How to find where a method is defined at runtime?

Question

We recently had a problem where, after a series of commits had occurred, a backend process failed to run. Now, we were good little boys and girls and ran rake test after every check-in but, due to some oddities in Rails' library loading, it only occurred when we ran it directly from Mongrel in production mode.

I tracked the bug down and it was due to a new Rails gem overwriting a method in the String class in a way that broke one narrow use in the runtime Rails code.

Anyway, long story short, is there a way, at runtime, to ask Ruby where a method has been defined? Something like whereami( :foo ) that returns /path/to/some/file.rb line #45? In this case, telling me that it was defined in class String would be unhelpful, because it was overloaded by some library.

I cannot guarantee the source lives in my project, so grepping for 'def foo' won't necessarily give me what I need, not to mention if I have many def foo's, sometimes I don't know until runtime which one I may be using.

Answer 1

This is really late, but here's how you can find where a method is defined:

http://gist.github.com/76951

# How to find out where a method comes from.
# Learned this from Dave Thomas while teaching Advanced Ruby Studio
# Makes the case for separating method definitions into
# modules, especially when enhancing built-in classes.
module Perpetrator
  def crime
  end
end

class Fixnum
  include Perpetrator
end

p 2.method(:crime) # The "2" here is an instance of Fixnum.
#<Method: Fixnum(Perpetrator)#crime>

If you're on Ruby 1.9+, you can use source_location

require 'csv'

p CSV.new('string').method(:flock)
# => #<Method: CSV#flock>

CSV.new('string').method(:flock).source_location
# => ["/path/to/ruby/1.9.2-p290/lib/ruby/1.9.1/forwardable.rb", 180]

Note that this won't work on everything, like native compiled code. The Method class has some neat functions, too, like Method#owner which returns the file where the method is defined.

EDIT: Also see the __file__ and __line__ and notes for REE in the other answer, they're handy too. -- wg

Answer 2

You can actually go a bit further than the solution above. For Ruby 1.8 Enterprise Edition, there is the __file__ and __line__ methods on Method instances:

require 'rubygems'
require 'activesupport'

m = 2.days.method(:ago)
# => #<Method: Fixnum(ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Numeric::Time)#ago>

m.__file__
# => "/Users/james/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2010.01/gems/activesupport-2.3.8/lib/active_support/core_ext/numeric/time.rb"
m.__line__
# => 64

For Ruby 1.9 and beyond, there is source_location (thanks Jonathan!):

require 'active_support/all'
m = 2.days.method(:ago)
# => #<Method: Fixnum(Numeric)#ago>    # comes from the Numeric module

m.source_location   # show file and line
# => ["/var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-3.0.6/.../numeric/time.rb", 63]

Answer 3

I'm coming late to this thread, and am surprised that nobody mentioned Method#owner.

class A; def hello; puts "hello"; end end
class B < A; end
b = B.new
b.method(:hello).owner
=> A

Answer 4

Copying my answer from a newer similar question that adds new information to this problem.

Ruby 1.9 has method called source_location:

Returns the Ruby source filename and line number containing this method or nil if this method was not defined in Ruby (i.e. native)

This has been backported to 1.8.7 by this gem:

• ruby18_source_location

So you can request for the method:

m = Foo::Bar.method(:create)

And then ask for the source_location of that method:

m.source_location

This will return an array with filename and line number. E.g for ActiveRecord::Base#validates this returns:

ActiveRecord::Base.method(:validates).source_location
# => ["/Users/laas/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@arveaurik/gems/activemodel-3.2.2/lib/active_model/validations/validates.rb", 81]

For classes and modules, Ruby does not offer built in support, but there is an excellent Gist out there that builds upon source_location to return file for a given method or first file for a class if no method was specified:

• ruby where_is module

In action:

where_is(ActiveRecord::Base, :validates)

# => ["/Users/laas/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@arveaurik/gems/activemodel-3.2.2/lib/active_model/validations/validates.rb", 81]

On Macs with TextMate installed, this also pops up the editor at the specified location.

Answer 5

This may help but you would have to code it yourself. Pasted from the blog:

Ruby provides a method_added() callback that is invoked every time a method is added or redefined within a class. It’s part of the Module class, and every Class is a Module. There are also two related callbacks called method_removed() and method_undefined().

http://scie.nti.st/2008/9/17/making-methods-immutable-in-ruby

Answer 6

If you can crash the method, you'll get a backtrace which will tell you exactly where it is.

Unfortunately, if you can't crash it then you can't find out where it has been defined. If you attempt to monkey with the method by overwriting it or overriding it, then any crash will come from your overwritten or overridden method, and it won't be any use.

Useful ways of crashing methods:

1. Pass nil where it forbids it - a lot of the time the method will raise an ArgumentError or the ever-present NoMethodError on a nil class.
2. If you have inside knowledge of the method, and you know that the method in turn calls some other method, then you can overrwrite the other method, and raise inside that.

Answer 7

Maybe the #source_location can help to find where is the method come from.

ex:

ModelName.method(:has_one).source_location

Return

[project_path/vendor/ruby/version_number/gems/activerecord-number/lib/active_record/associations.rb", line_number_of_where_method_is]

OR

ModelName.new.method(:valid?).source_location

Return

[project_path/vendor/ruby/version_number/gems/activerecord-number/lib/active_record/validations.rb", line_number_of_where_method_is]

Answer 8

Very late answer :) But earlier answers did not help me

set_trace_func proc{ |event, file, line, id, binding, classname|
  printf "%8s %s:%-2d %10s %8s\n", event, file, line, id, classname
}
# call your method
set_trace_func nil

Answer 9

You might be able to do something like this:

foo_finder.rb:

 class String
   def String.method_added(name)
     if (name==:foo)
        puts "defining #{name} in:\n\t"
        puts caller.join("\n\t")
     end
   end
 end

Then ensure foo_finder is loaded first with something like

ruby -r foo_finder.rb railsapp

(I've only messed with rails, so I don't know exactly, but I imagine there's a way to start it sort of like this.)

This will show you all the re-definitions of String#foo. With a little meta-programming, you could generalize it for whatever function you want. But it does need to be loaded BEFORE the file that actually does the re-definition.

Answer 10

You can always get a backtrace of where you are by using caller().