Ruby, a message to you

I don’t quite understand why Mongrel and WEBrick insist on loading your .irbrc every single request. It’s especially bad when your .irbrc is full of stuff that kills Rails (GuessMethod, redefining String#match to handle Oniguruma regular expressions, etc.).

Thankfully, Peter Jones clued me in to this:

env IRBRC=/dev/null script/server

Besides not killing Rails anymore, every request doesn’t load 8 unneeded gems, complain that there’s no constant named IRB, and define methods only usable for irb sessions.