Recently, I have been heavily involved to Homebrew’s development. Homebrew itself offers an interactive ruby shell, which can be handy for the development. You can use such tool by invoking brew irb in the shell. And as what its name sounds, this tool is based on irb.

Personal, I found pry is much more power than irb. For example, Gregg Rothmeier wrote this blog to show some useful features pry provided. In addition, pry ships with the support of plugin system.

So, how to use pry as the front end of interactive Homberew shell? I wrote a piece of code as shown below. Put it in the file brew-pry and make sure it has execute attribute and can be found in the PATH. That’s it. Run brew pry to use pry in Homebrew shell.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

$:.unshift ENV["HOMEBREW_LIBRARY_PATH"]
require "global"
require "formula"
require "keg"
require "pry"

class Symbol
  def f(*args)
    Formulary.factory(to_s, *args)
  end
end
class String
  def f(*args)
    Formulary.factory(self, *args)
  end
end

if ARGV.include? "--examples"
  puts "'v8'.f # => instance of the v8 formula"
  puts ":hub.f.installed?"
  puts ":lua.f.methods - 1.methods"
  puts ":mpd.f.recursive_dependencies.reject(&:installed?)"
else
  ohai "Interactive Homebrew Shell"
  puts "Example commands available with: brew pry --examples"
  Pry.start
end

Update (2015/2/16)

I found using HOMEBREW_LIBRARY_PATH to locate Homebrew library path is a better idea. This can be useful if you have multi Homebrew in your system.