Did you know you can jazz up your Rails console with custom methods? It’s super handy for those everyday tasks, like logging in or measuring how long it takes to execute a code block.

To do that, you only need the module Rails::ConsoleMethods. Let’s see that in action.

User Login in Rails console

Add the following code in any initializer or environment file. For example, in config/environment/development.rb.

module Rails::ConsoleMethods
  # This code sets the current user to the first user in the database.
  def login
    Current.user = User.first
  end
end

By including this module in the environment file the login method becomes available in the development Rails console. Now we can open the Rails console and type login, which can be useful for testing or debugging scenarios where you need a logged-in user without manually going through the authentication process each time.

Measuring Code Block Execution Time in Rails Console

Same way, we can add a method named timer to measure the time it takes to execute a block of code and then print the elapsed time in seconds.

module Rails::ConsoleMethods
  # We capture the current time and store it in a variable. Then,
  # we execute the code block that is passed to the timer method
  # using the 'yield' keyword, and print the execution time.
  def timer
    start_time = Time.zone.now

    result = yield

    elapsed_time = Time.zone.now - start_time
    puts "Execution time: #{elapsed_time.round(2)}s"

    result
  end
end

And here’s an example of how you might use this timer method:

timer do
  sleep(2) # or the code you want to measure
end

The console output would be something like:

Execution time: 2.0s