Jonathan Gnagy's Blog

I’ve heard people say great things Apache Ant and old faithful make, but I haven’t heard enough people talking about how wonderful rake is to work with. I’ve used rake for many simple and complex tasks, from importing YAML files into a Rails project, to managing LDAP users. Rake offers the full power of Ruby, but still offers a fairly simple DSL.

Here’s an excellent railscast about rake: http://railscasts.com/episodes/66-custom-rake-tasks.

Here’s some code that demonstrates creating a simple rake task:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

task :mkdirs do
  # Let's create some directories
  ["lib", "conf", "src"].each do |dir|
    Dir.mkdirs(dir) unless File.directory?(dir)
  end
end

# This task requires the 'mkdirs' task
task :copy_source => :mkdirs do
  require 'ftools'
  # Copy the source into the src directory...
  ["main.rb", "classes.rb"].each do |file|
    File.copy("/path/to/sources/#{file}", "src/#{file}")
  end
end

These two simple tasks create some directories and copy some source files. It also demonstrates task dependencies and pure Ruby file operations.