I built a small utility this week to help anybody start a REPL in any language stack^[1], with any libraries of their choosing. It’s built on top of docker, and it was a fun exercise for a couple of days to build something that’s I’ll personally use quite a lot when trying out new Ruby gems.

So instead of creating a Gemfile, making sure that its syntax is correct, installing the version of Ruby you’d like via rvm, instead, you just type in a single command:

replr ruby chronic

& your REPL is ready!

Do check it out at Github and gem install replr

A few things I learnt while building this:

• I wanted to keep dependencies low (because this is something people will install as a binary into their machines), so I did all the argument parsing et. al. manually. It’s not that hard or clumsy at all. replr currently has 0 dependencies.
• I used Visual Studio Code as the editor for building this, and its quickly becoming my go-to editor for every kind of code editing. I was one of the last few folks holdouts at Textmate 2, and while VSCode is still not native enough for my tastes, the breadth & depth of its editor and tooling integration is hard to live without now.
• Speaking of VSCode integration, I’ve heavily used the Ruby editor integration to make sure code conforms to Rubocop? guidelines. It’s nowhere near as good as Prettier? on JavaScript though. Prettier just has you spoilt with its auto-formatting & opinionated code rewriting. I feel Ruby can really use a tool like that.

[1]: Well, it currently just supports Ruby, but am planning to add new stacks soon!