Question

Eventually I would like to get to setting it up as a Rake task and do a cron job, but for right now…all I want to do is take my ruby script that used to work as a standalone script and have it work within my Rails app.

I renamed the file to be .rake instead of .rb and tried doing rake my_script at the command-line, but that gave me this error message:

rake aborted!
Don't know how to build task 'my_script'

(See full trace by running task with --trace)

How do I run this script within my Rails environment?

This is the first time I am doing something like this, so any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The primary difference between a runner and a rake task is : runner would boot rails while rake task doesn’t (you can tell it to do so).

Since rake can do both (boot/no boot), there’s no concept of runner in rails-3 anymore.

So, create a rake task: whatever_name.rake

Example:

desc "This task does awesome stuff"
  task :do_awesome_stuff do
  awesome_method
end

def awesome_method
  #put your ruby code here
end

Now from your command prompt, type rake do_awesome_stuff to execute this rake task.

To make it boot Rails, change task definition to this:

task :do_awesome_stuff => :environment do