Question

I want to be able to create a rakefile on Windows 7 that I can call with the rake -g <taskname> or rake --system <taskname> command. Where do I save the rakefile? I’ve tried creating a Rake directory under my user directory (c:\users\me\rake), but when I call rake -g hello_world, rake errors out saying it doesn’t know how to build the :hello_world task, which makes me think it just can’t see the rakefile. Here’s what my global rakefile looks like:

require 'rake'

desc "a hello world task"    
task :hello_world do    
  puts "hello from your global rakefile"    
end

Answer 1

Figured it out – turns out Rake expects global rakefiles to end in a “.rake” extension. I changed the example above to this:

require 'rake'

desc "a hello world task"    
task :hello_world do    
  puts "hello from {__FILE__}"    
end

And saved it as “testing.rake” in my c:\users\me\rake\ directory. I opened up a command prompt to a random directory and ran “rake -g hello_world” and got this output:

C:\Windows\system32>rake -g hello_world
(in C:/Windows/system32)
hello from C:/Users/me/Rake/testing.rake