🌲 LibraryTree

---

→ more funding options

🌻 Synopsis

Understand where modules wander off to when they are bored, in one line of code. It is a simple, lightweight (< 100 LOC), easy-to-use tree generator. What kind of tree? A tree representation of where a module ends up being included.

module MyGemLibrary
  include LibraryTree::Watcher # <====== THERE IT IS! ONE LINE OF CODE!
end

I will find out how far back to support in Ruby versions when this runs in CI GitHub Actions.

🚚 Amazing test matrix was brought to you by	🔎 appraisal2 🔎
👟 Check it out!	✨ github.com/appraisal-rb/appraisal2 ✨

💡 Info you can shake a stick at

Federated DVCS

Find this repo on other forges (Coming soon!)

Federated DVCS Repository	Status	Issues	PRs	Wiki	CI	Discussions
🧪 galtzo-floss/library_tree on GitLab	The Truth	💚	💚	💚	🏀 Tiny Matrix	➖
🧊 galtzo-floss/library_tree on CodeBerg	An Ethical Mirror (Donate)	💚	💚	➖	⭕️ No Matrix	➖
🐙 galtzo-floss/library_tree on GitHub	A Dirty Mirror	💚	💚	➖	💯 Full Matrix	💚
🎮️ Discord Server		Let's	talk	about	this	library!

Enterprise Support

Need enterprise-level guarantees?

• 💡Subscribe for support guarantees covering all FLOSS dependencies
• 💡Tidelift is part of Sonar
• 💡Tidelift pays maintainers to maintain the software you depend on!
  📊@Pointy Haired Boss: An enterprise support subscription is "never gonna let you down", and supports open source maintainers

Alternatively:

• 
• 
• 

Tokens to Remember
Works with JRuby
Works with Truffle Ruby
Works with MRI Ruby 3
Works with MRI Ruby 2
Works with MRI Ruby 1
Source
Documentation
Compliance
Style
Support
Maintainer 🎖️
... 💖	🧊 🐙 🛖 🧪

✨ Installation

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add library_tree

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

$ gem install library_tree

🔒 Secure Installation

For Medium or High Security Installations

This gem is cryptographically signed, and has verifiable SHA-256 and SHA-512 checksums by stone_checksums. Be sure the gem you install hasn’t been tampered with by following the instructions below.

Add my public key (if you haven’t already, expires 2045-04-29) as a trusted certificate:

gem cert --add <(curl -Ls https://raw.github.com/galtzo-floss/certs/main/pboling.pem)

You only need to do that once. Then proceed to install with:

gem install library_tree -P HighSecurity

The HighSecurity trust profile will verify signed gems, and not allow the installation of unsigned dependencies.

If you want to up your security game full-time:

bundle config set --global trust-policy MediumSecurity

MediumSecurity instead of HighSecurity is necessary if not all the gems you use are signed.

NOTE: Be prepared to track down certs for signed gems and add them the same way you added mine.

🔧 Basic Usage

Usage patterns:

1. Include Watcher into another module.

   module MyGemLibrary
     module SharedFunctionality
       include LibraryTree::Watcher
     end
   end

2. Include that other module somewhere else:

   module MyApp
     include MyGemLibrary::SharedFunctionality
   end

3. That's it! If you want to see the tree, do:

   puts LibraryTree.render

4. You're still done, but if you want more, you can watch other modules with the watcher:

   module AnotherLibrary
     include LibraryTree::Watcher
   end

5. Or you can let modules that are already watched do the watching:

   module YetAnotherLibrary
     include MyGemLibrary::SharedFunctionality
   end

6. Want to see the tree again, after those last changes?:

   puts LibraryTree.render

7. What if we go actually crazy, and do more module stuff:

   module MyApp
     include YetAnotherLibrary
   end

8. What do you expect to see? The render hasn't changed at all! The root node state of YetAnotherLibrary is already fixed, so it doesn't get made a child of MyApp. Load order matters, and this isn't a foolproof way to know all of the places a module gets used. This library is very simple and doesn't intend to be a full-fledged dependency tree, nor track dependency the way Ruby itself does.
9. Why use it?
   1. Debug infinite recursions (maybe). This library handles them, but, again, load order matters, so maybe it won't hep?
   2. It might help you understand relationships between things in your code, or library code.

