📍 NOTE
RubyGems (the GitHub org, not the website) suffered a hostile takeover in September 2025.
Ultimately 4 maintainers were hard removed and a reason has been given for only 1 of those, while 2 others resigned in protest.
It is a complicated story which is difficult to parse quickly.
Simply put - there was active policy for adding or removing maintainers/owners of rubygems and bundler, and those policies were not followed.
I’m adding notes like this to gems because I don’t condone theft of repositories or gems from their rightful owners.
If a similar theft happened with my repos/gems, I’d hope some would stand up for me.
Disenfranchised former-maintainers have started gem.coop.
Once available I will publish there exclusively; unless RubyCentral makes amends with the community.
The “Technology for Humans: Joel Draper” podcast episode by reinteractive is the most cogent summary I’m aware of.
See here, here and here for more info on what comes next.
What I’m doing: A (WIP) proposal for bundler/gem scopes, and a (WIP) proposal for a federated gem server.

Galtzo FLOSS Logo by Aboling0, CC BY-SA 4.0 ruby-lang Logo, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Ruby Visual Identity Team, CC BY-SA 2.5 simple_column-scopes Logo by Aboling0, CC BY-SA 4.0

🏛️ SimpleColumn::Scopes

Version GitHub tag (latest SemVer) License: MIT Downloads Rank Open Source Helpers CodeCov Test Coverage Coveralls Test Coverage QLTY Test Coverage QLTY Maintainability CI Heads CI Runtime Dependencies @ HEAD CI Current CI Truffle Ruby CI JRuby Deps Locked Deps Unlocked CI Supported CI Legacy CI Unsupported CI Ancient CI Test Coverage CI Style CodeQL Apache SkyWalking Eyes License Compatibility Check

if ci_badges.map(&:color).detect { it != "green"} ☝️ let me know, as I may have missed the discord notification.


if ci_badges.map(&:color).all? { it == "green"} 👇️ send money so I can do more of this. FLOSS maintenance is now my full-time job.

OpenCollective Backers OpenCollective Sponsors Sponsor Me on Github Liberapay Goal Progress Donate on PayPal Buy me a coffee Donate on Polar Donate at ko-fi.com

🌻 Synopsis

Create dynamic modules which define dynamic methods for scopes based on a dynamic array of column names!

Why?

Why replace a simple where query with a method from a DSL like this?

  • Tokenizing your logic makes it easy to find with grep or other search tools.
    • Do a search for .where( in a large codebase, and may wish the specific thing you are looking for was tokenized.
  • Creating small blocks of logic on which to build, of a uniform nature, can make applications
    • more robust (this will raise a noisy error on a typo - if the column doesn’t exist, or the scope prefix is incorrect)
    • reduce typos (see above)
    • reduce mental overhead (the same pattern every time, no variation; for_<column_name> always means the same thing)
  • Profit

💡 Info you can shake a stick at

Tokens to Remember Gem name Gem namespace
Works with JRuby JRuby 9.1 Compat JRuby 9.2 Compat JRuby 9.3 Compat
JRuby 9.4 Compat JRuby 10.0 Compat JRuby HEAD Compat
Works with Truffle Ruby Truffle Ruby 22.3 Compat Truffle Ruby 23.0 Compat
Truffle Ruby 23.1 Compat Truffle Ruby 24.1 Compat
Works with MRI Ruby 3 Ruby 3.0 Compat Ruby 3.1 Compat Ruby 3.2 Compat Ruby 3.3 Compat Ruby 3.4 Compat Ruby HEAD Compat
Works with MRI Ruby 2 Ruby 2.4 Compat Ruby 2.5 Compat Ruby 2.6 Compat Ruby 2.7 Compat
Support & Community Join Me on Daily.dev's RubyFriends Live Chat on Discord Get help from me on Upwork Get help from me on Codementor
Source Source on GitLab.com Source on CodeBerg.org Source on Github.com The best SHA: dQw4w9WgXcQ!
Documentation Current release on RubyDoc.info YARD on Galtzo.com Maintainer Blog GitLab Wiki GitHub Wiki
Compliance License: MIT Compatible with Apache Software Projects: Verified by SkyWalking Eyes 📄ilo-declaration-img Security Policy Contributor Covenant 2.1 SemVer 2.0.0
Style Enforced Code Style Linter Keep-A-Changelog 1.0.0 Gitmoji Commits Compatibility appraised by: appraisal2
Maintainer 🎖️ Follow Me on LinkedIn Follow Me on Ruby.Social Follow Me on Bluesky Contact Maintainer My technical writing
... 💖 Find Me on WellFound: Find Me on CrunchBase My LinkTree More About Me 🧊 🐙 🛖 🧪

Compatibility

Compatible with MRI Ruby 2.4.0+, and concordant releases of JRuby, and TruffleRuby.

