Hi folks, I have a directory structure like this: ...Projects/icookware /* main directory for a student project ...Projects/icookware/icwweb /* rails root directory Now I want to require some files from the icookware directory, lets say icw_blender.rb We don''t want to work with absolute paths in our code, since it''s ugly and we have different environments and project paths on our computers. I thought of extending the additional load path in environment.rb: ADDITIONAL_LOAD_PATHS.concat(Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/../"]) in my controller query_controller.rb: require ''icw_blender'' The problems is: icw_blender reads some data from another file in Projects/icookware (muster_rezepte) and rails does not find it: Errno::ENOENT in Queries#create No such file or directory - muster_rezepte /../icw_blender.rb:25:in `initialize'' /../icw_blender.rb:25:in `open'' /../icw_blender.rb:25:in `getMarshalledData'' /../icw_blender.rb:16:in `initialize'' app/controllers/queries_controller.rb:46:in `new'' app/controllers/queries_controller.rb:46:in `create'' ./script/server:48 Could please someone help me to understand this? Cheers, Ana