How do I make a Rake Task run after all other tasks? (i.e. a Rake AfterBuild task)

Question

I'm new to Rake and using it to build .net projects. What I'm interested in is having a Summary task that prints out a summary of what has been done. I want this task to always be called, no matter what tasks rake was invoked with.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

Thanks

---

Update on the question, responding to Patrick's answer what I want is the after task to run once after all other tasks, so the output I want is:

task :test1 do 
  puts 'test1'
end

task :test2 do 
  puts 'test2'
end

Rake::Task.tasks.each do |t|
    <Insert rake magic here>
#  t.enhance do 
#    puts 'after'
#  end
end

$ rake test1
test1
after

$rake test2
test2
after

$rake test1 test2  
test1
test2
after

and if

task :test3 =>[:test1, :test2]
   puts 'test3'
end

    $rake test3
test1
test2
test3
after

Even though the bounty is gone, any further help much appreciated. (Sadily I don't think that I can offer another bounty.)

Answer 1

Sounds like you are looking for an after_filter, like rails uses. Take a look at actionpack/lib/action_controller/filters.rb in Rails for a sample implementation you could try to adapt. Since a rake file is just ruby, you could include your version in your top level rakefile, and set an :after filter on all tasks.

Answer 2

I don't know if it's the best way but it's the simpler:

Make all your "public tasks" Summary ones that call real tasks.

task :compile => :realcompile do
   summary stuff
end

Answer 3

You should be able to do this with 'enhance':

Rake::Task["my_task"].enhance do
  Rake::Task["my_after_task"].invoke
end

This will cause 'my_after_task' to be invoked after 'my_task'.

If you want to apply this to all tasks, just loop over all the tasks and call enhance for each:

Rake::Task.tasks.each do |t| 
  t.enhance do 
    Rake::Task["my_after_task"].invoke
  end
end

Full test file:

task :test1 do 
  puts 'test1'
end

task :test2 do 
  puts 'test2'
end

Rake::Task.tasks.each do |t|
  t.enhance do 
    puts 'after'
  end
end

And the output:

$ rake test1
test1
after

$ rake test2
test2
after

Answer 4

Posting this as a new answer to keep the other one available. This is much less elegant as I have to get into the guts of Rake and manually update the task list, but it works.

task :test1 do
  puts 'test1'
end

task :test2 do 
  puts 'test2'
end

task :after do
  puts 'after'
end

# top_level_tasks is't writable so we need to do this ugly
# instance_variable_set hack...
current_tasks =  Rake.application.top_level_tasks
current_tasks << :after
Rake.application.instance_variable_set(:@top_level_tasks, current_tasks)

Outputs:

$ rake test1
test1
after

$ rake test1 test2
test1
test2
after

Answer 5

Apart from the ugly Rake.application.instance_variable_set, you can enhance the last task on the command-line like so:

  last_task = Rake.application.top_level_tasks.last
  Rake::Task[last_task].enhance do
    puts 'after'
  end

That should do exactly what you need to do!