Rake gotcha on Windows

We use Rake as our build system of choice for all of our projects, as it's much more flexible and pleasant to work with than make or ANT, and by and large it's pretty cross-platform. Except.....

I just spent about two hours tearing my hair out over something which should have worked transparently on Windows aswell as *NIX, but it just wasn't playing.

For reasons which would be tedious to go into, inside one particular rake task I needed to cd to a different directory and execute rake in there, to pick up a completely different set of tasks and ActiveRecord model classes, etc, and then resume execution of the containing task.

The following code worked fine on UNIX, but just completely failed to do anything on Windows:

Dir.chdir("../sonar-web") { system( "rake", "db:name_of_other_task" ) }


No error messages, nothing, it just wasn't doing anything.

I'll spare you the headbanging frustration and exhaustive list of things I tried that didn't work, and jump straight to the solution -

rake on Windows needs to execute c:/ruby/bin/rake.bat, not c:/ruby/bin/rake !

rake.bat will in turn call ruby.exe c:/ruby/bin/rake and pass on the command line parameters.

So at the top of my rakefile, I just added:

# on Windows, you can't invoke rake via a "system" cmd, as rake actually should invoke rake.bat
RAKE_CMD = RUBY_PLATFORM.match(/win/) ? "rake.bat" : "rake"

and then changed my system call to :

system( "#{RAKE_CMD}", "name_of_other_task" )

....and everything worked fine.