Rake Task Management Essentials

Deploy, test, and build software to solve real-world automation challenges using Rake

Overview

• Solve real-world automation challenges with human readable code.
• Build or deploy an application package quickly.
• Easy-to-follow instructions to speed up tasks and manage them efficiently.

In Detail

Rake is a build automation tool written in Ruby. It allows you to specify tasks and describe dependencies as well as group tasks in a namespace. Rake uses Ruby’s anonymous function blocks to define various tasks, allowing the use of the Ruby syntax. Rake’s goal is to automate build processes quickly and expressively.

“Rake Task Management Essentials” is a practical guide that covers the latest techniques in building, testing, and debugging rake tasks to solve real-world automation challenges. The book starts with a basic knowledge of Rake, allowing you to solve repetitive tasks. Then it provides you with information about processes performed with fi les, which is crucial for understanding the application of the tool. It includes demonstrations to show you how tasks can be run in parallel and how they can be applied in practice. Thereafter, it integrates Rake with Ruby with the help of simple and clear examples. By the end of this book, you will know how Rake has changed the programming world, especially in the Ruby community.

What you will learn from this book

• Use the rake command-line tool efficiently
• Learn Rake’s language to write clear custom tasks
• Run tasks in parallel to speed up the overall runtime of the tasks used
• Work with file transformations to manage file tasks
• Refactor a Rake project with the rules, prerequisites, and other technical features built into Rake tools
• Configure a scheduler to run recurring tasks on a server
• Configure continuous integration with Rake using a Jenkins example
• Integrate Rake with the Rails web framework to write Rails-specific rake tasks

Approach

A step-by-step and interactive approach explaining the Rake essentials along with code examples and advanced features.

Who this book is written for

If you are a developer who is acquainted with the Ruby language and want to speed up writing the code concerned with fi les, then this book is for you. To start reading this book, a basic knowledge of Ruby is required; however, an extensive experience with the language is not necessary.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Software Task Management Tool – Rake
Chapter 2: Working with Files
Chapter 3: Working with Rules
Chapter 4: Cleaning Up a Build
Chapter 5: Running Tasks in Parallel
Chapter 6: Debugging Rake Tasks
Chapter 7: Integration with Rails
Chapter 8: Testing Rake Tasks
Chapter 9: Continuous Integration
Chapter 10: Relentless Automation