Rails autoload and eager load paths

Jan 28, 2015 2 min.

How rails finds and loads classes when using autoload_paths and eager_load_paths can be pretty confusing. This post is the best that I’ve read on the topic, but there are a few things that I think are worth explaining more. autoload_paths This helps rails locate where an unknown constant is defined. So if it encounters the constant Foo::Bar::Baz, it knows to look for it in foo/bar/baz.rb That is why you only need to add lib/, instead of lib/**/*, to the paths.