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rake is one of those little things about Ruby on Rails that I suspect most of take completely for granted, running the odd rake tast without really ever thinking much about it. Turns out rake is pretty damned cool.

Gregg over on Rails Envy has written a very nice intro to rake in Ruby on Rails Rake Tutorial (aka. How rake turned me into an alchoholic) :

In this article we’re going to discover why Rake was created, and how it can help our Rails applications. By the end you should be able to write your own tasks, and learn how to get piss drunk using rake in no less then three steps.

He’s written well enough that by about midway down the article I was already thinking of ways to use rake to do some of the unpleasant maintenance tasks every site needs that I was consequently putting off thinking about. rake: not bad at all.