Tux dresses up sinatra in a shell. Use it to interact with your helpers, view rendering and your app’s response objects. Tux also gives you commands to view your app’s routes and settings.

Install the gem with:

gem install tux

Start with:

$ tux

If your app’s config file isn’t config.ru, specify with -c

$ tux -c app.ru

To interact with your helpers:

>> app.my_helper_method
...

To interact with any built-in sinatra methods i.e. request and response specific helper methods:

# depends on request
>> app.uri '/'
=> "http://:/"

# depends on response
>> app.headers
=> {"Content-Type"=>"text/html"}

For the above to work, tux sets up default empty request and response objects. To try the helpers with custom requests and responses:

>> app.request = Sinatra::Request.new({})
>> app.response = Sinatra::Response.new

To interact with your views:

>> app.erb :my_template
=> 'template rendered'

# also
>> app.haml
>> app.markdown
...

Tux lets you make requests and interact with rack response objects thanks to rack-test:

>> get '/'
=> #<Rack::MockResponse:0x13d452c @headers={"Content-Type"=>"text/html;charset=utf-8",
"Content-Length"=>"4"}, @errors="127.0.0.1 - - [05/Apr/2011 02:22:27] \"GET / \" 200 4
0.0015\n", @status=200, @original_headers={"Content-Type"=>"text/html;charset=utf-8",
"Content-Length"=>"4"}, @body="dude">

>> puts last_response.body
dude

>> post '/create'
...

To see the full list of rack-test actions you can make

>> rack.actions
=> [:request, :get, :post, :put, :delete, :head, :follow_redirect!, :header, :set_cookie,
:clear_cookies, :authorize, :basic_authorize, :digest_authorize, :last_response, :last_request]

Tux also comes with commands to give you a good overview of your app

>> routes
HEAD  "/"
HEAD  /book/:id
GET   "/"
GET   /book/:id

>> settings
absolute_redirects  true
add_charset         [/^text\//, "application/javascript", "application/xml",
"application/xhtml+xml"]
app_file            "./sample.rb"
bind                "0.0.0.0"
default_encoding    "utf-8"
dump_errors         true
empty_path_info     nil
environment         :development
lock                false
logging             false
method_override     false
port                4567
prefixed_redirects  false
public              "/my/path/public"
raise_errors        false
reload_templates    true
root                "/my/path"
run                 false
running             false
server              ["thin", "mongrel", "webrick"]
session_secret      "XXX"
sessions            false
show_exceptions     true
static              true
views               "/my/path/views"

Since tux is a ripl shell, tux is highly configurable. You can create tux commands in the format tux-COMMAND and enhance your shell by adding ripl plugins to ~/.riplrc. Read ripl’s readme for more.