A Gem hack in Rails 3 project

I have a little project, one piece of the main function requires some help from a gem named 'HelloWorld'. However, this gem doesn't have the exact support I need. Before the owner of the gem accept my github pull request, I need do some hack to extend two of the the gem's classes 'Hello' and 'HelloWorld'.

I put the class "Hello" in a file named 'hello.rb', placed the file in the 'lib',

and 'autoload' the 'lib' directory by putting in the following line in the 'Application.rb' file:

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)

It worked like a charm! I can invoke the class method of my "Hello" class in Rails Console! Hooary!

Then I changed the class to "HelloWorld", and I renamed my file to 'hello_world.rb'.

Theoretically, it should just work. But it didn't!

After pulling off a few hair from my almost hairless head, I found an interesting article by Bill Harding, and the suggested solution works for me is to force load the new file through initializers.

I created a new file 'extensions.rb' in 'config/initializers',

then put the following line into 'extensions.rb':

require File.join(Rails.root, "lib", "hello_world")

It worked! Well, it's not the way I really wanted it, but I'm happy it worked for me for now.

Note:
The 'Autoload' configuration in the 'Application.rb' file is not necessary any more in this case.

Hope it helps.