rake_snippets.md

Rake Snippets

This file contains snippets of rake files that have proven useful over the years. The are listed here, together for ease of copy and pasting where needed.

Tests

The standard unit test suite:

require 'rake/testtask'

#Run the Fibonacci unit test suite.
Rake::TestTask.new do |t|
  #List out all the test files.
  t.test_files = FileList['tests/**/*.rb']
  t.verbose = false
  t.warning = true
end

The test suite is accessed via:

$ rake test

Sometimes there are tests that you'd like to still have, but not run as part of the standard unit tests. The following example shows a series of tests called integration tests:

#Run the fOOrth integration test suite.
Rake::TestTask.new(:integration) do |t|
  #List out all the integration test files.
  t.test_files = FileList['integration/*.rb']
  t.verbose = false
  t.warning = true
end

This example is accessed via:

$ rake integration

Alternate Test

The test environment includes a lot of wierd, funky stuff that sometimes gets in the way. The alternate test task runs tests with a minimum of extra baggage. This often helps a lot.

desc "Alternative test procedure"
task :alt_test do |t|
  here  = File.dirname(__FILE__)
  target = "#{here}/test/*.rb"
  puts "Target files = #{target}"
  puts

  block = "{|file| require file if File.basename(file) =~ /test/}"
  code  = "Dir['#{target}'].each #{block}"

  system "ruby -e\"#{code}\""
end

Documentation

require 'rdoc/task'

#Generate internal documentation with rdoc.
RDoc::Task.new do |rdoc|
  rdoc.rdoc_dir = "rdoc"

  #List out all the files to be documented.
  rdoc.rdoc_files.include("lib/**/*.rb", "license.txt", "README.md")

  #Make all access levels visible.
  rdoc.options << '--visibility' << 'private'
  #rdoc.options << '--verbose'
  #rdoc.options << '--coverage-report'

  #Set a title.
  #rdoc.options << '--title' << 'Title Goes Here'
end

This task is accessed via:

$ rake rdoc

Note: I am moving away from rdoc on the grounds that it is often distracting from understanding the code and is an extra maintenance burden and is often out of date and thus misleading.

Code Smells

The reek gem is a powerful tool for identifying areas of code that may be improved. This snippet run a scan on the code library and records the results:

desc "Run a scan for smelly code!"
task :reek do |t|
  `reek --no-color lib > reek.txt`
end

Run this via:

$ rake reek

Note that the output is directed toward the file reek.txt without any fancy colorization or other special effects. This is part of my workflow in that I prefer to have a record of code smells at various points in the development and saving results to a text file makes it easy to version control the smell reports as the project progresses.

Debug/Test Console

Now there are several ways to run an irb console from rake, with test code "preloaded". There are also a number of problems with this. The most severe is that rake really seems to mess up the console. The long and short of it that rake should be used for batch tasks, not interactive ones. Here is my workaround to this issue:

desc "Run an IRB Session with fibonacci_rng loaded."
task :console do
  system "ruby irbt.rb local"
end

Now irbt.rb is a file that resides along with the rakefile.rb file. Here is an example of this file for the fibonacci_rng mentioned above:

# coding: utf-8
# An IRB + fibonacci_rng Test bed

require 'irb'

puts "Starting an IRB console with fibonacci_rng loaded."

if ARGV[0] == 'local'
  require_relative 'lib/fibonacci_rng'
  puts "fibonacci_rng loaded locally: #{FibonacciRng::VERSION}"

  ARGV.shift
else
  require 'fibonacci_rng'
  puts "fibonacci_rng loaded from gem: #{FibonacciRng::VERSION}"
end

IRB.start

This is accessed via:

$ rake console

And yes, bundler uses a different approach, but I cannot use it since it uses bash scripts to get things working.

Versions

A tiny, useful task simply identifies the version that would be built next.

desc "What version of the Fibonacci is this?"
task :vers do |t|
  puts
  puts "Fibonacci random number generator version = #{FibonacciRng::VERSION}"
end

This code only works because the bundler adds require "bundler/gem_tasks" at the top of the rakefile. Otherwise you'll have to require_relative the appropriate file on your own.

This task is accessed via:

$ rake vers