Viewing a Ruby on Rails script in my native browser

Question

I'm new to developing in Ruby and have mostly been using irb to experiment with code. For longer scripts, it would be helpful to be able to run them in my native browser (similar to how I run php scripts through MAMP). I believe there is a way to do this using localhost:3000 but I have not been able to get it to work. So my question is, what is the best way to view Ruby scripts in my native browser?

Answer 1

Well, running some Ruby code in IRB has nothing to do with using the Rails framework.

Follow a tutorial (for example this one) to learn the Rails framework itself now you have some understanding of the Ruby language.

Good luck.

Answer 2

I don't see how this would really be helpful to you, but it would be pretty easy to put your code into a simple Sinatra route and have that serve the result of the code into a browser if you want. Then you can just…

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
  "Hello World! This is file #{$0} live from Boulder!"
end

And when you access the server on your local computer, it will print whatever you put in the method.

I would be interested to hear why you want to do this rather than IRB, though. This seems like kind of a perverse way to code in most cases.

Answer 3

Rack is a Ruby webserver interface, you probably want to use that to hook your ruby script up with a server.