stefankroes/ancestry

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

3880 stars · 473 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A Ruby gem that organizes Rails ActiveRecord models into tree (hierarchical) structures using the materialized path pattern. It stores the ancestor chain in a single column, enabling efficient single-query traversal of ancestors, descendants, siblings, and children without extra tables.

Use cases

• organize ActiveRecord models into a tree hierarchy
• query ancestors and descendants of a record efficiently
• build category or comment nesting in Rails
• manage parent-child relationships in a single database table
• move nodes in a hierarchy without rewriting the whole tree
• add depth caching and counter caches to hierarchical data

When to choose

• you use Rails/ActiveRecord and need hierarchical data in an existing table
• you want fast single-query tree reads with a btree index
• you want to avoid extra join tables for tree storage
• you need STI support or orphan-handling strategies for tree nodes

When to avoid

• you use a non-Ruby ORM or non-ActiveRecord stack
• you need graph structures with many-to-many relationships rather than trees
• you prefer adjacency-list or nested-set patterns with existing tooling
• your project does not use a relational database supported by ActiveRecord

Facets

library · maturity stable

orm database developer-tools databases web-development backend developer-tools ruby jvm activerecord rails tree-structure hierarchy materialized-path gem

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