Access Rake Task Description from within Task

Question

Within a rake task how does one query the description? Something that would give:

desc \"Populate DB\"
task populate: :environment do
  puts task.desc # \"Popula         


        

Answer 1

Having a similar problem, that I wanted to show the user a customized help screen. The answer here helped me a lot.

It is very important that

Rake::TaskManager.record_task_metadata = true

is done before the first definition of tasks.

Then you can do

Rake.application.tasks.each do |t|
    printf("%-}s  # %s\n",
           t.name_with_args,
           t.comment)
  end

Details can be found by investigating https://github.com/jimweirich/rake/blob/master/lib/rake/application.rb#L284