Logging Ruby - The Ruby alias for the forgetful scripter

Only Feature: No more scrolling through your terminal… Logs the output of a script to the script itself!

First, clone the repo on your local machine.

Create an alias for lruby like this:

alias lruby="ruby -r /path-to-your-lruby/lruby.rb"

Check that the alias exists by calling which lruby in your terminal.

Once lruby is available, you can call your Ruby scripts with lruby instead of ruby.

Let’s take a look at ./examples/hello_world.rb.

cat ./examples/hello_world.rb

It is a very simple ruby script that writes “Hello world” and the current time using puts.

puts “Hello world! It is #{Time.now.strftime(‘%H:%m:%S’)}”

As expected when calling it with Ruby…

ruby ./examples/hello_world.rb

…it will do exactly that.

Hello world! It is 13:04:26

Now let’s use lruby to call the script:

lruby ./examples/hello_world.rb

Again, the output is the same:

Hello world! It is 13:05:04

But when looking at the source file:

cat ./examples/hello_world.rb

You will realize that the output of the last call has been logged to the script itself.

puts "Hello world! It is #{Time.now.strftime('%H:%m:%S')}"
__END__
----- [2020-04-19T13:05:04+0200] RESULTS -----
Hello world! It is 13:05:04

But don’t worry! It is still a valid Ruby file and can still be called with the normal Ruby interpreter:

ruby ./examples/hello_world.rb

And will still just produce the expected output.

Hello world! It is 13:05:50