Background:
I'm building a Sinatra app with the orientdb gem, and I'm working on making a couple basic rake tasks, so that people using OrientDB and ruby can have access to database tasks like activerecord has. But since I'm not using Rails, I don't have railties and personally, I'd rather not have to require the files of all the tasks I could have access to inside the Rakefile.
Solution:
I patched Rake::Application, so that it would discover any and all tasks inside of the folder 'tasks' inside your gems load_paths. The cool thing about this is that it could make the need to have tasks inside a railtie absolutely unnecessary, because rake would find them for you anyway. The only requirement this introduces aside from a changed directory structure is Bundler.
I know gems currently don't necessarily use this format for placing their rake tasks, but if gems placed their tasks in [load_path]/tasks then non-rails users could access the great rake tasks they contain. [Update - new patch now finds all tasks in all load path directories, so there's no need to put the tasks in a specific folder.]
If you want to add the patch to your rake so that you can start using custom rake tasks in your own gems and discover all other tasks that your gems allow you to use, the code is below.
[UPDATE - Until the time when rake accepts the patch, you can now use the gem I made. In your Rakefile, just do the following. Railties are now unnecessary!]
====
#Rakefile
require 'rake'
require 'alltasks'
====
That's it!
The code for the rake patch:
###
# We are replacing Rake::Application.raw_load_rakefile
# This will be in lib/rake.rb for people that installed it via gem and in lib/rake/application.rb for people that have the repository
###
def raw_load_rakefile # :nodoc:
rakefile, location = find_rakefile_location
if (! options.ignore_system) &&
(options.load_system || rakefile.nil?) &&
system_dir && File.directory?(system_dir)
puts "(in #{Dir.pwd})" unless options.silent
glob("#{system_dir}/*.rake") do |name|
add_import name
end
else
fail "No Rakefile found (looking for: #{@rakefiles.join(', ')})" if
rakefile.nil?
@rakefile = rakefile
Dir.chdir(location)
puts "(in #{Dir.pwd})" unless options.silent
$rakefile = @rakefile if options.classic_namespace
load File.expand_path(@rakefile) if @rakefile && @rakefile != ''
options.rakelib.each do |rlib|
glob("#{rlib}/*.rake") do |name|
add_import name
end
end
end
####
# New Code
####
# load gem rake files if Bundler is defined
if defined?(Bundler)
Bundler.load.specs.each do |spec|
#look for tasks in the gem's load paths
spec.load_paths.each do |load_path|
if File.directory?(load_path)
Dir.foreach(load_path) do |path|
check_dir = File.join(load_path, path)
if File.directory?(check_dir)
glob("#{check_dir}/**/*.rake") do |name|
add_import name
end
end
end
end
end
end
end
####
# End New Code
####
load_imports
end
