The Rails Console

The Rails console helps you to interact with Rails applications using the command line. The Rails console uses IRB and allows you to make use of all Rails methods and interact with data. The Rails console is a very useful tool for experimenting with ideas without actually implementing any code.

Let's try this in our application. From the root of the citireview application, run the following command:

$rails console

The output should be as follows:

Figure 11.20: Rails console

Let's check the Review model by trying an Active Record query to get all the records from the reviews table. Type the following command from the Rails console:

Review.all

The Terminal will respond as follows:

Figure 11.21: Review model response

We can see clearly that our record, with the correct values for name and description, has been created. There are some additional columns in this table as well, which are id, created_at...