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Learn
  • Learn And The Power Of Community
  • Intro
    • learn-co-curriculum/welcome-to-learn-verified
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    • learn-co-curriculum/environment-setup
  • Intro to tic tac toe
    • matz-readme
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    • hello world
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    • Intro to methods
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    • Intro-to-cli-applications
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    • Intro to ruby iterators
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  • OOP tic tac toe
    • intro to oop
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  • Git and github
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  • HTML
    • A-quick-tour-of-the-web
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  • Procedural Ruby
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    • Array introduction
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  • OOP Ruby
    • OO Ruby Video: Object Orientation Overview
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    • Intro to Inheritance
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  • Scraping and project
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    • Music Library CLI
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  • SQL
    • What is SQL
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  • ORM And Active record
    • Why an ORM is Useful
    • Mapping Ruby Classes to Database Tables
    • Mapping Classes to Tables Lab
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    • Mapping Database Rows to Objects Lab
    • Updating Records in an ORM
    • Updating Records in an ORM Lab
    • Preventing Record Duplication
    • ORMs Lab: Bringing It All Together lab
    • Dynamic ORMs
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    • Intro to Rake
    • Mechanics of Migrations
    • Writing Our Own Migrations
    • Migrations and Active Record Lab
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    • ActiveRecord Associations
    • ActiveRecord Associations Lab
    • ActiveRecord Associations Lab II
    • ActiveRecord Associations Video Review
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    • Video Review: Aliasing ActiveRecord Associations
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  • Rack
    • How the Internet Works
    • Increasing Layers of Abstraction
    • Inspecting the Web with Rack (lab)
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    • Video Review: How The Web Works, Pt 1
    • Video Review: How the Web Works, Pt 2
  • Html
    • How the Web Works
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    • video review how the web works pt 1
    • How the Web Works, Part 2: Overview
    • Setting Up a New Site
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  • CSS
    • CSS Fundamentals
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  • Sinatra
    • What is Sinatra?
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    • Using the Shotgun Development Server (lab)
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    • Sinatra Basic Views Lab
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    • Intro To Capybara
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    • Sinatra Forms Lab
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    • Nested Forms Readme
    • Sinatra Nested Forms Lab: Pirates!
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    • Sessions and Cookies
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    • Restful Routes Basic Lab
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    • Building a Site Generator, Part 1- Overview
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  • Rails
    • Welcome To Rails
      • Rails Application Basics
      • Rails Static Request
      • Rails Hello World Lab
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      • Intro to Rails- Overview
    • Intro to REST
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    • ActiveRecord Model Rails Lab
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    • Rails form_tag
    • Rails form_tag Lab
    • Create Action
    • Create Action Lab
    • Index, Show, New, Create Lab
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    • Strong Params Basics
    • form_for Lab
    • Rails Generators
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    • Rails Layouts And Templates Lab
    • Simple Partials
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    • Refresher on MVC
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    • Refactoring Views With Helpers Lab
    • Model Class Methods
    • Optimal Queries using Active Record (lab)
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    • Nested Resource Routing Lab
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    • Namespaced Routes
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    • Todomvc 2 lists have items
    • TodoMVC 3: Mark Items Complete
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    • Introduction to Authentication and Authorization
      • Cookies and sessions
      • Cookies and Sessions Lab
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      • Login Required Readme
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      • Omniauth review lecture in todomvc
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    • Rails Amusement Park lab
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  • JavaScript
    • Intro to JavaScript
      • JavaScript Data Types
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      • JavaScript Variables
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      • Functions
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    • Scope
      • Scope chain
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      • Lexical scoping
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      • Hoisting
    • Arrays And Objects
      • Objects
      • JavaScript: Objects and Arrays Quiz
      • Object Iteration
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      • Filter
      • Map
    • Functions Revised
      • First-Class Functions Lab
      • First-Class Functions
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      • First-Class Functions Practice Lab
    • OOP
      • Creating Objects
      • Object Methods and Classes
      • Using Prototypes
      • Using Classes in Javascript
      • JavaScript This Walkthrough
      • This Code-along
      • Bind, Call, and Apply Readme
      • Bind, Call, Apply Lab
      • Object Relations
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      • Class Relations Lab
      • JavaScript Closures and Higher Order Functions
      • Closures Lab
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      • Daily Lunch Lab
    • DOM
      • Introduction to the DOM
      • Introduction to the DOM Lab
      • More on the DOM
      • Creating and Inserting DOM Nodes
      • The DOM Is a Tree
      • Listening to Nodes
      • Modify HTML With jQuery
      • Modifying HTML Lab
      • jQuery Selectors
      • Document.ready
      • Acting On Events Lab
      • DOM Quiz
    • Templates
      • Introduction to CSS
      • CSS Quiz
      • CSS Libraries
      • CSS Libraries Lab
      • Intro to Templates
      • Template Engines
      • Template Engines Lab
      • Advanced Templating
      • Advanced Templating Lab
    • Asynchronous JavaScript
      • Intro to XHR Code Along
      • Hitting APIs Lab
      • Advanced AJAX Lab
      • AJAX and Callbacks
      • AJAX and Callbacks Lab
      • REST Refresher
      • REST Quiz
      • Fetch
      • JavaScript fetch() Lab
      • Intro to Mocha
      • Testing with Spies
      • Testing with Mocks and Stubs
  • Rails and JavaScript
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On this page
  • Objectives
  • What is Rake?
  • Why Rake?
  • Where did Rake Come From?
  • How to Define and Use Rake Tasks
  • Describing our Tasks for rake -T
  • Namespacing Rake Tasks
  • Common Rake Tasks
  • rake db:migrate
  • rake db:seed
  • rake console
  1. ORM And Active record

