Where to place private methods in Ruby?

The best practice in my point of view is to go sequentially and declare your methods without keeping private in point of view.

At the end, you can make make any method private by just adding: private :xmethod

Example:

class Example
 def xmethod
 end

 def ymethod
 end

 def zmethod 
 end

 private :xmethod, :zmethod

end

Does this justify your question?

There's also the option to prepend private to the method definition since Ruby 2.1.

class Example
 def xmethod
 end

 private def ymethod
 end

 private_class_method def self.zmethod 
 end
end

You can instantly see if a method is private, no matter where in the (large) file it is. And it's consistent with many other languages. But it's a bit more typing and doesn't nicely align.