How to correctly use require? - ruby

Question

I have this small project I've been working on. In this project, I've been using the rspec to test the classes, so my project folder is structured like this:

.
+--lib
|   +-- # bunch of classes 
|
+--spec
|   +-- # bunch of tests

Being in the project root, if I run rspec all the tests are ran correctly.

However, if I run the main script through the command line, like this: ruby lib/main.rb, then I get this error:

`require': cannot load such file

If I change all the requires to ./lib/class_name it works, but the rspec stops working.

What is the right way to do this?

Right, there's no rails tag. In this case, the generic answer would be "Set up your `$LOAD_PATH` so that all needed directories are there". That's how `require` works. It searches for the thing in each directory in your LOAD_PATH — Sergio Tulentsev, Apr 17 '17 at 15:03
Maybe you should use [require_relative](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3672586/what-is-the-difference-between-require-relative-and-require-in-ruby) — Bohdan, Apr 17 '17 at 15:49
I think the best solution would be similar to what is done here https://github.com/google/google-api-ruby-client/blob/master/spec/spec_helper.rb They've simply appended the required paths into `$LOAD_PATH` then 'required' this helper in the tests . As far as I know if you are typing in exact paths, `require_relative` loads the exact same paths as `require`. — whodini9, Apr 17 '17 at 18:47
Can you give concrete example which doesn't work? I never had a problem with this so I can't imagine how it's not working. Also main script should be in project root folder, not in lib. — Marko Avlijaš, Apr 18 '17 at 02:32

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 18 '17 at 17:35

So, I took Sergio Tulentsev advise and setted up the $LOAD_PATH and that solved my problem!

To do that I added the following code in the beginning of my main script:

$LOAD_PATH.unshift(File.dirname(__FILE__))

This code adds the current file directory to the beginning of the $LOAD_PATH(which is an array used by the require to mount the required files paths and load them).

In other words, this abled my main script to add lib to the $LOAD_PATH and fix the requires.

How to correctly use require? - ruby

1 Answers1