What is a Rakefile?

Question

I have started learning Ruby and just tried out my first hello world program in NetBeans IDE. I have one doubt, I can see that the new project wizard created set of package structure. It had one "Rakefile" in it. What does that mean and what is the use of it?

Sainthood

As a follow-up, you may find these resources helpful: - Using the Rake Build Language - rake (there are good links here to additional tutorials or webcasts) - Basic Rake (video of a talk by Jim Weirich) - Power Rake (video of a talk by Jim Weirich) Jim was the creator and maintainer of Rake before his death in 2014. – Removable

Answer 1

It is an alternative to Makefile with Ruby syntax.

Abradant

What is a Makefile? – Centistere

Answer 2

I've been using a rake file to manually kick off a call in the code to import various config files.

My rake file "import_contracts.rake" has the following code:

require 'yaml'

task :import_choice_contracts => :environment do
  desc 'Import Choice Contracts for Contract Service'
  path = "/Users/ernst.r/Desktop/import_contract.yml"
  PhiDao::Contract::Service.import_contract_from_file(path)
end

This rake task calls the "import_contract_from_file()" method and passes it the path to a file to import. Once the server is running I use the command "rake import_choice_contracts". Its great for testing my code while I still don't have a GUI frontend to call the completed code in the backend.

Fissh

Wedge