Interactive Ruby Shell

IRB stands for "interactive Ruby" and is a tool to interactively execute Ruby expressions read from the standard input. We're working hard to match Pry's variety of powerful features in IRB, and you can track our progress or find contribution ideas in this document. You can start a fresh IRB session by typing irb in your terminal. Once a binding.irb is evaluated, a new IRB session will be started with the surrounding context: You can use IRB as a debugging console with debug.gem with these options: In binding.irb , use the debug command to start an irb:rdbg session with access to all debug.gem commands. Use the RUBY DEBUG IRB CONSOLE=1 environment variable to make debug.gem use IRB as the debugging console. IRB v1.13.0 and later versions allows users/libraries to extend its functionality through official APIs.