[ACCEPTED]-What exactly is Rake?-rake

Accepted answer

Score: 78

These answers assume you know what a DSL 15 is, or are familiar with Make or Ant. If 14 that's not the case, here's a (perhaps grossly 13 oversimplified answer):

Rake is a tool you can 12 use with Ruby projects. It allows you to use 11 ruby code to define "tasks" that 10 can be run in the command line.

Rake can 9 be downloaded and included in ruby projects as a ruby gem.

Once 8 installed, you define tasks in a file named 7 "Rakefile" that you add to your project.

We 6 call it a "build tool" because 5 Rake comes with some libraries that make 4 it easy to do tasks that are common during 3 the build/deploy process, like file operations (creating, deleting, renaming, & moving 2 files), publishing sites via FTP/SSH, and running tests.

For 1 more information, here's the project documentation: http://rake.rubyforge.org/

Score: 54

Try Martin Fowler's article on Rake for 13 more information:

http://martinfowler.com/articles/rake.html

His pre-amble is:

Rake is 12 a build language, similar in purpose to 11 make and ant. Like make and ant it's a 10 Domain Specific Language, unlike those 9 two it's an internal DSL programmed in 8 the Ruby language. In this article I introduce 7 rake and describe some interesting things 6 that came out of my use of rake to build this 5 web site: dependency models, synthesized 4 tasks, custom build routines and debugging 3 the build script.

There is more information 2 available on or linked from the project's 1 home page as well:

http://rake.rubyforge.org/

Score: 12

Rake is an implementation of dependency-based declarative programming in the Ruby Programming Language. Basically, Rake 3 is to Ruby what Make is to C, with the notable 2 difference, that Make is an external DSL, while 1 Rake is an internal DSL.

Score: 11

Rake lets you execute Ruby code through 3 a nice namespace api. An example is rake 2 db:migrate. You can run tasks automatically 1 before and after other tasks. That is all.

Source: stackoverflow.com

[ACCEPTED]-What exactly is Rake?-rake

How do I use helpers in rake?

How do I pass environmental variables to a Rake task invoked from another Rake task?

Rails rake db:migrate doesn't work: nothing happens

Running Rake tasks in Rspec Tests

Generating release notes from git commits

Running Ruby unit tests with Rake

Is rake db:migrate the correct command to re-sync schema.rb with your database schema?

NoMethodError: undefined method `last_comment' after upgrading to rake 11

How can I stop Heroku Dyno that is running a Rails task through Heroku Scheduler?

Create seed file from data already in the database