Dealing with the lifecycle of a Tempfile

When dealing with Tempfiles in Ruby it's important to remember that when a tempfile object gets deallocated, the referenced file gets deleted as well.

require 'tempfile'

def foo
  Tempfile.new.path
end

path = foo # => "/tmp/20210723-30107-1h52x7" 

# Soon after:

File.exists?(path) # => true

# But wait for it..

File.exists?(path) # => false 

Comments

[Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴]

Correct. Once I needed to use Tempfile because was dealing with files in docker containers. To prevent losing the file I set it up to make a copy to a designated folder so that the process could finish with no risk of losing the file.