Why are all Rails helpers available to all views, all the time? Is there a way to disable this?

Question

Why can I access helper methods for one controller in the views for a different controller? Is there a way to disable this without hacking/patching Rails?

Answer 1

@George Schreiber's method doesn't work as of Rails 3.1; the code has changed significantly.

However, there's now an even better way to disable this feature in Rails 3.1 (and hopefully later). In your config/application.rb, add this line:

config.action_controller.include_all_helpers = false 

This will prevent ApplicationController from loading all of the helpers.

(For anyone who is interested, here's the pull request where the feature was created.)

Answer 2

The answer depends on the Rails version.

Rails >= 3.1

Change the include_all_helpers config to false in any environment where you want to apply the configuration. If you want the config to apply to all environments, change it in application.rb.

config.action_controller.include_all_helpers = false 

When false, it will skip the inclusion.

Rails < 3.1

Delete the following line from ApplicationController

helper :all 

In this way each controller will load its own helpers.