Arguments For Rake

Published 16 October 2008 by Farrel

Sometimes it pays to read the release notes. If I did that more often I would have known that as of Rake 0.8.0 it’s possible to pass arguments to rake tasks on the commandline. I first read about it in this article (via ruby.reddit.com) and applied it to the article I wrote previously on code generation. All it entailed was changing

1 task( :model_auto_rspec => 'sequel:merb_start' ) do
2   model_class = ENV['model']

to

1 task( :model_auto_rspec, :model , :needs  => 'sequel:merb_start') do |task, args|
2   model_class = args.model

and calling it from the command line like so

1 rake generate:model_auto_rspec[User]

Farrel Lifson is a lead developer at Aimred.