Environment configuration for Sinatra error

Question

I have an environment config file at config/environment.rb with the following:

require 'rubygems'
require 'bundler'
Bundler.setup
require 'sinatra'
require 'sinatra/base'
require 'sinatra/reloader'

and in my config.ru I have:

require File.expand_path('../config/environment', __FILE__)
require 'slim'
require 'coffee-script'
require 'padrino-helpers'
require 'sinatra/twitter-bootstrap'

I am getting the error :

Errno::ENOENT at /profile
No such file or directory - /Users/myusername/projects/accounts/config/views/profile.slim

and this only goes away when I remove require 'sinatra' from the config/environment.rb file and into config.ru. Can anyone explain why this happens? I assumed that the require File.expand_path('../config/environment', __FILE__) will simply include all requires from that file into config.ru but that doesn't seem to be the case. It now thinks my views live inside the config folder.

I followed the suggestion given here: How do I make Rake tasks run under my Sinantra app/environment? but again, moving require 'sinatra' into the environment breaks the app.

Answer 1

The error looks like it is from Sinatra being unable to find a Slim template when rendering a response, because it’s looking for a views directory under the config directory. By default Sinatra looks for the views dir relative to the application file, which (again by default) is the file that calls require 'sinatra'. In your case the require line is in config/environment.rb so Sinatra treats that as the app file and looks for the views dir below it.

I’m assuming you have an actual application file that you haven’t shown. The simplest solution is probably to explicitly set the application file setting in there:

set :app_file, __FILE__

Depending on your setup you might want to specify the view directory directly instead:

set :views, 'path/to/views'