Any comparison of using Rake vs. just building a simple command line program using something like the slop gem to parse arguments?
I’ve been using slop recently, and it’s quite nice!
Passing arguments to a command line program, with subcommands, certainly seems more friendly than trying to pass arguments to rake.
I tend to use Rake tasks for my Rails apps… and CLIs for pretty much anything else: I find Rake’s arguments support a bit cumbersome to use.
If you take the CLI path, there are pretty good libraries than provide not only argument parsing/validation, but also help commands and UI utils. I’ve used GitHub - tj/commander: The complete solution for Ruby command-line executables for a couple CLI projects and I found it pretty complete feature-wise (for my requirements) and very easy to learn.