Rake Task: invoke or execute??

What is Rake? Why we need it?

Rake is Ruby Make, a standalone Ruby utility that replaces the Unix utility ‘make’, and uses a ‘Rakefile’ and .rake files to build up a list of tasks.

Putting in a simple word :
rake will execute different tasks(basically a set of ruby code) specified in any file with .rake extension from the command line.

In Rails, a rake is a gem in itself and installation dependency of rails i.e. whenever you install rails rake gem get installed along with it.

Creating Rake Task

First let`s see what is Namespaces:
To organize your code better, rake supports the concept of namespaces. This essentially lets you group tasks inside a single namespace.

namespace :universe do
 namespace :world do
 #…
 end
end

Now let`s create a simple rake task to display “hello world” message.
The description (desc) is useful because it gets displayed when you list all available tasks.

namespace :universe do
    namespace :world do
        desc 'shout message'
        task :shout do
            puts "hello world"
        end
    end
end

How to run rake?

To run a rake task, just call the rake command with the name of your task.
Don’t forget to include your namespaces when you have them.
Namespaces and tasks are separated using a colon(:)

$ rake universe:world:shout
hello world

Running Rake from console:

Running your Rake tasks requires two steps:

• Loading Rake
• Loading your Rake tasks

require 'rake'
MyRailsApp::Application.load_tasks

1. Without parameter

Rake::Task['universe:world:shout'].invoke
Rake::Task['universe:world:shout'].execute

2. With parameter

• With Argument as hash

task :activate_account, :account_id do |t, args|
    account_id = args[:account_id] # ACCESSING args AS HASH
    account = Account.find_by(id: account_id)
    account.update_column(state: "Active")
end
# using invoke - IT WILL RUN ONLY ONCE
Rake::Task['activate_account'].invoke([111])
# using execute
Rake::Task['activate_account'].execute({account_id: 111})

• With Argument as Method call

task :activate_account, :account_id do |t, args|
    account_id = args.account_id # ACCESSING args AS METHOD CALL
    account = Account.find_by(id: account_id)
    account.update_column(state: "Active")
end
#using invoke # IT WILL RUN ONLY ONCE
Rake::Task['activate_account'].invoke([111])
#using execute
Rake::Task['activate_account'].execute(Rake::TaskArguments.new([:account_id], [1111]))

Difference between invoke & execute:

Difference between invoke and execute is the execution of your dependencies.

• execute: your task will get executed, but not the dependency
• invoke: will call the whole chain.

References:

Rake & ruby: some basics to get you started

Speedup your rake tasks!