WSL spring issues

I’ve been working in a Rails 5 app recently and ran into some strange issues with the rails console that I didn’t fully understand. Random queries or Ruby expressions would crash the console without allowing me to see the result. Some of these commands weren’t super urgent, I could write the query and display the results on a webpage just fine. Other times I could perform the work in a different IRB, which also worked. Eventually, after I was unable to run generators, I was annoyed enough to investigate, which was difficult.

[4] pry(main)> Octokit.repository?("appdev-projects/photogram-final")
/home/jello/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.3/gems/pry-0.10.4/lib/pry/exceptions.rb:29: warning: $SAFE will become a normal global variable in Ruby 3.0
/home/jello/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.3/gems/pry-0.10.4/lib/pry/exceptions.rb:29: warning: $SAFE will become a normal global variable in Ruby 3.0
Traceback (most recent call last):
/home/jello/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.3/gems/spring-2.0.2/lib/spring/application.rb:171:in `fork': cannot load such file -- yajl (LoadError)
/home/jello/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.3/gems/spring-2.0.2/lib/spring/application.rb:171:in `fork': undefined method `reject!' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
/home/jello/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.3/gems/spring-2.0.2/lib/spring/application.rb:171:in `fork': undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
/home/jello/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.3/gems/spring-2.0.2/lib/spring/application.rb:171:in `fork': undefined method `reject!' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
/home/jello/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.3/gems/spring-2.0.2/lib/spring/application.rb:171:in `fork': undefined method `reject!' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)

It appeared to be both a Spring issue and a Windows issue. The first few suggestions just said to stop spring with spring stop then run whatever command that was not working again. This didn’t work for me (spring would auto-start). Updating spring didn’t resolve the issue either, as I could only update so much on a Rails 5.0 app.

The only thing that did work was disabling spring with an environment variable.

DISABLE_SPRING=1 rails console

Thanks to this SO answer.