Question

I’m using a rails 3.1.3 project which has rake (0.9.2.2). I want to do this in a rake task: call it like

rake tale:import_kml /path/to/file.txt

and then inside the rake task, get access to “/path/to/file.txt” as args.filename

I thought i would be able to do this like so (the puts is there for bit of debugging):

namespace :tale do
  desc "Expects to get a file or folder name as the first argument, and passes that to Tale.import_kml"
  task(:import_kml, [:filename] => :environment) do |t, args|
    puts "args = #{args.inspect}"
    if File.exists?(args.filename)
      Tale.import_kml(filename)
    end
  end
end

But, i get this:

** Invoke tale:import_kml (first_time)
** Invoke environment (first_time)
** Execute environment
** Execute tale:import_kml
args = {}
rake aborted!
can't convert nil into String

so, filename isn’t making it into args. I can’t work out what i’m doing wrong here…

Answer 1

Try such snippet:

namespace :tale do
  desc "Expects to get a file or folder ..."
  task(:import_kml, [:filename]) do |t, args|
    args.with_default(:filename => :environment)
    puts "args = #{args.inspect}"
  end
end

rake tale:import_kml[foo]  # => args = {:filename => "foo"}