How to require an entire directory of files at path/to/rails/lib in environment.rb?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I searched through the group, but I can't seem to find any reference for this.

I understand that if files are named in lowercase, classes are named according to rails convention, and placed in lib directory, they will be required automatically.

E.g.

/lib/item.rb

class Item ... end

However, what if I would like to create a directory in /lib? Currently, I am requiring each file in the dir individually, but I foresee that the number of files in this dir would grow, and I would like the require statement in environment.rb to just include the entire dir, instead of having to include each individual file. Is this possible?

Example (Current) /lib/products/item1.rb /lib/products/item2.rb ... ...

environment.rb require 'products/item1' require 'products/item2' ... ...

Can I do this instead? require 'products/*'

Thanks in advance!!

Winston

2

Well, the simple technical answer, not tested:

    def require_tree(name)       path_to_lib = "RAILS_ROOT/lib" #adjust if necessary       path_to_tree = "#{path_to_lib}/#{name}"       Dir["#{path_to_tree}/**/*.rb"].each { |fn|           fn =~ /^#{Regexp.escape(path_to_lib)}\/(.*)\.rb$/           require $1       }     end

    # Usage     require_tree "products"

Stefan

3

Excuse me if I’m mistaken, but are you finding all .rb files in a certain directory, and then checking to see if their extension is .rb? Isn’t this kind of irrelevant if you’d already found them?

4

The regex is there to pick out the "feature name" of path. The name (called "feature") you pass to require is stored in $", so that when the same feature is required a second time, it won't be loaded again.

Now if we pass "/home/foo/my_app/lib/my/class.rb" to require and some other file does a plain require "my/class", the file will be loaded two times. My regex picks the "my/class" out of the full path. There is no conditional - the regex is just there to destructure the path.

(There's mistake in my original version: The line 'path_to_lib = "RAILS_ROOT/lib" ...' should read 'path_to_lib = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/lib" ...'

Stefan