ClosureTree/closure_tree

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1944 stars · 248 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A Ruby gem that lets ActiveRecord models act as nodes in a tree data structure using the closure table pattern. It provides highly efficient single-query reads and writes for hierarchical data like tags, threaded comments, and CMS page graphs.

Use cases

• store hierarchical data like tags or categories in Rails
• model threaded comments with parent-child relationships
• fetch all descendants of a node in one query
• find or create a node by its ancestry path
• render tree structures as nested hashes or Graphviz DOT format
• manage user referral hierarchies

When to choose

• you use ActiveRecord 7.2+ and need performant tree queries
• you need fast ancestor/descendant/sibling lookups in a single SELECT
• you need concurrency-safe hierarchy mutations
• you want STI support within a hierarchy

When to avoid

• you are not using Ruby on Rails or ActiveRecord
• you need support for ActiveRecord versions older than 7.2
• your hierarchy is shallow and simple enough for a basic parent_id column
• you use a database other than MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite

Facets

library · maturity active

orm database data-science databases web-development developer-tools ruby jvm activerecord closure-table tree-structure hierarchy rails nested-hashes ancestry nested-set

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