How to install pry/pry-rails globally for all projects?

Question

How can replace irb and rails console with pry/pry-console globally for every project without having to include it in a project?

Answer 1

Easy mode is to hack your .irbrc, so that when anything tries to load IRB, you take over and force it to load Pry instead:

begin
  gem "pry"
rescue => ex
  $stderr.puts ex.message
else
  require "pry"
  Pry.start
  exit!
end

If you're using Bundler, however, that'll still only work if Pry is available in the current bundle.

---

To make it work even when Bundler doesn't think Pry should be allowed to activate, you'll need to monkey with gem loading -- Bundler tries very hard to make it impossible.

To do that, you'll need a ~/.rubyrc.rb file, which you ensure always gets loaded for all ruby commands by exporting RUBYOPT=$HOME/.rubyrc in your .bashrc / .zshrc.

That file can then hack into Bundler's internals to force loading a non-bundled gem. You can also monkey-patch Bundler.require, which is how Rails loads all the gems in the Gemfile, to similarly force pry-rails in any application that contains rails.

(This strategy also allows you to globally support binding.pry, without needing to explicitly require anything, or add the gem to the project.)