Maintaining custom application tasks in Rails
Here are some hints on best practices to maintain your tasks in larger projects.
Rake Tasks vs. Scripts
- The Rails default is using rake tasks for your application tasks. These live in
lib/tasks/*. - In case you want to avoid rake for your tasks and just use plain ruby scripts, consider
lib/scripts/*as folder.
Keeping tasks slim
For readability and testing it's easier to keep your tasks slim.
Example:
lib/gitlab/maintenance_tasks/user_export.rb:
module Gitlab
module MaintenanceTasks
class UserExport
def export
# Your code of exporting all users e.g. into a XSLX file
end
end
end
end
As rake task: lib/tasks/gitlab.rb:
# bundle exec rake gitlab:user_export
namespace :gitlab do
desc 'Export all users as XSLX'
task user_export: :environment do
Gitlab::MaintenanceTasks::UserExport.new.export
end
end
As plain ruby script: lib/scripts/user_export.rb:
# bundle exec rails runner -e development lib/scripts/user_export.rb
Gitlab::MaintenanceTasks::UserExport.new.export
Testing should not be optional
Tasks should be tested the same way as other code, even if they are only run once.
Example:
spec/lib/gitlab/maintenance_tasks/user_export_spec.rb:
describe Gitlab::MaintenanceTasks::UserExport do
it 'should export all users as XLSX file' do
# Your code for testing all edge cases in the user export
end
end
As rake task: spec/lib/tasks/gitlab_spec.rb:
describe 'lib/scripts/gitlab.rb' do
it 'calls the user export' do
Rake::Task['gitlab:user_export'].invoke
# Your code for testing e.g. that a file user_export.xlsx is written to disk (smoke test)
end
end
As plain ruby script: lib/scripts/gitlab_spec.rb:
describe 'lib/scripts/gitlab.rb' do
let(:script) { Rails.root.join(subject) }
it 'calls the user export' do
load(script)
# Your code for testing e.g. that a file user_export.xlsx is written to disk (smoke test)
end
end