Here's something almost cool. In a Rails 8.0.2 app I have this in config/applicaiton.rb:

require_relative "boot"

require "rails/all"

I patch it:

 require_relative "boot"

+require "active_support/actionable_error"
+ActiveSupport::ActionableError.send(:include, LibraryTree::Watcher)
+
 require "rails/all"

I run bin/rails c and then:

➜  bin/rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 8.0.2)
floss-funding-dev(dev)> puts LibraryTree.render
* ActiveRecord::NoDatabaseError
  * ActiveSupport::ActionableError
* ActiveRecord::PendingMigrationError
  * ActiveSupport::ActionableError
=> nil

ActiveSupport already has a DescendantsTracker module which is superceded in Ruby 3.1+ by Ruby's native Class#subclasses.

This is not that. This tracks up to the "including" parents and down to "including" children (when it does anything at all). Don't expect accurate results!

I'm not sure if this is useful to anyone, not even me, but I wanted to explore how it would work.

FLOSS Funding

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank

I’m driven by a passion to foster a thriving open-source community – a space where people can tackle complex problems, no matter how small. Revitalizing libraries that have fallen into disrepair, and building new libraries focused on solving real-world challenges, are my passions — totaling 79 hours of FLOSS coding over just the past seven days, a pretty regular week for me. I was recently affected by layoffs, and the tech jobs market is unwelcoming. I’m reaching out here because your support would significantly aid my efforts to provide for my family, and my farm (11 🐔 chickens, 2 🐶 dogs, 3 🐰 rabbits, 8 🐈‍ cats).

If you work at a company that uses my work, please encourage them to support me as a corporate sponsor. My work on gems you use might show up in bundle fund.

I’m developing a new library, floss_funding, designed to empower open-source developers like myself to get paid for the work we do, in a sustainable way. Please give it a look.

Floss-Funding.dev: 👉️ No network calls. 👉️ No tracking. 👉️ No oversight. 👉️ Minimal crypto hashing. 💡 Easily disabled nags

🔐 Security

See SECURITY.md.

🤝 Contributing

If you need some ideas of where to help, you could work on adding more code coverage, or if it is already 💯 (see below) check reek, issues, or PRs, or use the gem and think about how it could be better.

We so if you make changes, remember to update it.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more detailed instructions.

🚀 Release Instructions

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Code Coverage

🪇 Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting with this project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists agrees to follow the .

🌈 Contributors

Made with contributors-img.

Also see GitLab Contributors: https://gitlab.com/galtzo-floss/library_tree/-/graphs/main

⭐️ Star History

📌 Versioning

This Library adheres to . Violations of this scheme should be reported as bugs. Specifically, if a minor or patch version is released that breaks backward compatibility, a new version should be immediately released that restores compatibility. Breaking changes to the public API will only be introduced with new major versions.

dropping support for a platform is both obviously and objectively a breaking change
—Jordan Harband (@ljharb, maintainer of SemVer) in SemVer issue 716

I understand that policy doesn't work universally ("exceptions to every rule!"), but it is the policy here. As such, in many cases it is good to specify a dependency on this library using the Pessimistic Version Constraint with two digits of precision.

For example:

spec.add_dependency("library_tree", "~> 1.0")

📌 Is "Platform Support" part of the public API? More details inside.

SemVer should, but doesn't explicitly, say that dropping support for specific Platforms is a breaking change to an API. It is obvious to many, but not all, and since the spec is silent, the bike shedding is endless.

To get a better understanding of how SemVer is intended to work over a project's lifetime, read this article from the creator of SemVer:

• "Major Version Numbers are Not Sacred"

See CHANGELOG.md for a list of releases.

📄 License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License . See LICENSE.txt for the official Copyright Notice.

© Copyright

• Copyright (c) 2025 Peter H. Boling, of Galtzo.com , and library_tree contributors

P.S. If you need help️ or want to say thanks, 👇 Join the Discord.