Autoloading in Development

Developer happiness is a cornerstone philosophy of Rails and one way of achieving this is with automatic code reloading in development.

Once you start the Rails server, new files or changes to existing files are detected and automatically loaded or reloaded as necessary. This allows you to focus on building without having to restart your Rails server after every change.

You may also notice that Rails applications rarely use require statements like you may have seen in other programming languages. Rails uses naming conventions to require files automatically so you can focus on writing your application code.

See Autoloading and Reloading Constants for more details.