How do I make a Rake Task run after all other tasks? (i.e. a Rake AfterBuild task)

Question

I\'m new to Rake and using it to build .net projects. What I\'m interested in is having a Summary task that prints out a summary of what has been done. I want this task to alw

Answer 1

Found this simple elegant answer here that uses the Ruby method at_exit.

It's worth noting that the method defined after at_exit will run every time the rake script is invoked regardless of the task run, or if any task is run. This includes when running rake -T (to list available tasks). Make sure that at_exit only does anything if a previous task told it to do so.

rakefile.rb

desc "Lovely task a"
task :a do
  puts "a"
end

desc "Lovely task b"
task :b do
  puts "b"
end

task :cleanup do
  puts "cleanup"
end

at_exit { Rake::Task[:cleanup].invoke if $!.nil? }

shell

$ rake a b
a
b
cleanup
$ rake -T
rake a # Lovely task a
rake b # Lovely task b
cleanup

You also don't need to make it run a task if you don't want to.

at_exit do
  puts "cleanup"
end

Or make it run an method

def on_exit_do_cleanup
  puts "cleanup"
end

at_exit { on_exit_do_cleanup }

And you may want to make sure you only do the cleanup if a task actually ran so that rake -T won't also do a cleanup.

rakefile.rb

do_cleanup = false

desc "Lovely task a"
task :a do
  puts "a"
  do_cleanup = true
end

desc "Lovely task b"
task :b do
  puts "b"
  do_cleanup = true
end

task :cleanup do
  return unless $!.nil? # No cleanup on error
  return unless do_cleanup # No cleanup if flag is false
  puts "cleanup"
end

at_exit { Rake::Task[:cleanup].invoke }