CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby
Geekygecko
Geekygecko

Reputation: 3972

What is the best way to load Ruby classes into an application?

Currently I am loading Ruby classes into each class file using the require command, for example:

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'observation_worker')
require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'log_worker')

For each class I am defining the classes it requires. It would be great if I could do this at the entry point to my application.

Is there an easy way to load all the Ruby classes at the start of an application?

Upvotes: 12

Views: 15816

Answers (5)

Chris Farmiloe
Chris Farmiloe

Reputation: 14175

Not sure I fully understand, since you will always have to tell your program what files it needs, but you could do something like:

Dir["#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/*.rb"].each { |f| require(f) }

Which will include all .rb files from the directory of the current file. Although if you ever start using RDoc, it will not be happy with you.

It's generally not a bad thing to list your requires explicitly, it makes it clear to other developers reading your code what is going on.

Upvotes: 2

dylanfm
dylanfm

Reputation: 6345

As commented by jtzero, autoload has been deprecated

You still need to specify what to load, but you can try autoload.

autoload :Module, "module"

When the constant Module is first used the file "module" will be required automatically.

Upvotes: 1

Alex Craft
Alex Craft

Reputation: 15336

checkout this class loader

http://github.com/alexeypetrushin/class_loader

suppose you have the following directory structure

/your_app
    /lib            
        /animals
            /dog.rb
        /zoo.rb

just point ClassLoader to the root of your App, it will find and loads all other classes automatically

require 'class_loader'
autoload_dir '/your_app/lib'

Zoo.add Animals::Dog.new # <= all classes loaded automatically

Upvotes: 1

jshen
jshen

Reputation: 11907

Here's an option I like using.

http://github.com/dyoder/autocode/tree/master

From the github doc

  require 'autocode'

  module Application
    include AutoCode
    auto_load true, :directories => [ :configurations, :models, :views, :controllers ]
  end

This will attempt to load code dynamically from the given directories, using the module name to determine which directory to look in. Thus, Application::CustomerModel could load the file models/customer_model.rb.

Also, you can check out the way rails boots.

Upvotes: 2

ucron
ucron

Reputation: 2852

If you have a somewhat clear directory structure of where your code goes you could add specific directory paths to the load path like

$LOAD_PATH.unshift( File.join( File.dirname(__FILE__), 'lib' ) )

then in other parts of your code you could require from a relative path like so:

require 'observation_worker'
require 'logger_worker'

or if you have folders within lib you could even do

require 'workers/observation'
require 'workers/logger'

This is probably the cleanest way to handle loading within a library's context in my opinion.

Upvotes: 12

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