How to pass command line arguments to a rake task
If you want to pass named arguments (e.g. with standard OptionParser
) you could use something like this:
$ rake user:create -- --user [email protected] --pass 123
note the --
, that's necessary for bypassing standard Rake arguments. Should work with Rake 0.9.x, <= 10.3.x.
Newer Rake has changed its parsing of --
, and now you have to make sure it's not passed to the OptionParser#parse
method, for example with parser.parse!(ARGV[2..-1])
require 'rake'
require 'optparse'
# Rake task for creating an account
namespace :user do |args|
desc 'Creates user account with given credentials: rake user:create'
# environment is required to have access to Rails models
task :create do
options = {}
OptionParser.new(args) do |opts|
opts.banner = "Usage: rake user:create [options]"
opts.on("-u", "--user {username}","User's email address", String) do |user|
options[:user] = user
end
opts.on("-p", "--pass {password}","User's password", String) do |pass|
options[:pass] = pass
end
end.parse!
puts "creating user account..."
u = Hash.new
u[:email] = options[:user]
u[:password] = options[:pass]
# with some DB layer like ActiveRecord:
# user = User.new(u); user.save!
puts "user: " + u.to_s
puts "account created."
exit 0
end
end
exit
at the end will make sure that the extra arguments won't be interpreted as Rake task.
Also the shortcut for arguments should work:
rake user:create -- -u [email protected] -p 123
When rake scripts look like this, maybe it's time to look for another tool that would allow this just out of box.
Options and dependencies need to be inside arrays:
namespace :thing do
desc "it does a thing"
task :work, [:option, :foo, :bar] do |task, args|
puts "work", args
end
task :another, [:option, :foo, :bar] do |task, args|
puts "another #{args}"
Rake::Task["thing:work"].invoke(args[:option], args[:foo], args[:bar])
# or splat the args
# Rake::Task["thing:work"].invoke(*args)
end
end
Then
rake thing:work[1,2,3]
=> work: {:option=>"1", :foo=>"2", :bar=>"3"}
rake thing:another[1,2,3]
=> another {:option=>"1", :foo=>"2", :bar=>"3"}
=> work: {:option=>"1", :foo=>"2", :bar=>"3"}
NOTE: variable
task
is the task object, not very helpful unless you know/care about Rake internals.
RAILS NOTE:
If running the task from Rails, it's best to preload the environment by adding
=> [:environment]
which is a way to setup dependent tasks.
task :work, [:option, :foo, :bar] => [:environment] do |task, args|
puts "work", args
end
In addition to answer by kch (I didn't find how to leave a comment to that, sorry):
You don't have to specify variables as ENV
variables before the rake
command. You can just set them as usual command line parameters like that:
rake mytask var=foo
and access those from your rake file as ENV variables like such:
p ENV['var'] # => "foo"
You can specify formal arguments in rake by adding symbol arguments to the task call. For example:
require 'rake'
task :my_task, [:arg1, :arg2] do |t, args|
puts "Args were: #{args} of class #{args.class}"
puts "arg1 was: '#{args[:arg1]}' of class #{args[:arg1].class}"
puts "arg2 was: '#{args[:arg2]}' of class #{args[:arg2].class}"
end
task :invoke_my_task do
Rake.application.invoke_task("my_task[1, 2]")
end
# or if you prefer this syntax...
task :invoke_my_task_2 do
Rake::Task[:my_task].invoke(3, 4)
end
# a task with prerequisites passes its
# arguments to it prerequisites
task :with_prerequisite, [:arg1, :arg2] => :my_task #<- name of prerequisite task
# to specify default values,
# we take advantage of args being a Rake::TaskArguments object
task :with_defaults, :arg1, :arg2 do |t, args|
args.with_defaults(:arg1 => :default_1, :arg2 => :default_2)
puts "Args with defaults were: #{args}"
end
Then, from the command line:
> rake my_task[1,false] Args were: {:arg1=>"1", :arg2=>"false"} of class Rake::TaskArguments arg1 was: '1' of class String arg2 was: 'false' of class String > rake "my_task[1, 2]" Args were: {:arg1=>"1", :arg2=>"2"} > rake invoke_my_task Args were: {:arg1=>"1", :arg2=>"2"} > rake invoke_my_task_2 Args were: {:arg1=>3, :arg2=>4} > rake with_prerequisite[5,6] Args were: {:arg1=>"5", :arg2=>"6"} > rake with_defaults Args with defaults were: {:arg1=>:default_1, :arg2=>:default_2} > rake with_defaults['x','y'] Args with defaults were: {:arg1=>"x", :arg2=>"y"}
As demonstrated in the second example, if you want to use spaces, the quotes around the target name are necessary to keep the shell from splitting up the arguments at the space.
Looking at the code in rake.rb, it appears that rake does not parse task strings to extract arguments for prerequisites, so you can't do task :t1 => "dep[1,2]"
. The only way to specify different arguments for a prerequisite would be to invoke it explicitly within the dependent task action, as in :invoke_my_task
and :invoke_my_task_2
.
Note that some shells (like zsh) require you to escape the brackets: rake my_task\['arg1'\]