Canister

Canister is a simple IoC container for ruby. It has no dependencies and provides only the functionality you need. It does not monkey-patch ruby or pollute the global namespace, and most importantly it expects to be invisible to your domain classes.

It provides:

• Out-of-order declaration
• Caching
• Automatic dependency resolution
• Automatic cache invalidation on re-registration

Canister was created to make it easier to declare the setup for an application's production and test environments in a single place, without needing to know when exactly those objects were created.

Canister is not a replacement for dependency injection. Rather, it is useful when you have designed your objects to have their dependencies injected.

The domain of your application is not concerned with the design patterns you use to implement it; therefore, the domain entities within in it should represent the domain, not the patterns. For example, it would be a mistake to write all of your classes such that they accept a single parameter called container. Car.new(container) is undesirable when what your application really calls for is Car.new(make, model, year).

For more information on dependency injection and inversion of control containers in ruby, please see this excellent article by Jim Weirich that both sums up the issue and was the inspiration for this gem.

Add it to your Gemfile and you're off to the races.

# Basic usage
container = Canister.new
container.register(:foo) { "foo" }
container.register(:bar) {|c| c.foo + "bar" }

container.bar     #=> "foobar"
container[:bar]   #=> "foobar"
container["bar"]  #=> "foobar"

# Dependencies can be declared in any order
container.register(:after) {|c| "#{c.before} and after" }
container.register(:before) { "before" }
container.after   #=> "before and after"

# Values are cached
container.register(:wait) { sleep 3; 27 }
container.wait
  .
  .
  .
  #=================> 27
container.wait    #=> 27

# Caches are invalidated automatically
container.register(:foo) { "oof" }
container.bar     #=> "oofbar"

Standard rules apply.

Canister has been tested on the following:

• ruby >= 2.3.x
• ruby >= 3.x
• jruby 9.4.2.0 (3.1.0)

As Canister does not rely on any specific runtime environment other than the ruby core, it is compatible with every ruby library and framework.

• The author and maintainer is Bryan Hockey
• This project was inspired by this excellent article by Jim Weirich. (We are not affiliated, so don't blame him if this breaks.)

Copyright (c) 2018 The Regents of the University of Michigan.
All Rights Reserved.
Licensed according to the terms of the Revised BSD License.
See LICENSE.md for details.