Loading class descendants in rails development

Question

I need to be able to see all of the class descendants from a controller when I go into the rails console locally. I have this Api::BaseController which all my Api controller inherit from. The issue I have is when I hop in to the rails console to check which Api controller are in the descendants, it comes up empty until I call them. This probably has something to do with how the classes in development aren't eager loaded, and they're not cached locally.

sample_app$ rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 4.2.0)
2.1.5 :001 > Api::BaseController.descendants
 => []
2.1.5 :002 > Api::V1::FoosController
 => Api::V1::FoosController
2.1.5 :003 > Api::BaseController.descendants
 => [Api::V1::FoosController]

From this example, you can see when I call descendants on the Api::BaseController the first time, it's an empty array. After calling one of the controllers that class will be then loaded and will show up as a descendant. In this case, there could be an any number of controllers in V1 as well as V2, V3, etc...

As a stupid ugly hack, I could do

Dir.glob("#{Rails.root.join('app', 'controllers', 'api', 'v1')}/**/*.rb").each(&method(:require_dependency))

but I don't want to have to write that each time I enter the console. I'm also working on a gem, and definitely don't want to put this sort of code in my gem.

The other option is caching classes in development, but that causes a huge issues on it's own. Anyone have any ideas?

Edit Another option would be to call Rails.application.eager_load!. This option would work fine if I could specify only controllers in my API folder. Then I wouldn't have to eager load the entire app, but just a small subset of controllers that I need.

Answer 1

I found the following post: http://avinmathew.com/using-rails-descendants-method-in-development/

In short it says the following:

In enviroments/development.rb add the following:

config.eager_load_paths += Dir['path/to/files/*.rb']
ActionDispatch::Reloader.to_prepare do
  Dir['path/to/files/*.rb'].each {|file| require_dependency file}
end

The first line adds the path that should be loaded when you start your app (or console) and the rest tells rails to reload the classes on each request.