ActionDispatch::Reloader provides prepare and cleanup callbacks, intended to assist with code reloading during development.

Prepare callbacks are run before each request, and cleanup callbacks after each request. In this respect they are analogs of ActionDispatch::Callback's before and after callbacks. However, cleanup callbacks are not called until the request is fully complete – that is, after close has been called on the response body. This is important for streaming responses such as the following:

self.response_body = lambda { |response, output|
  # code here which refers to application models
}

Cleanup callbacks will not be called until after the response_body lambda is evaluated, ensuring that it can refer to application models and other classes before they are unloaded.

By default, ActionDispatch::Reloader is included in the middleware stack only in the development environment; specifically, when config.cache_classes is false. Callbacks may be registered even when it is not included in the middleware stack, but are executed only when ActionDispatch::Reloader.prepare! or ActionDispatch::Reloader.cleanup! are called manually.