Intro to Rake

Objectives

  1. Introduce Rake and Rake tasks.

  2. Understand what Rake is used for in our Ruby programs.

  3. Learn how to build a basic Rake task.

What is Rake?

Rake is a tool that is available to us in Ruby that allows us to automate certain jobs––anything from execute SQL to puts-ing out a friendly message to the terminal.

Rake allows us to define something called "Rake tasks" that execute these jobs. Once we define a task, that task can be executed from the command line.

Why Rake?

Every program has some jobs that must be executed now and then. For example, the task of creating a database table, the task of making or maintaining certain files. Before Rake was invented, we would have to write scripts that accomplish these tasks in BASH, or we would have to make potentially confusing and arbitrary decisions about what segment of our Ruby program would be responsible for executing these tasks.

Writing scripts in BASH is tough, and BASH just isn't as powerful as Ruby. On the other hand, for each developer to make his or her own decisions about where to define and execute certain common tasks related to databases or file maintenance is confusing.

Rake provides us a standard, conventional way to define and execute such tasks using Ruby.

Where did Rake Come From?

In fact, the C community was the first to implement the pattern of writing all their recurring system maintenance tasks in a separate file. They called this file the MakeFile because it was generally used to gather all of the source files and make it into one compiled executable file.

How to Define and Use Rake Tasks

Building a Rake task is easy, since Rake is already available to us as a part of Ruby. All we need to do is create a file in the top level of our directory called Rakefile. Here we define our task:

task :hello do
  # the code we want to be executed by this task
end

We define tasks with task + name of task as a symbol + a block that contains the code we want to execute.

If you open up the Rakefile in this directory, you'll see our :hello task:

task :hello do
  puts "hello from Rake!"
end

Now, in your terminal in the directory of this project, type:

rake hello

You should see the following outputted to your terminal:

Describing our Tasks for rake -T

Rake comes with a handy command, rake -T, that we can run in the terminal to view a list of available Rake tasks and their descriptions. In order for rake -T to work though, we need to give our Rake tasks descriptions. Let's give our hello task a description now:

desc 'outputs hello to the terminal'
task :hello do
  puts "hello from Rake!"
end

Now, if we run rake -T in the terminal, we should see the following:

rake hello       # outputs hello to the terminal

So handy!

