Ruby require 'file' and relative location

So I'm writing some rspec tests and I'm embarrassed at my lack of Ruby understanding.

I have a file structure that looks like the following:

• GUI_Tests/Tests/test_spec.rb
• GUI_Tests/windows_gui.rb
• GUI_Tests/upload_tool.rb

when I run spec for the test_spec.rb file, I require the upload_tool file to be included like so:

spec -r ../upload_tool -fs test_spec.rb

Then, the upload_tool requires windows_gui.rb, like so:

require '../windows_gui'

My question is, why so I have to reference windows_gui.rb relative to test_spec.rb (requiring the ../开发者_如何学Go) rather than the upload_tool.rb? This feels wrong to me, I'll want to use the upload_tool.rb out of context of the test specs, which means changing the requires each time.

Clearly I'm missing something, but if I don't reference relative to the test spec I get a file not found error.

Sorry for being so ignorant here, but I'm coming up empty handed. Any thoughts appreciated.

BB

You don't. requires are relative to the current directory, which in your case was GUI_Tests/Tests. If you did this instead:

cd ..
spec -r upload_tool -fs Test/test_spec.rb

You would have to use this:

require 'windows_gui' # without '../'

The most common way to get around that problem is using File.dirname(__FILE__):

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', 'windows_gui')

NOTE: in Ruby 1.9.2 require changed it's defaults: Ruby: require vs require_relative - best practice to workaround running in both Ruby <1.9.2 and >=1.9.2