Vital Logs

The Ruby on Rails console is one of the most useful tools a web developer could have. It is the backend equivalent of firebug for those not familiar with Ruby on Rails. But every now and then I find myself hoping that I could actually connect to a running instance of ruby on rails and debug it.

Today, I decided that I am desperate enough that I was going to look for one (not enough to build one yet). I googled “ruby on rails web console” and there it was on the first page: KAWAII (which means “cute” in japanese).

I had to do some changes to make it work with the tree where I need it, since the tree is on rails 1.2.6. Here is a list of changes if you happen to need it:

• Modify all html.erb files back to the rhtml extension
• Download the prototype 1.6 javascript file and replace the “javascript_include_tag :defaults” with an explicit link to the new prototype file (rails 1.2.6 includes prototype 1.5)
• Copy the contents of config/initializer/kawaii.rb into config/environments/development.rb

enjoy!