Use inverse_of when creating associations with non-standard naming

I have two models ‘Customer’ and ‘GreenPencil’.

A customer can have many green pencils. But, as far as the customer is concerned, these are just pencils. It makes sense for me to call the relationship that.

I first establish that a green pencil belongs to a customer.

class GreenPencil < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :customer, required: true
  #...

Now, when I establish the other side of the relationship (remember, each GreenPencil has a foreign key pointing to its Customer) I can do this:

class Customer < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :pencils,
           class_name: 'GreenPencil',
           inverse_of: :customer

I’m telling Rails that a Customer has many pencils, the associated class is GreenPencil and that this relationship is the other side of GreenPencil’s relationship with a customer that I established at the start.

Rails usually sets inverse_of on all associations itself. However, because the class name differs from the association name, we need to specifiy it explicitly.

Rails will infer the inverse relationship if we set foreign_key but I think inverse_of is clearer to the reader.