Rake (Software)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Rake is a software task management tool. It allows you to specify tasks and describe dependencies as well as to group tasks in a namespace. It is similar to SCons and make, but has a number of differences. The tool is written in the Ruby programming language, and the Rakefiles (equivalent of Makefiles in make) use Ruby syntax. It was originated by Jim Weirich. Rake uses Ruby's anonymous function blocks to define various tasks, allowing the use of the Ruby syntax. It has a library of common tasks: for example, functions to do common file-manipulation tasks and a library to remove compiled files (the "clean" task). Like Make, Rake can also synthesize tasks based on patterns (for example, automatically building a file compilation task based on filename patterns). Rake is now part of the standard library from Ruby version 1.9.