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If my Rakefile does not find a task with a particular name, I'd like rake to instead create a new task by that name according to certain rules, if a file with the missing task name exists. But if it doesn't, I want to fall back to the default ("Don't know how to build task 'foo'!").

In short, is there a method_missing for Rake?

James Wenton
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    I'd love to know how to do this if that's possible. I don't think `method_missing` is really the right thing to look for, though. Rake is really looking up names, not methods, for tasks. It would be more appropriate if there were something like a `task_missing` hook that you could override, but a cursory inspection of the code doesn't show anything like that. – John Feminella Apr 23 '10 at 18:27

1 Answers1

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I haven't tried it, but a quick search revealed this.

If you define a rule with an empty string, you can catch any task that hasn’t been defined elsewhere. This makes it easy to dynamically create rake tasks. Essentially, this is method_missing for rake!

rule "" do |t|
  t.name 
  # ... do something with the name of the task  
end
Jason Marcell
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