VisibilityMonitor

Provides a way to monitor a module for method visibility changes with MRI ruby.

This might be useful when using Module#method_added to detect method definitions where the visibility of the method is also of interest. The problem is that the method visibility might be changed immediately after the method is defined (e.g. when using private def to define a private method).

Although the visibility methods (private, protected and public) can be overridden in pure ruby code to detect visibility changes, calling super doesn't change the visibility scope when the visibility method is called without arguments (e.g. private). This gem works around this limitation by overriding these visibility methods in a C extension, so they don't interfere with setting the visibility scope.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'visibility_monitor'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install visibility_monitor

To monitor a module for method visibility changes, extend it with VisibilityMonitor, then the visibility_set class method will be called after a method's visibilty is set. For example

require 'visibility_monitor'

class Example
  extend VisibilityMonitor

  def self.visibility_set(method_name, visibility_symbol)
    puts "method :#{method_name} has been marked :#{visibility_symbol}"
  end

  private def example
  end
end

would output

method :example has been marked :private

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/dylanahsmith/visibility_monitor.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.