Passing Parameters to Rake Tasks

I recently discovered how to correctly pass parameters to Rake tasks from the command-line instead of the old, busted way of passing in environment variables. The post is up on the Viget Extend blog, but here's the short of it.

If you have a task that you want to parameterize:

task :echo do
  puts "Hello"
end

You can specify the parameters that it accepts and receive them as a hash inside of the task:

task :echo, :message do |t, args|
  message = args[:message] || 'Hello'
  puts message
end

It also honors task dependencies (using a different syntax):

task :echo, :message, :needs => :environment do |t, args|
  ...
end

Check out the post for the full details.