Today I was writing some specs with RSpec, the Ruby BDD Testing Framework. In between tests, classes aren’t reloaded by default, so I went about try to figure out how to reload a class for certain tests.

Active Support defines a method on Class called remove_class. This provides half of the equation. The other half was to reload the class again. So, I wrote a method on the Object class that should handle most cases. Note, this may not work with namespaced classes, but it did the quick and dirty job of helping my specs to reload the class.

# Call this method like
# MyRubyClass.reload!
# or
# MyRubyClass.reload!('/path/to/file/my_ruby_class.rb')
class Object
  def reload!(file = nil)
    remove_class(self)
    load(file || "#{self.to_s.underscore}.rb")
  end
end

All I needed to do was then call this method when I needed to reload the class.

MyRubyClass.reload!