🚚 Amazing test matrix was brought to you by 🔎 appraisal2 🔎 and the color 💚 green 💚
👟 Check it out! github.com/appraisal-rb/appraisal2

Federated DVCS

Find this repo on federated forges (Coming soon!)
Federated DVCS Repository Status Issues PRs Wiki CI Discussions
🧪 galtzo-floss/simple_column-scopes on GitLab The Truth 💚 💚 💚 🐭 Tiny Matrix
🧊 galtzo-floss/simple_column-scopes on CodeBerg An Ethical Mirror (Donate) 💚 💚 ⭕️ No Matrix
🐙 galtzo-floss/simple_column-scopes on GitHub Another Mirror 💚 💚 💚 💯 Full Matrix 💚
🎮️ Discord Server Live Chat on Discord Let’s talk about this library!

Enterprise Support Tidelift

Available as part of the Tidelift Subscription.

Need enterprise-level guarantees?

The maintainers of this and thousands of other packages are working with Tidelift to deliver commercial support and maintenance for the open source packages you use to build your applications. Save time, reduce risk, and improve code health, while paying the maintainers of the exact packages you use.

Get help from me on Tidelift

  • 💡Subscribe for support guarantees covering all your FLOSS dependencies
  • 💡Tidelift is part of Sonar
  • 💡Tidelift pays maintainers to maintain the software you depend on!
    📊@Pointy Haired Boss: An enterprise support subscription is “never gonna let you down”, and supports open source maintainers

Alternatively:

  • Live Chat on Discord
  • Get help from me on Upwork
  • Get help from me on Codementor

✨ Installation

Install the gem and add to the application’s Gemfile by executing:

bundle add simple_column-scopes

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

gem install simple_column-scopes

🔒 Secure Installation

For Medium or High Security Installations

This gem is cryptographically signed, and has verifiable SHA-256 and SHA-512 checksums by stone_checksums. Be sure the gem you install hasn’t been tampered with by following the instructions below.

Add my public key (if you haven’t already, expires 2045-04-29) as a trusted certificate:

gem cert --add <(curl -Ls https://raw.github.com/galtzo-floss/certs/main/pboling.pem)

You only need to do that once. Then proceed to install with:

gem install simple_column-scopes -P HighSecurity

The HighSecurity trust profile will verify signed gems, and not allow the installation of unsigned dependencies.

If you want to up your security game full-time:

bundle config set --global trust-policy MediumSecurity

MediumSecurity instead of HighSecurity is necessary if not all the gems you use are signed.

NOTE: Be prepared to track down certs for signed gems and add them the same way you added mine.

⚙️ Configuration

There isn’t any.

🔧 Basic Usage

Given an ActiveRecord model with a column: user_id
Create a scope that queries it, by prefixing for_ to the column name:

include SimpleColumn::Scopes.new(:for_user_id)

is equivalent to:

class << self
  def for_user_id(user_id)
    where(user_id: user_id)
  end
end

Complete example*:

# == Schema Information
#
# Table name: monkeys
#
#  id             :integer(4)       not null, primary key
#  user_id        :integer(4)
#  seller_id  :integer(4)
class Monkey < ActiveRecord::Base
  include SimpleColumn::Scopes.new(:for_user_id, :for_seller_id, :etc)
  # => for_user_id, and for_seller_id scopes are added to the model,
  #       and they query on the user_id and seller_id columns, respectively
end

Monkey.for_user_id(1)
Monkey.for_seller_id(2)

* This software may not be suitable for buying and selling of Monkeys. This is simply a contrived example.

🦷 FLOSS Funding

While galtzo-floss tools are free software and will always be, the project would benefit immensely from some funding.
Raising a monthly budget of… “dollars” would make the project more sustainable.

We welcome both individual and corporate sponsors! We also offer a
wide array of funding channels to account for your preferences
(although currently Open Collective is our preferred funding platform).

If you’re working in a company that’s making significant use of galtzo-floss tools we’d
appreciate it if you suggest to your company to become a galtzo-floss sponsor.

You can support the development of galtzo-floss tools via
GitHub Sponsors,
Liberapay,
PayPal,
Open Collective
and Tidelift.

📍 NOTE
If doing a sponsorship in the form of donation is problematic for your company
from an accounting standpoint, we’d recommend the use of Tidelift,
where you can get a support-like subscription instead.

