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Comment by troels | Hacker News Reader

One thing I can't figure out is whether to place my service objects under `/app/models` or under `/lib`. There doesn't seem to be a clear consensus on this? I tend more towards the former, because autoload works better during development. Also, I consider them part of my domain model. What do you do?

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There's nothing stopping you from creating extra folders under /app to contain various types of service objects. Personally I have:

  /app/factories - for classes which create active record objects
  /app/services - for classes which do something I generally don't care about the return value of. Often perfect for background jobs.
  /app/decorators - most of these are Draper classes
  /app/forms - form objects

and a few others from various other gems.

  /app/interactors

It's a trivial thing to add new folders like this to autoloading:

  # add to application.rb
  config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/app/interactors)

As of Rails 3.0, I believe app/anything/ is autoloaded:

* https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/3-0-stable/railties/test...

* http://hakunin.com/rails3-load-paths

Anything that is application-specific, we put in /app

Anything that's generic and re-usable, we put in /lib. This code is normally a prime candidate for gems - only very simple code stays in /lib for very long.

I use /app/interactors or /use_cases (per some Uncle Bob talk about architecture). I don't consider them models in the 'Data Model' sense so I don't put them in /app/models

I have app/services and just add that in application.rb to the load path.

You don't even need to add that to the load path as of rails 4 - we have app/validators, app/services, app/forms, app/inputs etc etc, all autoloaded with no config.

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