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!

require 'require_all'

You can now require_all in a multitude of different ways:

require_all *args

One of the easiest ways to require_all is to give it a glob, which will enumerate all the matching files and load them in the proper order. For example, to load all the Ruby files under the ‘lib’ directory, just do:

require_all 'lib/**/*.rb'

If the dependencies between the matched files are unresolvable, it will throw the first unresolvable NameError.

Don’t want to give it a glob? Just give it a list of files:

require_all Dir.glob("blah/**/*.rb").reject { |f| stupid_file(f) }

Or if you want, just list the files directly as arguments:

require_all 'lib/a.rb', 'lib/b.rb', 'lib/c.rb', 'lib/d.rb'

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

Methodology

I didn’t invent the approach this gem uses. It was shamelessly stolen from Merb. Once upon a time at MountainWest RubyConf we were discussing how horrible ActiveSupport’s dependencies.rb hijacking of const_missing and someone described the approach Merb used to me. It was so simple and clean! Here’s how it works:

  1. Enumerate the files in the glob
  2. 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.
  3. If all the files loaded, great, we’re done! If not, go through the “try to load it later” list again rescuing NameErrors the same way.
  4. 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 freenode: “tarcieri”

Or by email: [email protected]

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License

MIT (see the LICENSE file for details)