Question

The documentation I’ve seen for Cakefiles seems to be by example, where this serves as a typical example:

option '-v', '--verbose [TRUE|FALSE]', 'Turn verbosity on/off (off by default)'
task 'spec', 'run specs', (options) ->
  jasmine = require 'jasmine-node'
  # ...

But what happens when I want this:

option '-v', '--verbose [TRUE|FALSE]', 'Turn verbosity on/off (off by default)'
task 'spec', 'run specs', (options) ->
  jasmine = require 'jasmine-node'
  # ...

option '-d', '--directory [PATH]', 'specific directory to set up the widget in'
task 'createWidgets', 'create the widgets', (options) ->
  console.log options.verbose

Options are specific to the file, not the task, which means that (a) options bleed into all tasks in the file, and (b) when running cake, it’s not clear to the user which options are associated with which tasks.

How do I associate options with particular tasks?

Answer 1

There isn’t a way to add task-specific options via any of the functions provided by cake.coffee — if you look at the source you’ll see that options are handled globally. You could write that code yourself, extracting options on a per-task basis by writing code that reads off node’s process.argv. However, cake.coffee is really quite a bare-bones build tool, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anything more than the simplest build systems. You might want to look at something like rake or make instead.