Ruby Internals: Overriding Object.require() to watch files as they are loaded

Sharad Jain, Saturday, May 24, 2008 @ 11:21 am

Recently, on a RoR project, I needed to write a utility in lib folder and corresponding test in test/* folder. I had assumed that anything in folders/subfolders of lib would automatically get loaded as part of environment load. For some reason, it wasn't loading my utility file when I ran my test. The obvious solution would have been to require that file specifically in my test file but I was curious to see if there is a way to figure how rails does its loading magic. Armed with the information that any method that does not act on any object are considered part of "Object" class, I wrote something like this:

class Object
def require(ruby_file)
p "Requiring #{ruby_file} ..."
super
end
end

I put this at the top of my test file, which was the very first file to get loaded, even before the usual line requiring 'test_helper'.

And Woila !!. The next time I ran the test, it showed following:

"Requiring rubygems ..."
"Requiring mechanize ..."
"Requiring fileutils ..."
"Requiring etc ..."
"Requiring fileutils ..."
"Requiring www/mechanize ..."
"Requiring net/http ..."
"Requiring net/protocol ..."
"Requiring socket ..."
"Requiring timeout ..."
...

Next, what I actually needed is to override "load" so that I see only the files as they are loaded as opposed to files being 'require'd (See require vs. load). So, I tried this:

class Object
def load(ruby_file)
p "Loading #{ruby_file} ..."
super
end
end

For some reason that I have yet to figure out, it didn't work. Do you know why?

tech development

Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   use Kernel.load and Kernel.require

   Comment by Delegitimizer, Monday, August 11, 2008 @ 1:56 pm

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