require_all¶ ↑

A wonderfully simple way to load your code.

Tired of futzing around with require statements everywhere, littering your code with require File.dirname(__FILE__) crap? What if you could just point something at a big directory full of code and have everything just automagically load regardless of the dependency structure?

Wouldn't that be nice? Well, now you can!

Installation¶ ↑

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'require_all'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install require_all

Usage¶ ↑

require 'require_all'

# load all ruby files in the directory "lib" and its subdirectories
require_all 'lib'

# or load all files by using glob
require_all 'lib/**/*.rb'

# or load files in an Array
require_all Dir.glob("blah/**/*.rb").reject { |f| stupid_file? f }

# or load manually specified files
require_all 'lib/a.rb', 'lib/b.rb', 'lib/c.rb', 'lib/d.rb'

You can also load files relative to the current file by using require_rel:

# Instead of
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/foobar'

# you can do simply like this
require_rel 'foobar'

You can give all the same argument types to the require_rel as for require_all.

It is recommended to use require_rel instead of require_all since it will require files relatively to the current file (__FILE__) as opposed to loading files relative from the working directory.

load_all and load_rel methods also exist to use Kernel#load instead of Kernel#require!

The proper order to in which to load files is determined automatically for you.

It's just that easy! Code loading shouldn't be hard.

autoload_all¶ ↑

This library also includes methods for performing autoload - what a bargain!

Similar syntax is used as for require_(all|rel) and load_(all|rel) methods with some caveats:

• Directory and file names have to reflect namespaces and/or constant names:

# lib/dir1/dir2/my_file.rb
module Dir1
  module Dir2
    class MyFile
    end
  end
end

# lib/loader.rb
autoload_all File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/dir1"

• A base_dir option has to be specified if loading directories or files from some other location than top-level directory:

# lib/dir1/other_file.rb
autoload_all File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/dir2/my_file.rb",
             :base_dir => File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../dir1"

• All namespaces will be created dynamically by autoload_all - this means that defined?(Dir1) will return "constant" even if my_file.rb is not yet loaded!

Of course there's also an autoload_rel method: ruby autoload_rel "dir2/my_file.rb", :base_dir => File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../dir1"

If having some problems with autoload_all or autoload_rel then set $DEBUG=true to see how files are mapped to their respective modules and classes.

Methodology (except for autoload_{all|rel})¶ ↑

• Enumerate the files to be loaded

• Try to load all of the files. If we encounter a NameError loading a particular file, store that file in a “try to load it later” list.

• If all the files loaded, great, we're done! If not, go through the “try to load it later” list again rescuing NameError the same way.

• If we walk the whole “try to load it later” list and it doesn't shrink at all, we've encountered an unresolvable dependency. In this case, require_all will rethrow the first NameError it encountered.

Questions? Comments? Concerns?¶ ↑

You can reach the author on github or by email jarmo.p@gmail.com

License¶ ↑

Jarmo Pertman

MIT (see the LICENSE file for details)