I have some behavior in my controller that I pulled out into a module in order to test better and re-use it in a few places. Two questions about this:
- Where is a good place to put my modules? They need to run in order to be available to the controllers, so I was thinking the
config/initializers/
directory. That seems a little suspect to me though. lib/
?
- How do I ensure the code gets run so the modules are available to
include
in my controllers?
Thank you kindly sirs.
lib/
is an excellent place for modules; much better than config/initializers/
--at least in my opinion. If it's several modules, or one large one, you can also consider making it a plugin and placing it in vendor/plugins
.
If you put it in lib/
, you'll need to manually require
the file. Rails, by default, does not autoload files in the lib/
directory. You can place the require in one of your config files.
I usually put my additional autoloads in config/application.rb
. Something like this should do the trick (assuming that your .rb
file is in a directory called lib/my_module
):
config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{Rails.root}/lib/my_module"]
You have to make sure that your module is an actual module
and not a class
. Then, you can simply include it:
# lib/my_module/foobar.rb
module Foobar
def foobar
"Hello world!"
end
end
# app/models/my_model.rb
class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
include Foobar
end
# rails console
>> obj = MyModel.first
=> #<MyModel id: 1, ...>
>> obj.id
=> 1
>> obj.foobar
=> "Hello world!"
1) I like to put:
my class extentions under app/extentions
my modules under /app/mixins
my services under /app/services
2) You can configure your application to load all of these in config/application.rb:
class extentions should be required right way
and the mixins and services can be added to your autoload path
class Application < Rails::Application
# require class extentions right now
Dir[Rails.root.join('app', 'extentions', "*.rb")].each {|l| require l }
# Custom directories with classes and modules you want to be autoloadable.
config.autoload_paths += Dir[Rails.root.join('app', 'mixins', '{**}')]
config.autoload_paths += Dir[Rails.root.join('app', 'services', '{**}')]
(I'm using rails 3)
Try putting controller specific modules in app/controllers
. No require
required.