Debu.gs

LiveConsole 0.2.0 Released

Pete Elmore, 2008-10-16 00:00

Hey, uh, here’s a long-overdue new release of LiveConsole. If you’ve
never heard of it, it is a library for providing IRB over a TCP or Unix
socket so that you can interact with a running application.

• Unix Domain Socket support (Works under Linux and OS X, apparently; not likely to work under Windows)
• The ability to supply bindings to LiveConsole
• A program for interacting with the Unix socket (installed in your bin directory as udscat), as some versions of netcat don’t include this functionality.

It’s useful for debugging, for hot-patching code that you don’t want to
interrupt, for interactive monitoring, and for looking cool.

For the impatient:

	# Run a LiveConsole with IRB bound to the toplevel:
	lc = LiveConsole.new :socket, :port => 30303
	lc.start

	# Fire up a second terminal, and 
	you@your-box:~$ netcat localhost 30303
	irb(main):001:0> puts "Hello, world!"

	# This shows up in the terminal of the program that created the
	# LiveConsole:
	Hello, world!

	# Run a LiveConsole for the current process, and pass it the
	# local binding (Unix only):
	lc = LiveConsole.new :unix_socket, :path => '/tmp/live-console.sock',
	                     :bind => binding
	lc.start

	# Fire up a second terminal, and 
	you@your-box:~$ udscat /tmp/live-console.sock
	irb(main):001:0> puts "Hello, world!"

	# Similar results.  See the example code or the README for
	# details.

Tags: ruby

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