Question

I was building my own class that resides in /lib folder and debugging with rails console. I quickly comes to a problem, which I have to reload! my console everytime I modified my class file. Would like to know how to auto-reload this when file changed.

Following is my configuration:

Class Location

/lib/book.rb

Code

class Book  
  def hello
    puts 'hello'
  end
end

config/application.rb

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)
config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"]

Console

rails c
Book.new.hello

Answer 1

It doesn’t look to me like guard will do this, but I could be wrong. My solution, since this is coming up a lot today is to add a load_lib function to my .irbrc file:

(note that this is Rails specific, perhaps someone has a suggestion about that)

 def load_lib
    path = File.join( Rails.root, 'lib') 
    failures = []
    Dir.glob("#{path}/**/*.rb").each {  |file|
    puts "loading: #{file} ... "
    begin
      load file
    rescue => ex
      failures << file 
    end
   } 
  # this second pass is here to try to catch anything that 
  # is dependent on something else
  # could be improved, but is working fine for my needs
  double_failures = []
  for file in failures 
    begin
      load file
    rescue => ex1
      double_failures << file 
    end
  end 

  if double_failures.size > 0 
    puts "these files failed twice"
    for file in double_failures
      puts file
    end
  end 
end

The in the Rails console I just need to run load_lib and my library code is loaded in. It’s brute force and might not be perfect but it is meeting my needs. It also doesn’t answer your question, but it’s close enough?