So you've created your bespoke Ruby application without Rails. Then you thought, "Bollocks, I have to manually require all my application files, and in a certain order! And I have to explicitly define all my submodules - they don't magically appear based on the directory structure like they did in Rails. There has to be a better way!" Well now there is.

This is an actively used and maintained project. It may look dead, but that's because there's nothing left to do.

Add to your Gemfile.

gem 'awesome_loader'

Let's say you have a fairly simple layout, somewhat inspired by Rails.

• app/models/widget.rb contains class Widget
• app/models/billing/line_item.rb contains class Billing::LineItem
• app/helpers/app_helpers.rb contains module AppHelpers

Given those files and their contents, this is all you have to tell awesome_loader. Awesome, right?

AwesomeLoader.autoload do
  paths %w(app ** *.rb)
end

Maybe your app structure is more complicated. That's fine too. Note the root_depth: 2 argument. That's saying, "Only start creating modules for dirs after the first 2 levels." That means app and app/* won't get any modules, but deeper directories, like app/models/billing, will. 2 is the default, as you can see in the above example.

AwesomeLoader.autoload root_depth: 2 do
  # These files have top-level Routes and Entities modules
  paths %w(app routes ** *.rb), root_depth: 1
  paths %w(app entities ** *.rb), root_depth: 1

  # Load everything else using the default root_depth
  paths %w(app ** *.rb)

  # Load your app's initializers. Any classes/modules in them will be autoloaded.
  require %w(config initializers *.rb)
end

For more details and options, check out the documentation.

If you're running a threaded server like Puma or Thin, it's usually considered best practice to load everything up-front (at least in production), instead of lettings things load while other threads might be running. The eager_load option will ensure that all files are loaded before the block exits.

AwesomeLoader.autoload eager_load: is_prod? do
  paths %w(app ** *.rb)
end

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Copyright (c) 2017 Jordan Hollinger