT.  Just throw this in your .irbrc file and call toggle_console_logging from the console’s command line.

def toggle_console_logging
  if ActiveRecord::Base.logger == Rails.logger
    l = Logger.new(STDOUT)
    l.level = Rails.logger.level
    set_logger l and return "console"
  else
    set_logger Rails.logger and return "log file"
  end
end

def set_logger(logger)
  ActiveRecord::Base.logger = logger
  ActiveRecord::Base.clear_active_connections!
end

You can check out the gist here.