Rake with namespaces and default tasks
Rake is an awesome tool to automate tasks for your Ruby (or Rails) application. In this short article I’ll show you how to use namespaces and set default tasks for them. ~ Let me first tell you what I want to accomplish. I have a Rails application that needs to be cleaned up occasionally. Essetially we delete old data from the database.
There are several models that each implement a cleanup!
method which
takes care of cleaning up data. Now all I need is a few rake tasks to
kick off the clean up process.
This is what I’d like:
rake cleanup # Cleanup everything
rake cleanup:clicks # Aggregate click stats
rake cleanup:logs # Clean old logs
Here’s what I put in lib/tasks/cleanup.rake
:
namespace :cleanup do
desc "Aggregate click stats"
task :clicks => :environment do
Click.cleanup!
end
desc "Clean old logs"
task :logs => :environment do
Log.cleanup!
end
task :all => [:clicks, :logs]
end
desc "Cleanup everything"
task :cleanup => 'cleanup:all'
Notice that the cleanup:all
task does not have a description. Without
it, it won’t show up when you do a rake -T
to view available tasks.
The task cleanup
has the same name as the namespace and calls the
(undocumentend) cleanup:all
task, kicking off the entire cleanup
process.