How does load differ from require in Ruby?

Question

Is there any major difference between load and require in the Ruby on Rails applications? Or do they both have the same functionality?

Answer 1

require searches for the library in all the defined search paths and also appends .rb or .so to the file name you enter. It also makes sure that a library is only included once. So if your application requires library A and B and library B requries library A too A would be loaded only once.

With load you need to add the full name of the library and it gets loaded every time you call load - even if it already is in memory.

Answer 2

Another difference between Kernel#require and Kernel#load is that Kernel#load takes an optional second argument that allows you to wrap the loaded code into an anonymous empty module.