Pry: show me the stack

To do this without any pry plugins (I was having troubles with pry-stack_explorer), just look at caller.

I actually look for my project name to filter out all the irrelevant rails stack items. For example, if my project name were archie I'd use:

caller.select {|line| line.include? "archie" }

Which gives me the stack trace I'm looking for.

A shorter way would be:

caller.select {|x| x["archie"] }

Which works just as well.

Use the pry-stack_explorer plugin, it allows you to move up and down the call-stack (with up and down), display the callstack (with show-stack), and so on:

see here:

Frame number: 0/64

From: /Users/johnmair/ruby/rails_projects/personal_site/app/controllers/posts_controller.rb @ line 7 PostsController#index:

    5: def index
    6:   @posts = Post.all
 => 7:   binding.pry
    8: end

[1] pry(#<PostsController>)> show-stack

Showing all accessible frames in stack (65 in total):
--
=> #0  index <PostsController#index()>
   #1 [method]  send_action <ActionController::ImplicitRender#send_action(method, *args)>
   #2 [method]  process_action <AbstractController::Base#process_action(method_name, *args)>
   #3 [method]  process_action <ActionController::Rendering#process_action(*arg1)>
<... clipped ...>

[2] pry(#<PostsController>)> up

Frame number: 1/64
Frame type: method

From: /Users/johnmair/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/actionpack-3.2.8/lib/action_controller/metal/implicit_render.rb @ line 4 ActionController::ImplicitRender#send_action:

    3: def send_action(method, *args)
 => 4:   ret = super
    5:   default_render unless response_body
    6:   ret
    7: end

[3] pry(#<PostsController>)> 

There is pry-backtrace which show's the backtrace for the Pry session.

There is also wtf?. Which show's the backtrace of the most recent exception. Add more question marks to view more of the backtrace or an exclamation mark to see it all.

Type help in pry to see all the other commands :)

Extending on Paul Oliver's answer.

If you have a list of phrases you want to permanently exclude you can do that with a custom commands feature in Pry.

In ~/.pryrc:

Pry::Commands.block_command "callerf", "Filter the caller backtrace" do
  output = caller.reject! { |line| line["minitest"] || line["pry"] } 
  puts "\e[31m#{output.join("\n")}\e[0m"
end

Calling callerf will result in a filtered caller output. Weird signs around #{output} is coloring to replicate the original look of the caller. I took the color from here.

Alternatively, if you don't want to make a custom command, use Ctrl+R to search through command history.