Custom Colorized Environment String in Rails Console

Custom Colorized Environment String in Rails Console

Ever opened a Rails console and wondered “wait, which environment am I in again?” Yeah, me too. Especially when you’re switching between development, staging, and production faster than you can say User.destroy_all.

Here’s a neat trick to add some color to your console prompt so you never have to wonder again.

The Problem

The default Rails console visual feedback stops being useful because staging environments are usually configured as “production” on Heroku and most deployment platforms. So Rails.env.production? returns true for both staging and production. Fun times!

The Solution

Drop this into config/initializers/console.rb:

# frozen_string_literal: true

require "rails/commands/console/irb_console"

module IRBConsoleWithDeployEnv
  def initialize(app, env)
    super(app)
    @deploy_env = env
  end

  def colorized_env
    IRB::Color.const_set(:DIM, 2) unless defined?(IRB::Color::DIM)

    return super unless @deploy_env

    IRB::Color.colorize("live:", [:DIM]) +
      case @deploy_env
      when "staging"
        IRB::Color.colorize("stag", [:YELLOW])
      when "production"
        IRB::Color.colorize("prod", [:RED])
      else
        IRB::Color.colorize(@deploy_env, [:BLUE])
      end
  end

  Rails::Console::IRBConsole.prepend self
end

And this into config/application.rb:

module MyApp
  class Application < Rails::Application
    # Other configurations...

    console do |app|
      config.console = Rails::Console::IRBConsole.new(app, ENV["DEPLOY_ENV"])
    end
  end
end

Now your console prompt will show a nice colorized environment string prefixed by your app name. No more “oops, wrong environment” moments.