Rake is a popular task runner in Ruby that is used extensively in Ruby on Rails applications. It allows developers to define and run tasks, which are small pieces of code that perform specific actions, such as:
Making a backup of your database
Running your tests
Gathering and reporting stats[1]
In Rails, Rake is used to centralize access to these tasks, making them easier to find and run. For example, you can run rake db:migrate to run database migrations, or rake routes to list all the routes defined in your application[1].
To define a Rake task, you create a Rakefile in your project's root directory. Here's a simple example:
desc "Print reminder about eating more fruit."
task :apple do
puts "Eat more apples!"
end
You can then run this task by executing rake apple in your terminal[1].
