Freezolite ❄️

Tired of adding # frozen_string_literals: true to every file in your project or running rubocop -A to make it do that for you? What if I told you that you can just add a single gem to your project and activate this option for the project's files automatically (without enabling it globally)?

Freezolite is a gem that turns the frozen_string_literal compile option on only for the specified files. Thus it's like running Ruby with --enable=frozen-string-literal but only for the files you own.

📖 Read more about the motivation behind this project in "Freezolite: the magic gem for keeping Ruby literals safely frozen" post.

Freezolite also comes with experimental support for freezing constants.

Usage

Add the gem to your Gemfile:

gem "freezolite"

And drop the following line into your application entry-point after loading dependencies and before loading your application code. For example, in Rails, you can put it in config/application.rb after the Bundler.require(...) call:

# config/application.rb

#...
Bundler.require(*Rails.groups)

require "freezolite/auto"

# <application configuration>

By default, the gem uses Dir.pwd to determine the project root. If you want to use a different directory or multiple directories, configure the gem like this:

require "freezolite"

Freezolite.setup(
  # You must pass a list of glob patterns
  patterns: ["/path/to/dir1/*.rb", "/path/to/dir2/*.rb"],
  exclude_patterns: ["/path/to/dir1/vendor/*"]
)

Note

When using auto mode, the <project-root>/vendor/bundle folder is excluded automatically. In manual mode, you may want to exclude it yourself.

Using with Bootsnap

Freezolite is compatible with Bootsnap. Just make sure you require it after Bootsnap. No manual cache invalidation required.

Freezing constants

Ruby 3 introduced a new pragma—# shareable_constant_value: .... It's meant to be used with Ractor-driven applications to easily turn constants into Ractor-shareable objects within a source file. Making Ractor-shareable implies deep freezing, thus, we can leverage this pragma to automatically freeze constants!

Freezolite can automatically inject this pragma for you (only for matching files, similarly to frozen literals). You need to opt-in to enable this feature:

require "freezolite"
# You can also specify specific values, such as literal, experimental_copy, etc.
# Setting to `true` is equal to the `literal` value.
Freezolite.experimental_freeze_constants = true
require "freezolite/auto" # or setup manually

Note

This feature is considered experimental for the following reasons: 1) the pragma itself is not widely used and we still need to learn how to use it in our applications; 2) unlike # frozen_string_literal, this setting is not a compiler option but a parser context switch; thus, we have to use source transform here, and literally add a line to the source file, thus, breaking the line numbers in your stack traces, etc.

Supported Ruby versions

• Ruby (MRI) >= 2.7.0

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ruby-next/freezolite.

License

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