Ruby is famously extensible: open classes, included, inherited and such, TracePoint, and more. Yet when it comes to intercepting the process of loading (or requiring) source code, we're left without a standard mechanism to do so.

Transpilers, load flow analyzers, runtime type checkers—all of these could benefit from having a standard API for hijacking require calls. What if we had one? Actually, we do.

Let me introduce the require-hooks gem, which brings a universal interface for intercepting require (and load) calls in Ruby, allowing you to perform source transformations and more.