How do I change the load order of initializers in Rails?

Even though the guide recommends prepending the initializer filenames with numbers, that does seem ugly. Another way is to utilize the provided initialization hooks. See http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#initialization-events

E.g.

# application.rb

module YourApp
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.before_initialize do
     # initialization code goes here
    end
  end
end

Put the configuration code in config/environment.rb file, right after the first require statement, such as:

# Load the rails application
require File.expand_path('../application', __FILE__)

# Load global configurations
CONFIG = Hashie::Mash.new YAML.load_file(Rails.root.join("config", "application.yml"))[Rails.env]

# Initialize the rails application
RailsSetup::Application.initialize!

Rename the initializer to 01_name.rb, that will force it to load alphabetically previously.

Edit

To quote the official Rails Guide for configuration (thanks zetetic for the tip):

If you have any ordering dependency in your initializers, you can control the load order by naming. For example, 01_critical.rb will be loaded before 02_normal.rb.

Use a require_relative to make sure one file is loaded first.

# aaa.rb
require_relative 'bbb'
# ... code using values from bbb.rb ...