Namespacing Rake Tasks

It is possible to namespace your Rake tasks. What does "namespace" mean? A namespace is really just a way to group or contain something, in this case our Rake tasks. So, we might namespace a series of greeting Rake tasks, like hello, above, under the greeting heading.

Let's take a look at namespacing now. Let's say we create another greeting-type Rake task, hola:

desc 'outputs hola to the terminal'
task :hola do
  puts "hola de Rake!"
end

Now, let's namespace both hello and hola under the greeting heading:

namespace :greeting do
desc 'outputs hello to the terminal'
  task :hello do
    puts "hello from Rake!"
  end

  desc 'outputs hola to the terminal'
  task :hola do
    puts "hola de Rake!"
  end
end

Now, to use either of our Rake tasks, we use the following syntax:

rake greeting:hello
hello from Rake!

rake greeting:hola
hola de Rake!

Common Rake Tasks

As we move towards developing Sinatra and Rails web applications, you'll begin to use some common Rake tasks that handle the certain database-related jobs.

rake db:migrate

One common pattern you'll soon become familiar with is the pattern of writing code that creates database tables and then "migrating" that code using a rake task.

Our Student class currently has a #create_table method, so let's use that method to build out our own migrate Rake task.

We'll namespace this task under the db heading. This namespace will contain a few common database-related tasks.

We'll call this task migrate, because it is a convention to say we are "migrating" our database by applying SQL statements that alter that database.

namespace :db do
  desc 'migrate changes to your database'
  task :migrate => :environment do
    Student.create_table
  end
end

But, if we run rake db:migrate now, we're going to hit an error.

Task Dependency

You might be wondering what is happening with this snippet:

task :migrate => :environment do
...

This creates a task dependency. Since our Student.create_table code would require access to the config/environment.rb file (which is where the student class and database are loaded), we need to give our task access to this file. In order to do that, we need to define yet another Rake task that we can tell to run before the migrate task is run.

Let's check out that environment task:

# in Rakefile

task :environment do
  require_relative './config/environment'
end

After adding our environment task, running rake db:migrate should create our students table.

rake db:seed

Another task you will become familiar with is the seed task. This task is responsible for "seeding" our database with some dummy data.

The conventional way to seed your database is to have a file in the db directory, db/seeds.rb, that contains some code to create instances of your class.

If you open up db/seeds.rb you'll see the following code to create a few students:

require_relative "../lib/student.rb"

Student.create(name: "Melissa", grade: "10th")
Student.create(name: "April", grade: "10th")
Student.create(name: "Luke", grade: "9th")
Student.create(name: "Devon", grade: "11th")
Student.create(name: "Sarah", grade: "10th")

Then, we define a rake task that executes the code in this file. This task will also be namespaced under db:

namespace :db do

  ...

  desc 'seed the database with some dummy data'
  task :seed do
    require_relative './db/seeds.rb'
  end
end

Now, if we run rake db:seed in our terminal (provided we have already run rake db:migrate to create the database table), we will insert five records into the database.

If only there was some way to interact with our class and database without having to run our entire program...

Well, we can build a Rake task that will load up a Pry console for us.

rake console

We'll define a task that starts up the Pry console. We'll make this task dependent on our environment task so that the Student class and the database connection load first.

desc 'drop into the Pry console'
task :console => :environment do
  Pry.start
end

Now, provided we ran rake db:migrate and rake db:seed, we can drop into our console with the following:

This should bring up the following in your terminal:

Let's check to see that we did in fact successfully migrate and seed our database:

[1] pry(main)> Student.all
=> [[1, "Melissa", "10th"],
 [2, "April", "10th"],
 [3, "Luke", "9th"],
 [4, "Devon", "11th"],
 [5, "Sarah", "10th"]]

We did it!

PreviousTranslating from ORM to ActiveRecordNextMechanics of Migrations

Last updated 5 years ago

Rake was later developed by as the task management tool for Ruby.

View on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.

Jim Weirich
Intro to Rake