Using Rake or Gem for building scripts?

Question

I want to build scripts that automatize things for me.

Here is an example of what I want to do:

• Create new rails app (rails new application_name --database=mysql)
• Jump to folder
• Initialize git (git init; git add .; git commit -m "first commit"; git remote add name address; git push name master)
• Create heroku project (heroku create; git push heroku master)
• Etc...

I've got a lot of such scripts (not just rails related) I want to build.

Should these kind of steps be coded with Rake or Gem?

From what I have understood rake is usually getting the tasks from the current folder's Rakefile. If i want to make operations universal, is it better to create a gem?

The thing is that I want to be able to call it from whatever directory I'm in.

What are the pros and cons with each?

Answer 1

You should be using rake tasks for this stuff. Bates has a screencast showing how to accomplish what your trying to get done. Basically you create a custom task and after you can call rake my_task and it will execute your script.

Answer 2

Going with rake or a gem is fine. If you want to centralize your rake tasks (assuming you are on OSX or Some Linux/*nix variant) you can create them in your home directory:

~/.rake/*.rake

Rake will look there for tasks to run if in a directory w/ no Rakefile.

Also, consider (again, if you are on some sort of *nix platform) just creating shell aliases to your commands.

Edit:

Another consideration specific to your Rails work is to leverage Application Templates. Here is a link to a good screencast.

Answer 3

Some of what you want could be accomplished with shell aliases, some with gems, some with rake.

Using Brian's suggestion, I added the following to ~/.rake/git.rake:

namespace :git do
  desc "Init, add, initial commit"
  task :init do
    `git init .`
    `git add .`
    `git commit -m 'Initial commit'`
  end
end

Then in any directory I can run "rake git:init" and it will do all the intial setup. The remote add is a little harder because the remote name would be a variable (could be provided via a shell variable or a Readline prompt).

For creating a rails app, I'd add an alias to ~/.bash_profile:

alias new_mysql="rails new $ARGV --database=mysql"

Then run "new_mysql myRailsProject".

For the most part I would think just running a bunch of command line scripts would be a shell alias rather than a Rake task.