When all you need is a rake, why would you grab a tractor?
I have been doing some investigations of build tools lately. My simple desires for a build tool are:
- smallish size
- no installation
- as much ancillary benefit as possible
I have used
NAnt extensively and dabbled in
psake recently. I may post my thoughts on psake later, but at this moment, I want to document what I have done with rake.
My business partner,
John Teague, had been pushing me to try
Ruby and
rake for some time, but I knew the installation had a footprint over 20MB. Disk space is cheap, but that is still quite an increase over NAnt. Compound this with how many times it will be downloaded by developers and a Continuous Integration server as part of a build and the size and time adds up. There is definitely a lot of Ruby development going on, but the size and required installation (Ruby itself plus lots of little "gems") were real turn-offs.
One evening I started surfing on Ruby and ran across
Erik Veenstra's AllInOneRuby script. It is a Ruby script that packages your Ruby installation into a single executable. This is definitely worth a try. However, I quickly ran into trouble with a run-time error in the script. The script has not seen an update in two years, so Ruby has apparently moved beyond it. A lilttle digging and I found the accepted solution to the error. Nothing like learning a new language by fixing an error in two year source.
This being my first work in Ruby, I am open to constructive criticism. I will describe the process in two parts. Specific version numbers are given for reference. First, the Ruby installation:
- I downloaded the latest Ruby binaries (1.8.7) rather than use the Windows installer to maintain the "cleanliness" of my workstation for subsequent testing.
- Extract the binaries to c:\rubywork\ruby
- Download RubyGems (1.3.4)
- Extract RubyGems to c:\rubywork\gems
- To install RubyGems, at a command prompt in c:\rubywork\gems, run
..\ruby\bin\ruby setup.rb
- Download Rake (0.8.7)
- Extract Rake to c:\rubywork\rake
- To install Rake, at a command prompt in c:\rubywork\rake, run
..\ruby\bin\ruby install.rb
Next, to update Erik's script:
- Download allinoneruby.tar.gz (0.2.11), the internals of AllInOneRuby
- Extract allinoneruby.tar.gz to c:\rubywork\oneruby\allinoneruby
- Download Erik's tar2rubyscript.rb (0.4.8) to c:\rubywork\oneruby
- Edit c:\rubywork\oneruby\allinoneruby\init.rb and modify line 188 to read:
f.puts " $0 = script"
- Edit c:\rubywork\oneruby\tar2rubyscript.rb and modify line 623 to read:
$0 = File.expand_path("./init.rb")
- At a command prompt in c:\rubywork\oneruby, run
..\ruby\bin\ruby tar2rubyscript.rb allinoneruby/
which will create a partially flawed allinoneruby.rb
- Edit c:\rubywork\oneruby\allinoneruby.rb and modify line 605 to read:
$0 = File.expand_path("./init.rb")
- At a command prompt in c:\rubywork\oneruby, run
..\ruby\bin\ruby allinoneruby.rb --site
which creates the desired allinoneruby.exe.
The exe is just over 3MB. Not bad at all.
Now, to execute rake, we need a couple support files. Create a file named rake.rb:
require 'rake'
require 'rake/tasklib'
Rake.application.run
Then, a file named rakefile:
task :default do
$stderr.puts "Howdy, World"
end
Place these two files together with your allinoneruby.exe and execute:
allinoneruby.exe ruby.rb
and receive a Texan salutation.
Enjoy!