Default Rake Task

Published: Dec 29th, 2020

This is part of Joyful Rails, a list of recommendations to make developing your Rails app more productive and joyful.

In this article, we are talking about adding to the default rake task.

When

I recommend adding to the default rake task every time you add a tool that automatically checks your codebase.

Why

Having a single command to run all of your automated checks and specs makes it easy to run them after every change and before every deploy.

How

First, create Rake tasks for automated checkers that do not have one.

Rubocop

In lib/tasks/rubocop.rake put

if Gem::Specification.find_all_by_name('rubocop').present?
  require 'rubocop/rake_task'
  RuboCop::RakeTask.new
end

Now you can run rake rubocop.

Bundler audit

In lib/tasks/bundler_audit.rake put

if Gem::Specification.find_all_by_name('bundler-audit').present?
  require 'bundler/audit/task'
  Bundler::Audit::Task.new
end

Now you can run rake bundle:audit.

License Finder

In lib/tasks/license_finder.rake put

task license_finder: :environment do
  sh 'bundle', 'exec', 'license_finder'
end

Now you can run rake license_finder.

Rails Best Practices

In lib/tasks/rails_best_practices.rake put

task rails_best_practices: :environment do
  sh 'rails_best_practices'
end

Now you can run rake rails_best_practices.

Brakeman

In lib/tasks/brakeman.rake put

if Gem::Specification.find_all_by_name('brakeman').present?
  namespace :brakeman do
    desc "Check your code with Brakeman"
    task check: :environment do
      require 'brakeman'
      r = Brakeman.run app_path: '.', print_report: true, pager: false
      exit Brakeman::Warnings_Found_Exit_Code unless r.filtered_warnings.empty?
    end
  end
end

(Adapted from Brakeman documentation)

Now you can run rake brakeman:check.

Default rake task

Edit your Rakefile define the default rake task.

task default: %i[
  rubocop
  spec
  rails_best_practices
  license_finder
  brakeman:check
  bundle:audit
]

To run the default task with all of your automated checks and specs use this command: rake.