Is there a way to call a private Class method from an instance in Ruby?

Let me contribute to this list of more or less strange solutions and non-solutions:

puts RUBY_VERSION # => 2.1.2

class C
  class << self
    private def foo
      'Je suis foo'
    end
  end

  private define_method :foo, &method(:foo)

  def bar
    foo
  end
end

puts C.new.bar # => Je suis foo
puts C.new.foo # => NoMethodError

Nowadays you don't need the helper methods anymore. You can simply inline them with your method definition. This should feel very familiar to the Java folks:

class MyClass

  private_class_method def self.my_private_method
    puts "private class method"
  end

  private def my_private_method
    puts "private instance method"
  end

end

And no, you cannot call a private class method from an instance method. However, you could instead implement the the private class method as public class method in a private nested class instead, using the private_constant helper method. See this blogpost for more detail.

Here is a code snippet to go along with the question. Using "private" in a class definition does not apply to class methods. You need to use "private_class_method" as in the following example.

class Foo
  def self.private_bar
    # Complex logic goes here
    puts "hi"
  end
  private_class_method :private_bar
  class <<self
    private
    def another_private_bar
      puts "bar"
    end
  end
  public
  def instance_bar
    self.class.private_bar
  end
  def instance_bar2
    self.class.another_private_bar
  end
end

f=Foo.new
f=instance_bar # NoMethodError: private method `private_bar' called for Foo:Class
f=instance_bar2 # NoMethodError: private method `another_private_bar' called for Foo:Class

I don't see a way to get around this. The documentation says that you cannot specify the receive of a private method. Also you can only access a private method from the same instance. The class Foo is a different object than a given instance of Foo.

Don't take my answer as final. I'm certainly not an expert, but I wanted to provide a code snippet so that others who attempt to answer will have properly private class methods.