Ruby Tips - How to figure out where a method is defined

The other day when I was dabbling with the huge codebase, I was wondering where a particular method was being declared for a specific method. I wanted to know this because my greps didn't turn out to volatile and didn't return any results.

The Solution

The Ruby interpreter has certain methods that can be used for identifying under which module or class, the particular method is being defined. See the example below.

module Foo
  def say_hello
    puts "hello"
  end
end
	

class Bar
  include Foo
end
	

puts Bar.new.method(:say_hello)                   #=> #<Method: Bar(Foo)#say_hello>
puts Bar.new.method(:say_hello).source_location   #=> hello.rb

So using the .source_location you will be able to figure which file it has been declared.