Rake (software)

Rake is a software task management and a build automation tool created by Jim Weirich, written in Ruby. It allows the user to specify tasks and to describe dependencies as well as to group tasks in a namespace. It is similar to SCons and Make and it's written in the Ruby programming language and Rakefile (equivalent of Makefile in Make). It uses the standard Ruby syntax. Rake uses Ruby's anonymous function blocks to define various tasks, allowing the use of Ruby syntax. It has a library of common tasks: for example, functions to do common file-manipulation tasks and a library to remove compiled files (the "clean" task). Like Make, Rake can also synthesize tasks based on patterns: for example, automatically building a file compilation task based on filename patterns. Rake is now part of the standard library of Ruby from version 1.9 onward.