Rails Plugins: Extending Rails Beyond the Core

Chapter 4. Sharing Code (lib)

It’s great being able to display information when your application starts, but typically you’ll want to enhance Rails applications in more interesting and useful ways than that. Most commonly, you’ll want to make one or more methods or classes available to the rest of your application.

The lib Directory	40
The CopyrightHelper Plugin	42
Rails, Modules, and Auto-Loading Code	44
Using the Copyright Plugin in an Application	45
Including Code Automatically	48
Adding to ApplicationHelper	48
Summary	50

The lib Directory

The two defining aspects of a plugin are the presence of the init.rb file and of a directory in the plugin called lib. If neither of these exists, then Rails will not recognize the subdirectory of vendor/plugins ...