Converting Rails 2 plugin to Rails 3 gem

So there's this great plugin I've gotten used to using in my Rails 2 projects called Bootstrapper. It essentially duplicates the functionality of the seeds.rb file, but I like it because it lets you break up your bootstrap process into concise chunks.

Anyway, I've gone so far as to fork the project and attempt to turn it into a Rails 3 gem. I've been able to get the gem to initialize and register the rake tasks and generators OK. However, I'm running into a problem with the Bootstrapper class itself. It won't load in the Rails project unless it's in a module.

That is, if I place the Bootstrapper class in a file by itself and require that file in my Railtie, then in my Rails app, it can't find the Bootstrapper class. If I put the class in a module and call Bootstrapper::Bootstrapper everything is peachy.

The code that actually requires the Bootstrapper class is this:

ActiveSupport.on_load :开发者_开发百科active_record do
  require 'bootstrapper/bootstrapper'
end

The source is available here: http://github.com/jrmehle/bootstrapper/tree/make_gem

Autoload paths actually has an annoying feature of following filesystem paths. For example in your lib or extras (depending on what you autoload) you might have the following file structure:

lib/bootstrapper/bootstrapper.rb
# in this case, Bootstrapper::Bootstrapper.class = Class in rails c
# ie: you don't get a NameError exception

More specifically,

lib/bootstrappers/bootstrapper.rb
# Bootstrapper::Bootstrapper => NameError
# Bootstrappers::Bootstrapper => works

If you really want the other way, you can move everything into your lib/bootstrapper.rb source file but meh, I don't like doing that, that's not how gems are organized. In rails3, you'll find the autoloading pretty nice once you use modules everywhere (which can be painful).

Rails3 uses /extras instead of /lib but it's not required, it's just the default (commented out) from rails new. To switch, you just autoload extras instead of lib.