Lazy Load Hooks

LazyLoadHooks allows Rails to lazily load a lot of components and thus making the app boot faster. Because of this feature now there is no need to require ActiveRecord::Base at boot time purely to apply configuration. Instead a hook is registered that applies configuration once ActiveRecord::Base is loaded. Here ActiveRecord::Base is used as example but this feature can be applied elsewhere too.

Here is an example where on_load method is called to register a hook.

initializer 'active_record.initialize_timezone' do
  ActiveSupport.on_load(:active_record) do
    self.time_zone_aware_attributes = true
    self.default_timezone = :utc
  end
end

When the entirety of ActiveRecord::Base has been evaluated then run_load_hooks is invoked. The very last line of ActiveRecord::Base is:

ActiveSupport.run_load_hooks(:active_record, ActiveRecord::Base)

run_load_hooks will then execute all the hooks that were registered with the on_load method. In the case of the above example, it will execute the block of code that is in the initializer.

Registering a hook that has already run results in that hook executing immediately. This allows hooks to be nested for code that relies on multiple lazily loaded components:

initializer "action_text.renderer" do
  ActiveSupport.on_load(:action_controller_base) do
    ActiveSupport.on_load(:action_text_content) do
      self.default_renderer = Class.new(ActionController::Base).renderer
    end
  end
end