felix clack

Override a rake task

Today I ran into a problem where we have a company gem that includes a bunch of helpful rake tasks, one of which imports a production database into your dev db.

I wanted to do some stuff after this rake import task that was specific to the application I’m working on.

I first tried to overwrite the task, like you would do with any Ruby method. No dice though, this had the effect of running my lib/import.rake task before the gem task that I was trying to override.

I saw a few posts about this but they all seem to be overkill for what I wanted. I didn’t want to monkey patch Rake unless I really had to.

Then I struck gold…

Rake::Task['some:task:name'].clear`

One line to stop the original task and then I could crack on and do whatever I wanted.

namespace :db do
  task :import => :environment do
    Rake::Task["db:import"].clear
    ...
    Rake::Task["my_post_import_task"].invoke
  end
end

Simple.