Rake: Calling tasks with arguments in default task

Question

I have been playing around with Rake and Albacore, to see if I can replace our existing MSBuild script that deploys software with something that isn't XML. I have a task that will change the debug value inside a web.config to false. The task takes the directory of the web.config as an argument, but I can't quite figure out the syntax needed to supply this argument in the default task.

require 'albacore'
require 'nokogiri'

deployment_path = "c:\\test-mars-deploy"

task :default => [ :buildMARS, :publishMARS, :updatewebconfig ['c:\\test-mars-deploy']]

msbuild :buildMARS do |msb|
  msb.solution = "MARS/MARS.sln"
  msb.targets :clean, :build
  msb.properties :configuration => :release
end

task :updatewebconfig, :deploypath do |t, args|  
  deployment_path = #{args[:deploypath]}
  webconfig_path = deployment_path + "/Web.config"

  f = File.open(webconfig_path, "r+")
  doc = Nokogiri::XML(f)
  puts "finding attribute"
  attribute = doc.xpath("/configuration/system.web/compilation")
  attribute.attr("debug","false")
  puts attribute.to_xml

  f.close()

  File.delete(webconfig_path)

  fi = File.new(webconfig_path, "w")
  fi.write(doc.to_s)
  fi.close()
end

msbuild :publishMARS do |msb|
  msb.targets :ResolveReferences, :_CopyWebApplication
  msb.properties(
    :configuration => :release, 
    :webprojectoutputdir => deployment_path,
    :outdir => deployment_path + "/bin/"
  )
  msb.solution = "MARS/MARS.vbproj"
end

I'm pretty sure there's an easy solution to this, but I can't seem to figure it out!

Answer 1

basically, you name your args as extra symbols after the name of the task. an args param will get passed into the block that responds to the name of your args, and you can invoke the task passing the args in square brackets ([])

ree-1.8.7-2010.02@rails3 matt@Zion:~/setup$ cat lib/tasks/blah.rake 
task :blah, :n do |t, args|
  puts args.n
end
ree-1.8.7-2010.02@rails3 matt@Zion:~/setup$ rake blah[20]
(in /home/matt/setup)
20

Answer 2

I think you might have to use the old style parameter passing, eg:

nicholas@hal:/tmp$ cat Rakefile
task :default => :all

deploy_path = ENV['deploy_path'] || "c:/some_path"

task :all do |t, args|
    puts deploy_path.inspect
end

And invoke with:

nicholas@hal:/tmp$ rake
(in /tmp)
"c:/some_path"

Or, to override the path:

nicholas@hal:/tmp$ rake deploy_path=c:/other_path
(in /tmp)
"c:/other_path"