I’m increasingly using rake files for common system tasks. Since Rake
will search up a directory tree until it finds a Rakefile, I can have
one in my home directory and call tasks from anyplace below that.
But tasks that need to know something about the current directory have
me stymied. Calling Dir.pwd in a task reflects the directory of the
Rakefile.
Is there a rake method that returns the path of where the Rakefile
search began?
E.g., if I’m in /home/james/foo/bar, and the nearest Rakefile is in
/home/james, with task :whereami, and I call
$ rake whereami
what does :whereami have to do to return ‘/home/james/foo/bar’ ?
E.g., if I’m in /home/james/foo/bar, and the nearest Rakefile is in
/home/james, with task :whereami, and I call
$ rake whereami
what does :whereami have to do to return ‘/home/james/foo/bar’ ?
No idea. One possible solution is to put a “stub” rakefile in the dir,
and the stub requires the main rakefile. Then (IIRC) the pwd during the
rake tasks will be that of the stub. But maybe you don’t want to scatter
stubs all over the place.
E.g., if I’m in /home/james/foo/bar, and the nearest Rakefile is in
/home/james, with task :whereami, and I call
$ rake whereami
what does :whereami have to do to return ‘/home/james/foo/bar’ ?
Thanks!
Modify rake to log the initial working directory before doing anything
else. You could do this by putting the line to log the dir in the file
bin/rake. Take advantage of ruby’s openness.
Alternatively, you could put a file in a dir on your PATH (let’s say
rake2) to log the dir and then delegate to rake, and just call rake2
instead of rake from the command line.
Modify rake to log the initial working directory before doing anything
else. You could do this by putting the line to log the dir in the file
bin/rake. Take advantage of ruby’s openness.
I’ve hacked ruby apps in this manner before, but they are prone to “gem
update <name_of_gem>” stomping.
So any mods to rake itself have to happen via by a plugin that will
survive library updates.
Alternatively, you could put a file in a dir on your PATH (let’s say
rake2) to log the dir and then delegate to rake, and just call rake2
instead of rake from the command line.
Too hackish, even for me. I’d rather see about a cleaner way for any
arbitrary rake task to know the initial calling directory.
–
James B.
“I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion
out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be
solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!”
Alternatively, you could put a file in a dir on your PATH (let’s say
rake2) to log the dir and then delegate to rake, and just call rake2
instead of rake from the command line.
I’ve tried that out, and it works quite well.
I had already aliased ‘r’ to ‘rake’ to save tying those extra three
characters. I now have a real script ‘r’ (well, “r.rb”, which is now
the new r alias):
No idea. One possible solution is to put a “stub” rakefile in the dir,
and the stub requires the main rakefile. Then (IIRC) the pwd during the
rake tasks will be that of the stub. But maybe you don’t want to scatter
stubs all over the place.
Right, that’s the whole point. For example, I have a Rake task that
will do an svn commit. I’ve also aliased rake to r , so I can do this
to commit code:
$ r com This is my log message
and the :com task knows how to grab the message, do the commit, and run
a few other things (like svn status to alert if I missed adding any new
files).
Very handy, except as at stands, the invoked rake file thinks everything
happens relative where it lives, so I have to create a Rakefile
everyplace I want to use a location-Dependant task.
(Someone else mentioned using a “rake2” delegate; since I’m already
using ‘r’ as my rake invocation, maybe having a real r.rb that stores
the calling directory in ENV might work. That rake tasks that need the
caller dir can look for the value in ENV; these tasks could then assume
a default dir if this environment variable is empty.)
–
James B.
“I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion
out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be
solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!”
I’m increasingly using rake files for common system tasks. Since Rake
will search up a directory tree until it finds a Rakefile, I can have
one in my home directory and call tasks from anyplace below that.
But tasks that need to know something about the current directory have
me stymied. Calling Dir.pwd in a task reflects the directory of the
Rakefile.
Is there a rake method that returns the path of where the Rakefile
search began?
E.g., if I’m in /home/james/foo/bar, and the nearest Rakefile is in
/home/james, with task :whereami, and I call
$ rake whereami
what does :whereami have to do to return ‘/home/james/foo/bar’ ?
even calling ARGV.clear doesn’t help.
Sadly, more typing that what you have, but it works with rake instead of
against it.
why did you choose to use environment vars here. isn’t that sort of
like using globals? also, these don’t work in my case becuase i can’t
differentiate the env vars set by rake from the “real” env vars.
why did you choose to use environment vars here. isn’t that sort of
like using globals? also, these don’t work in my case becuase i can’t
differentiate the env vars set by rake from the “real” env vars.
The fact they look like environment variables is delibrate. This allows
you to pass information to Rake via environment variables or by command
line and Rake doesn’t care. You can put a default value in your
environment and then easily override it on the command line. It is also
the way that the original make program worked.
Inside of your Rakefile, ENV[‘MSG’] will contain your log message.
Sadly, more typing that what you have, but it works with rake
instead of
against it.
why did you choose to use environment vars here. isn’t that sort of
like using globals? also, these don’t work in my case becuase i can’t
differentiate the env vars set by rake from the “real” env vars.
Sure you can. Just introduce a little pragmatic namespacing:
I had looked for such a method in ri and the Rake rdocs, but saw nothing
that looked like what I wanted.
$ ri Rake
------------------------------------------------------------ Class: Rake
(no description…)
I could not find the originaL_dir method listed in the rdoc either,
until I walked through the source code.
Because of the way this method is defined it Rake, rdoc will not
correctly process it as a class method on Rake itself:
in lib/rake.rb
class << self
# Current Rake Application
def application @application ||= Rake::Application.new
end
# Set the current Rake application object.
def application=(app)
@application = app
end
# Return the original directory where the Rake application was
# started.
def original_dir
application.original_dir
end
end
And in the rdoc for Rake::Application, the method is not listed in the
list of methods because it gets rdoc’ed as an “attribute”.
One has to already know where to look, and what to look for, to find the
behavior.
–
James B.
“I never dispute another person’s delusions, just their facts.”
)
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