Ruby Pocket Reference

Rake

A build tool helps you build, compile, or otherwise process files, sometimes large numbers of them. Rake is a build tool like make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make) and Apache ant (http://ant.apache.org), but it is written in Ruby. It is used by Ruby many applications, not just Rails. Rails operations use Rake frequently, so it is worth mentioning here.

Rake uses a Rakefile to figure out what to do. A Rakefile contains named tasks. When you create a Rails project, a Rakefile is automatically created to help you deal with a variety of jobs, such as running tests and looking at project statistics. (After creating a Rails project with one of the tutorials below, while in the main Rails project directory, run rake --tasks or rails stats to get a flavor of what Rake does.)

Rake was written by Jim Weirich (http://onestepback.org). You’ll find documentation on Rake at http://rake.rubyforge.org. Additionally, you’ll find a good introduction to Rake, by Martin Fowler, at http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/rake.html.

Check to see whether Rake is present:

$ rake --version
rake, version 0.7.2

If this command fails, use RubyGems to install Rake, as shown in the previous section.

To run Rake help, type:

$ rake --help

Usage:

rake [-f rakefile] {options} targets...

Options:

--classic-namespace (-C)

Put Task and FileTask in the top-level namespace.

--dry-run (-n)

Do a dry run without executing actions.

--help (-H)

Display this help message.

--libdir=LIBDIR (-I)

Include LIBDIR in the search path for required ...