This is a short introduction to Rakefiles.

I use rakefiles for building C projects because it’s easier than CMake and Makefiles.

• What are rakefiles?
• Rake Tasks/Rules
• Dependency Based Programming

What are rakefiles?

Rakefiles is a ruby version of Makefiles. It uses Ruby syntax.

In a more strict sense,

Rake is a software task management and build automation tool.

You can find here a great tutorial about “How to use Rake Build Language”.

For this tutorial you will need to know two things:

• Tasks/Rules
• Dependency Based Programming

Rake Tasks/Rules

Rake uses tasks as building blocks. You must define tasks to take full advantage of rake.

Each task definition consists of:

• The name that identifies the task
• The code to be executed by the task

For example:

task :task_name do
    # Your code goes here
end

Rake also uses something known as rules.

Rules are similar to tasks. But rules define filenames and a block of Ruby code.

For each matching file, the rule creates and runs a new task with the specified code.

You may use either names or regular expressions to define the files that match the rule.

For example:

rule '.o' => '.c' do |task|
    sh "gcc -c #{task.source}"
end

In this case, this rule matches all files with *.o extension.

Things to note:

• The task is the object representing the task itself.
• task.source is a reference to the source files of this rule.

Dependency Based Programming

Let’s say you want to build and test your code. It makes sense that before testing you must build your code.

That means that test depends on build.

In rake, you can define dependencies using the => symbol followed by [:dependency_1, :dep_2].

For example:

task :build => do
  #do the compilation
end

task :test => [:build] do
  # run the tests
end

I hope you got the basic idea about rakefiles.

In future post, we’ll take this concepts to automate builds and tests for embedded projects