Open Collective for Individuals

Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities. [Become a backer]

NOTE: kettle-readme-backers updates this list every day, automatically.

No backers yet. Be the first!

Open Collective for Organizations

Become a sponsor and get your logo on our README on GitHub with a link to your site. [Become a sponsor]

NOTE: kettle-readme-backers updates this list every day, automatically.

No sponsors yet. Be the first!

Another way to support open-source

I’m driven by a passion to foster a thriving open-source community – a space where people can tackle complex problems, no matter how small. Revitalizing libraries that have fallen into disrepair, and building new libraries focused on solving real-world challenges, are my passions. I was recently affected by layoffs, and the tech jobs market is unwelcoming. I’m reaching out here because your support would significantly aid my efforts to provide for my family, and my farm (11 🐔 chickens, 2 🐶 dogs, 3 🐰 rabbits, 8 🐈‍ cats).

If you work at a company that uses my work, please encourage them to support me as a corporate sponsor. My work on gems you use might show up in bundle fund.

I’m developing a new library, floss_funding, designed to empower open-source developers like myself to get paid for the work we do, in a sustainable way. Please give it a look.

Floss-Funding.dev: 👉️ No network calls. 👉️ No tracking. 👉️ No oversight. 👉️ Minimal crypto hashing. 💡 Easily disabled nags

OpenCollective Backers OpenCollective Sponsors Sponsor Me on Github Liberapay Goal Progress Donate on PayPal Buy me a coffee Donate on Polar Donate to my FLOSS efforts at ko-fi.com Donate to my FLOSS efforts using Patreon

🔐 Security

See SECURITY.md.

🤝 Contributing

If you need some ideas of where to help, you could work on adding more code coverage,
or if it is already 💯 (see below) check reek, issues, or PRs,
or use the gem and think about how it could be better.

We Keep A Changelog so if you make changes, remember to update it.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more detailed instructions.

🚀 Release Instructions

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Code Coverage

Coverage Graph

Coveralls Test Coverage

QLTY Test Coverage

🪇 Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting with this project’s codebases, issue trackers,
chat rooms and mailing lists agrees to follow the Contributor Covenant 2.1.

🌈 Contributors

Contributors

Made with contributors-img.

Also see GitLab Contributors: https://gitlab.com/galtzo-floss/simple_column-scopes/-/graphs/main

⭐️ Star History Star History Chart

📌 Versioning

This Library adheres to Semantic Versioning 2.0.0.
Violations of this scheme should be reported as bugs.
Specifically, if a minor or patch version is released that breaks backward compatibility,
a new version should be immediately released that restores compatibility.
Breaking changes to the public API will only be introduced with new major versions.

dropping support for a platform is both obviously and objectively a breaking change

—Jordan Harband (@ljharb, maintainer of SemVer) in SemVer issue 716

I understand that policy doesn’t work universally (“exceptions to every rule!”),
but it is the policy here.
As such, in many cases it is good to specify a dependency on this library using
the Pessimistic Version Constraint with two digits of precision.

For example:

spec.add_dependency("simple_column-scopes", "~> 1.0")
📌 Is "Platform Support" part of the public API? More details inside.

SemVer should, IMO, but doesn’t explicitly, say that dropping support for specific Platforms is a breaking change to an API, and for that reason the bike shedding is endless.

To get a better understanding of how SemVer is intended to work over a project’s lifetime, read this article from the creator of SemVer:

See CHANGELOG.md for a list of releases.

📄 License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of
the MIT License License: MIT.
See LICENSE.txt for the official Copyright Notice.

  • Copyright (c) 2017, 2025 - 2026 Peter H. Boling, of Galtzo.com Galtzo.com Logo (Wordless) by Aboling0, CC BY-SA 4.0 , and simple_column-scopes contributors.

🤑 A request for help

Maintainers have teeth and need to pay their dentists.
After getting laid off in an RIF in March, and encountering difficulty finding a new one,
I began spending most of my time building open source tools.
I’m hoping to be able to pay for my kids’ health insurance this month,
so if you value the work I am doing, I need your support.
Please consider sponsoring me or the project.

To join the community or get help 👇️ Join the Discord.

Live Chat on Discord

To say “thanks!” ☝️ Join the Discord or 👇️ send money.

Sponsor galtzo-floss/simple_column-scopes on Open Source Collective 💌 Sponsor me on GitHub Sponsors 💌 Sponsor me on Liberapay 💌 Donate on PayPal

Please give the project a star ⭐ ♥.

Thanks for RTFM. ☺️