What's the difference between require and require_dependency?

[Dan Bikle]

People,
What's the difference between require and require_dependency?

I looked here for clues:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/
and I could not find either one.

-Dan

[Florian Frank]

Dan Bikle wrote:

require loads a file (shared object or ruby source) once from the load path.

require_dependency isn't a ruby core feature, it's part of rails. It
remembers the given
file and loads it on each new server request (like load "path/file.rb"
does), if development mode is enabled:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RequireDependency

--
Florian Frank

[Michael Schoen]

"require" is standard ruby. "require_dependency" is a Rails extension
that works some magic when operating in development mode (in which Rails
reloads most of the app classes with each request).