Ruby's __FILE__ keyword returns the path to the current file. On popular for this are Ruby binaries:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
$LOAD_PATH << File.expand_path('../../lib', __FILE__)
require 'my_cli'
MyCli.run!

Growing Rails Applications in Practice

Check out our e-book. Learn to structure large Ruby on Rails codebases with the tools you already know and love.

• Introduce design conventions for controllers and user-facing models
• Create a system for growth
• Build applications to last

Read more Show archive.org snapshot

However, if you create a symlink to this file, this will no longer work. __FILE__ will resolve to the path of the symlink, not to its target.

One solution is to use File.realpath(__FILE__).

In Ruby 2+ you can also use this:

$LOAD_PATH << File.expand_path('../lib', __dir__)

__dir__ is simply a shortcut for File.dirname(File.realpath(__FILE__)).