CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3plugins
trevorgrayson
trevorgrayson

Reputation: 1867

Run arbitrary code in a Rails plugin on reload

I have built a rails plugin and it has a requirement of building some files to work correctly. A user can manually kick this off as a rake task, but for convenience in development, I would like to add the option of rerunning this build whenever they refresh their browsers.

Just to be clear, I do not want to reLOAD the plugin every refresh, nor do I want to reload any other ruby file. I would like to run some arbitrary ruby code every time Rails decides to reload it's libraries.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 160

Answers (2)

trevorgrayson
trevorgrayson

Reputation: 1867

I came across this solution which is a bit more to the point.

ActionDispatch::Callbacks.to_prepare do
  Rails.logger.warn "Look at me I'm updating!"
end

Upvotes: 0

Sumit Munot
Sumit Munot

Reputation: 3868

First solution:

You have to add:

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)

In your Application class in config/application.rb

Please refer this link https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/5218-rails-3-rc-does-not-autoload-from-lib

Another One:

It is more useful try it,

New file: config/initializers/reload_lib.rb

if Rails.env == "development"
  lib_reloader = ActiveSupport::FileUpdateChecker.new(Dir["lib/**/*"]) do
    Rails.application.reload_routes! # or do something better here
  end

  ActionDispatch::Callbacks.to_prepare do
    lib_reloader.execute_if_updated
  end
end

It's disgusting but it's a hack. There might be a better way to trigger a full reload, but this works for me. My specific use case was a Rack app mounted to a Rails route so I needed it to reload as I worked on it in development.

Basically what it does is it checks if any files in /lib have changed (modified timestamp) since last loaded and then triggers a reload if they change.

I might also mention I have this in my config/application.rb

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)
config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"]

Which just by default makes sure everything in my lib directory gets loaded.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions