From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-07-20T01:56:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Help with relative paths using require

On Sunday 19 July 2009 09:13:37 am typemismatch wrote:
> My structure is simple enough.
>
> app\
> app\lib
> app\feature
> app\feature2
>
> I have all shared code in \lib and in any feature code I do a require
> '..\lib\whatever.rb'

Quick question: Where are you actually running the app from? I'm guessing that 
path isn't relative to the file the 'require' statement is in, but rather, from 
the current working directory.

> It runs fine locally but if I run on a server using Cron or a Daemon
> the base path seems to be always set to something else so ..\lib
> doesn't exist.

Among other things, I'm guessing you'll find the working directory is somewhere 
else. But you could play with $: a bit.

> What is the correct method here? To wrap my lib code in a gem?

That's a good idea anyway, but you could also do something like this:

require 'pathname'
$: << Pathname(__FILE__).parent.join('lib').to_s

Now, you could just do:

require 'whatever'

The .rb is implied, and the path includes 'lib' directly, now. You'd get 
something similar if you packaged it as a gem.