Rakefiles are like makefiles, but for ruby. Makefiles basically set up a bunch of tasks that you use all the time in development.

The main advantage of rakefiles is if you use ruby all the time - it's easier to code things up in ruby than in shell script. And because my brain is influenced by what I did as a teenager, that makes it the easiest thing for me to quickly spin up build tooling in.

Notes and recipes

Give one task multiple names

• See: Alias of task name in rake - StackOverflow.

Let's say I want rake edit and rake show to do the same thing. Or perhaps I want rake e to be a shortcut for rake edit.

If you don't care about arguments, you can do this with prerequisites:

task :edit do
  # Whatever you need to do here
end

task :e => :edit

If you do care about arguments, it's a bit harder:

task :edit, [:par1, :par2] do |task, args|
  # Do stuff with args here
end

task :e, [:par1, :par2] => :edit

And here's some code stolen from the above StackOverflow thread which compresses this into a method:

def alias_task(name, old_name)
  t = Rake::Task[old_name]
  desc t.full_comment if t.full_comment
  task name, *t.arg_names do |_, args|
    # values_at is broken on Rake::TaskArguments
    args = t.arg_names.map { |a| args[a] }
    t.invoke(args)
  end
end

Namespaces

namespace "main" do
  task :build do
    # Build the program...
  end
end

Can be accessed with rake main:build.