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Introduction to $LOAD_PATH, require, load, include and extend in Ruby

Introduction to $LOAD_PATH, require, load, include and extend in Ruby​

Ruby is a powerful object-oriented programming language with a rich library and module system. In Ruby, there are some key concepts and methods, such as $LOAD_PATH, require, load, include, and extend, which play an important role in organizing and using code. Let’s learn about them one by one.

  1. $LOAD_PATH:
    Ruby's $LOAD_PATH is a global variable that stores a list of paths used by the Ruby interpreter to find and load files. When you import a file using the require or load methods, the Ruby interpreter searches the paths in $LOAD_PATH for the corresponding file. You can view the contents of $LOAD_PATH in the following ways:
     puts $LOAD_PATH

This prints out a list of the current load paths.

  1. require:
    require is the method in Ruby for loading library files. It accepts a string argument specifying the name of the file to load (the file extension can be omitted). The require method will search the path in $LOAD_PATH to find and load the corresponding file. Once the file is loaded, the classes, modules, and methods defined in it are available to the current code. For example:
     require 'my_library'