Rails: Lazy-loading Dependencies October 09, 2025

There are ruby gems that doesn’t need to be implicitly “required” in the application. A perfect use-case would be a gem that you’ll only use inside a rake task. You probably don’t need that included in the whole application.

This is what require does.

In order to use this gem, you’ll have to explicitly require it otherwise an error will occur. It’s a neat feature and could be something to look at when doing performance optimizations.