solutions to the annoying “warning: already initialized constant” message

Question

Today I\'ve stumbled upon a tricky issue with Ruby constants. In our team someone created a module, which is included into multiple models. In our (spec) test output this result

Answer 1

This is only a problem in applications that explicitly reload, like Rails applications.

If the verbosity offends you, you can use unless as a statement modifier instead:

module LifeCycle
  RESET = 'reset' unless const_defined?(:RESET)
end

This leaves a few weak arguments against Avdi's suggestion to only use methods:

• constant lookup is faster than method lookup,
• constant values are defined on load, not on (first) request,
• constants visually suggest that they require no work to derive, and

If you like Avdi's suggestion enough to ignore these, go with it.