RoR app works fine locally, but errors when using a from /lib when run on Heroku

Question

My RoR app works fine when run locally, but when I run it on Heroku, it errors on this line:

my_reader = Docreader.new(params[:doc])

Error:

NameError (uninitialized constant NotesController::Docreader):

Docreader.rb is located in the lib folder

I've tried heroku restart , but it didn't help. What am I doing wrong? Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

The likely culprit is the uppercase letter D in Docreader.rb . You need to make sure it is named docreader.rb - in all lower-case letters. Heroku uses a case-sensitive file system, so a mixed case file will work locally in OS X or Windows, but not on Heroku.

In general, it is not advised to use any upper-case letters in your filenames with Ruby on Rails (and lowercase is also the de-facto standard in Ruby), as Rails's auto-loading code always uses lowercase.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem with getting my module to run on Heroku. In addition to the autoload naming convention stated by @wuputah, I found out that the module code must be required due to a threadsafe assumption made by the Rails' production environment on Heroku (even though it was commented out in my production.rb file.) As soon as I "required" the module file before calling "include" on the module, everything started to work.

Please take a look at this excellent article on the subject of getting Modules to load correctly in Heroku:

http://www.williambharding.com/blog/technology/rails-3-autoload-modules-and-classes-in-production /