Q:

How can I force my plugin to reload with each request?

As I understand it, plugins are not reloaded in Rails with each request in development mode.
Which makes sense, as generally you add plugins to your app and it's the app you're developing.
But if you are developing a plugin, you have to restart the server with each change to the plugin which has a significant overhead.
Is there any way to make Rails reload your plugin during development, the way it reloads your models and controllers?

A:

I have been struggling with this for some time, too. None of the solutions work, including the autoload_paths and autoload_once_paths tricks. Furthermore, the hack with FileUpdateChecker and initializers also does not help (the checker triggers properly, but the files are not reloaded). Same for config.reload_plugins = true...
However, there is a solution. In app/controllers/application_controller.rb add one line:
require_dependency 'your_file_name_here'
The application controller is reloaded on every request and require_dependency makes your file to be checked for modifications and reloaded accordingly. It worked for me, Apache 2, Passenger 3 and Rails 3.0.3.

A:

I do this by using the shotgun gem.
gem install shotgun
cd /path/to/rails/app
shotgun
slower response time, but reloading all the rails code, not wasting time to write autoload_paths

A:

If restarting the server automatically when plugin code changes is an acceptable solution, you could use Mike Clark/topfunky's rstakeout for that, or the newer watchr which sounds like it does the same thing.
You would do something like this:
rstakeout 'touch tmp/restart.txt' 'vendor/plugins/**/*'

