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Asked: 2026-05-11T01:45:04+00:00

Here is one more newbie question: require ‘tasks/rails’ I saw this line in Rakefile

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Here is one more newbie question:

require 'tasks/rails'

I saw this line in Rakefile in the root path of every rails project. I guess this line is used to require vendor/rails/railties/lib/tasks/rails.rb to get all rake tasks loaded:

$VERBOSE = nil # Load Rails rakefile extensions Dir['#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/*.rake'].each { |ext| load ext } # Load any custom rakefile extensions Dir['#{RAILS_ROOT}/lib/tasks/**/*.rake'].sort.each { |ext| load ext } Dir['#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/plugins/*/**/tasks/**/*.rake'].sort.each { |ext| load ext }

My question is why only ‘tasks/rails’ is specified for the require method, but not the full path of the file?

Thanks in advance.

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  1. When you start your rails app it runs config/boot.rb which calls Rails::Initializer.set_load_path and thatsets up the $LOAD_PATH.

    Ruby uses that list of directories to find the files specified on a require line. If you give it an absolute path like require '/home/lolindrath/ruby/lib.rb' it will skip that search.

    This is roughly analogous to #include <stdlib.h> in C/C++ where it searches the include path you give the compiler to find that header file.

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