This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Jeremy Voorhis. Original Post: Last Night A Rake Task Saved My LIfe - Real World Project Automation With Rake Feed Title: JVoorhis Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jvoorhis Feed Description: JVoorhis is a Rubyist in northeast Ohio. He rambles about Ruby on Rails, development practices, other frameworks such as Django, and on other days he is just full of snark. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Jeremy Voorhis Latest Posts From JVoorhis

Here’s a follow-up story about PLANET ARGON’s asset compiler project in action.

In our client’s application, an Image model is created for each image they upload and the uploaded images are saved into an asset source directory. After the images are saved, an observer launches the build system, acting on any source images whose targets are missing.

While I was speaking at Railsconf, a client of ours posted a bug to our Basecamp. For reasons I am still trying to determine, our client had uploaded four images to their application but the asset compiler task was not executed. It might take a minute to find the disconnect between my application and Rake, but our client needs those images that coincide with a press release as soon as we can deliver them.

rake assets:build --dry-run

rake assets:build --dry-run | grep "** Execute" 

rake assets:build

The beautiful thing here is how easy asset compiler lets me manage 4000 images. The application knows when to run build tasks, and in my assets.rake file, I can concisely define 11 types of image transformations. I can run each type of transformation individually, or I can run them in one shot. Even better, since rebuilding all of the images takes considerable CPU power, I can rsync my asset source directory to a separate build server and run the build tasks there, exporting them to our web server and the bandwidth provider.

For those of you unfamiliar, the asset_compiler project is hosted at planetargon.org and there is an article on InfoQ that tells the story of its motivation and implementation. Asset compiler is free software.

UPDATE

** Execute (dry run) assets:navigation_icon:build
** Execute (dry run) assets:bronze_navigation_icon:build
** Execute (dry run) assets:navigation_icon_no_resize:build
** Execute (dry run) assets:bronze_navigation_icon_no_resize:build
** Execute (dry run) /path/to/assets/full_size/Ronaldo9mVert1.jpg
** Execute (dry run) /path/to/assets/assets/full_size/Ronaldo9mHoriz2.jpg
** Execute (dry run) /path/to/assets/assets/full_size/Ronaldo9mVert2.jpg
** Execute (dry run) /path/to/assets/assets/full_size/Ronaldo9mHoriz1.jpg
** Execute (dry run) assets:full_size:build
<snip />
** Execute (dry run) assets:build

This is exactly the kind of clear and unambiguous feedback I like to see when investigating this kind of problem. A big thank you to Jim Weirich for his thoughtful implementation of Rake.