Like many keystroke-efficient Rails hackers, I’ve long had a line in my .bash_profile file to alias sc to script/console, along with a host of other tricks.

This shortcut was more than sufficient until recently, when I started writing Sinatra apps. The minimal framework that it is, Sinatra doesn’t provide a console script like Rails, but I found you can easily achieve the same effect by running irb -r your_sinatra_app.rb.

Not wanting my fingers to have to deviate from habits long held, I changed my sc alias into a full-blown bash function that will drop you into a Rails console, Sinatra console or just a plain irb console based on your location within the filesystem:

function sc {
  if [ -x script/console ]; then
    script/console
  else
    sinatra_rb=`egrep -l "^require.+sinatra.$" *.rb 2>/dev/null`
    if [ -e $sinatra_rb ]; then
      irb -r $sinatra_rb
    else
      irb
    fi
  fi
}

Throw it in your .bash_profile and have fun!