Temporary Directories in Ruby

Ruby's Tempfile allows you to create temporary files, but what if you want to create temporary directories.

Dir#mktmpdir provides that functionality but with a caveat: if you pass a block to it, the directory will be automatically removed when the block finished, otherwise you have to clean up the directory yourself.

require 'fileutils'
require 'tmpdir'    # needed to mix-in the mktmpdir method

begin
  temp_dir = Dir.mktmpdir('my_temp_dir')
  # do some work
ensure
  FileUtils.remove_entry temp_dir
end