Question

I have a engine style Rails plugin from which I can create a gem using Jeweler. But when I require it in my Rails environment (or erb) the models within the plugin are not loaded. I have followed a number of tutorials and read just about everything on the subject.

# environment.rb
config.gem 'myengine'

# in irb
require 'myengine'

I have unpacked the gem and verified that all files are present. My init.rb has been moved to a new folder called ‘rails’ as per. All files in ‘lib’ are automatically added to the $LOAD_PATH, so require 'myengine' runs lib/myengine.rb. I verified this by putting a puts 'hello' within.

Is it because of the physical presence of plugins in a known place that Rails can add all the models, controller etc. to the relevant load_paths? Do I need to replicate this manually when using a gem?

Would gemspec require_paths be a way of adding additional paths other than lib? I assume however that Rails does not just require every single file, but loads them on demand hence the need for the filename and class name to match?

Answer 1

The problem was the files (in app) where not being added to the gem because when using Jeweler it only automatically adds files to required_paths which are committed to git.