rails - Redirecting console output to a file

You can use override $stdout to redirect the console output:

$stdout = File.new('console.out', 'w')

You may also need to call this once:

$stdout.sync = true

To restore:

$stdout = STDOUT

A quick one-off solution:

irb:001> f = File.new('statements.xml', 'w')
irb:002> f << Account.find(1).statements.to_xml
irb:003> f.close

Create a JSON fixture:

irb:004> f = File.new(Rails.root + 'spec/fixtures/qbo/amy_cust.json', 'w')
irb:005> f << JSON.pretty_generate((q.get :customer, 1).as_json)
irb:006> f.close

If you write the following code in your environment file, it should work.

if "irb" == $0
  config.logger = Logger.new(Rails.root.join('path_to_log_file.txt'))
end

You can also rotate the log file using

config.logger = Logger.new(Rails.root.join('path_to_log_file.txt'), number_of_files, file_roation_size_threshold)

For logging only active record related operations, you can do

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(Rails.root.join('path_to_log_file.txt'))

This also lets you have different logger config/file for different environments.

Apart from Veger's answer, there is one of more way to do it which also provides many other additional options.

Just open your rails project directory and enter the command:

rails c | tee output.txt

tee command also has many other options which you can check out by:

man tee