Mark Chavez

In the previous article, I talked about the different ways to load a ruby file and we’re not stopping there. Apparently, there’s an easier way of loading files without the nuisance of $LOAD_PATH, among other things.

With the recent release of Rails 6, I learned that they migrated the autoloader from the traditional way to using a library called zeitwerk — it’s much faster, and thread-safe. More importantly, let me provide you a simple comparison on how might a traditional require differ from using zeitwerk.

Why use an external library if Ruby already has a built-in way of doing it?

Given a directory structure:

lib/
  > anotherfile.rb
hello.rb

Let’s load anotherfile.rb using the old and zeitwerk way.

# OLD WAY

$LOAD_PATH.unshift "lib"
require "anotherfile"

# ZEITWERK
require "zeitwerk"

loader = Zeitwerk::Loader.new
loader.push_dir("lib")
loader.setup

With zeitwerk, the directory structure plays a very important role because your constants should be defined based on how the directories are mapped out (at least by default, but IIRC you can override this). For example:

app/services/
  > hello/
    > world.rb

Zeitwerk expects that you have a constant defined World under the Hello module.

require "zeitwerk"

loader = Zeitwerk::Loader.new
loader.push_dir("app/services")
loader.setup

Hello::World.new

Happy coding!