How can I run Rake tasks more easily?

Question

Running Rake tasks can be awkward.

The commands tend to be really long.

For example...

$ bundle exec rake some_project:clear_expired_sessions

Also, I may not always remember the exact name of some task I only use occasionally.

So I have to discover task's name first like this and then copy and paste it into the command line...

$ bundle exec rake -T some_project

I'm using Zsh on OS X with oh-my-zsh and the Rake plugin.

It provides tab-completion of Rake tasks, but you still have to type " bund exec rake " the completions are really slow to load -- several seconds on my machine.

Is there a more efficient way?

Answer 1

You can always add an alias to your .bashrc or your .bash_profile to avoid bundle exec rake in the future.

alias rake='bundle exec rake'

Of course now bundle exec is implicated whenever you run rake , its up to you to decide if you want that.

or for project specific (lets say your project is rails_blog)

alias rkblog=railsblogtasks()
function railsblogtasks(){
  cd /path/to/blog/;
  bundle exec rake -T;
end

alias rkblogrun=runblogtask()
function runblogtask(){
  cd /path/to/blog/;
  bundle exec rake $1;
end

Now $ rkblog will show all your rails_blog tasks and $ rkblogrun <task> will run any task in your rails_blog project. This can of course be refactored and abstracted, but there is a general idea.

Answer 2

One quick simplication:

task :example_alias => :environment do
  Rake::Task[some_project:clear_expired_sessions].invoke
end

Then you can simply do

  $ rake example_alias