Thor VS Rake

Ruby has always been a great general-purpose scripting language and is often used to create command-line utilities. Many of these use the excellent Thor gem to parse command-line options, but there's no escaping one fact: command-line utilities just aren't interesting. Never have been, never will be.

All public methods in the generator will be called one after the other. Private methods will not be called but are available in your public methods like regular Ruby classes.

ruby: http://whatisthor.com

I will add that if you want to develop a CLI tool that gives you various commands that you can run, I would have a look at something like thor to keep it organised and documented. But this is completely unnecessary as a first step - you can simply create a Ruby file that does a thing you want and invoke it directly.

Not to be confused with generator functions (which you might be familiar with from Python or Javascript), Rails generators are custom Thor commands that focus on, well, generating things.

I wanted to provide a command-line interface for the user that was easy to use, and I also wanted to provide the flexibility with the options used to render the animation. After looking around online I found that Thor was a good tool to utilize. It allowed me to easily create a number of options that make this program much more versatile. An example below shows how a user can select which folder the source images are in, as well as what the background and foreground colors should be:

I've used Thor a lot, but it's kind of terrible. It uses a custom non-POSIX-compliant option parser (ex: method_option :list, type: :array -> --list one two three, where as the POSIX way is --list one,two,three or --item one -- item two --item three) and will not error on unknown options or exit with -1 when not enough args are given. If you want a better CLI library, checkout dry-rb, command_kit, or cmdparse.

And Thor might be worth looking at if you have complex scripts: https://github.com/erikhuda/thor

Some competitors - Rake (ruby) - Bake - Earthly - SCons - doit

where every argument except the name can either be missing, single (value) or multiple (array). Sure, it has the "advantage" that it's syntactically valid Ruby code, but it then requires some 70 lines of awful code to actually parse that data into a usable construct ([1] up to L145).

[1] https://github.com/ruby/rake/blob/7b50e9dc37abc57fd365c16cb1...

Rake[0] is still the best ‘make-like’ build tool I’ve used for general purpose stuff. The syntax is nice and it’s just Ruby which is a delight. I briefly used Mage (similar, but Go) and it was fine too.

[0]: https://github.com/ruby/rake

Yup! Two well-established alternatives are "rake", in the Ruby community, and "just" in the Rust community.

Rake is fully programmable in Ruby. Just is a bit less flexible, but it doesn't require learning Ruby, and it's quite pleasant to use.

https://ruby.github.io/rake/

Rake is a great way to homogenize and declare common behaviors of your script (called "tasks"); a guide.

In Ruby there's a gem named Rake. This gem provides a DSL to create tasks to be run from the command line. A small example looks like this:

I think you're referring to Rake. https://ruby.github.io/rake/

We use [Rake](https://github.com/ruby/rake) instead - it's awesome.

If you've been working with Ruby on Rails for a while, you've come across Rake. Written by the late Jim Weirich, Rake is to Ruby what Make is to C. It's very easy to create custom Rake tasks to simplify your development workflows. Rails even provides a generator (rails g task) to create them for you.