Does the Rails Console reload initializers? [duplicate]

Question

I was using the Rails Console to test a few things by hand and found that one of my initializers (under config/initializers) had an error. I exited the console, made the change, and ran "rails c" again. Much to my surprise, the updated initializer was not executed.

Here is what I found:

-- If I start a new Bash session and enter "rails c" all the initializers get executed.

-- If I add / change an initializer and then re-run "rails c" within the same Bash session, the initializers are not executed.

This occurs under development which disables caching.

What the heck is going on? Thanks.

Answer 1

The introduction of Spring was meant to make loading your rails app faster, by keeping a copy of the app in memory and only reloading what changes.

Unfortunately, sometimes your initializers can stay exactly the same, but they need to be re-run. An example is the "business_time" gem, which generates an initializer that loads a YAML file. You can change the YAML file and restart console, but Spring sees that your initializer hasn't changed, so it doesn't re-run it. Thus, the changes to your YAML file go unnoticed, This is a very difficult error to troubleshoot.

If you're having initializer problems, then exit out of console and run:

bundle exec spring stop

before going back into console. This will force a fresh reload of the initializers.

You can also disable Spring entirely by removing the gem from your Gemfile.