What is a Rakefile?

I have started learning Ruby and just tried out my first hello world program开发者_开发知识库 in NetBeans IDE. I have one doubt, I can see that the new project wizard created set of package structure. It had one "Rakefile" in it. What does that mean and what is the use of it?

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It is an alternative to Makefile with Ruby syntax.

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I've been using a rake file to manually kick off a call in the code to import various config files.

My rake file "import_contracts.rake" has the following code:

require 'yaml'

task :import_choice_contracts => :environment do
  desc 'Import Choice Contracts for Contract Service'
  path = "/Users/ernst.r/Desktop/import_contract.yml"
  PhiDao::Contract::Service.import_contract_from_file(path)
end

This rake task calls the "import_contract_from_file()" method and passes it the path to a file to import. Once the server is running I use the command "rake import_choice_contracts". Its great for testing my code while I still don't have a GUI frontend to call the completed code in the backend.

Fissh