Basics of Include and Extend in Ruby on Rails

Include is for adding methods to an instance of a class and extend is for adding class methods. Let’s take a look at a small example.

module Foo
  def foo
    puts 'heyyyyoooo!'
  end
end

class Bar
  include Foo
end

Bar.new.foo # heyyyyoooo!
Bar.foo # NoMethodError: undefined method ‘foo’ for Bar:Class

class Baz
  extend Foo
end

Baz.foo # heyyyyoooo!
Baz.new.foo # NoMethodError: undefined method ‘foo’ for # 

As you can see, include makes the foo method available to an instance of a class and extend makes the foo method available to the class itself.