Last Updated: February 25, 2016

Passing parameters to Rake tasks

Ever wonder how you can pass parameters to a rake task from the command line, well here is a quick tip on doing so.

Let's say we have a Rake task that clones a repository from github(a bit redundant but it serves well for the purpose of this tip):

namespace :git do
 desc "let's you clone a git repo by passing username and repo"
 task :clone, :user, :repo do |t, args|
 user = args[:user]
 repo = args[:repo]
 if system "git clone git@github.com:#{user}/#{repo}.git"
 puts "Repository: #{repo} cloned successfully"
 else
 puts "There was a problem with your request, please try again later."
 end
 end
end

Now from the command line you can call this task by running: