A rake task for tracking your time with git

July 7, 2009

Are you using Ruby on Rails? Are you using Git? Do you have a need to track how long you spend on things? Then I have just the thing for you.

I threw together a quick rake task that gets all of your commits in a git repo and parses out the times and commit message from them. Then it formats them with the time and also the time interval between them. You can get the rake task to track your time from this gist.

The output will look something like this:

Fri, Jul 07 10:55AM  20m 49s  Added toolbar for controllers using temp...
Fri, Jul 07 10:34AM  21h 52m  Added support for using page templates i...
Thu, Jul 07 12:42PM  37m 57s  LH#77, fixed issue with tests failing on...
Thu, Jul 07 12:04PM  12m 18s  LH#67, added a limit option to the rende...
Thu, Jul 07 11:52AM  17m 30s  Removed debug statement                 ...
Thu, Jul 07 11:34AM  19h 52m  LH#66, added :path option to render menu...
Wed, Jul 07 03:41PM           Added DSL for modifying portlet behavior...
Tue, Jun 06 02:05PM  18h 44m  LH#119, multiple HTML fields on one bloc...
Mon, Jun 06 07:20PM   6h 21m  Converted docs to textile               ...
Mon, Jun 06 12:58PM           Fix for LH#118, create directories in ge...
Sat, Jun 06 10:22PM           Added support for other template handler...
Fri, Jun 06 04:49PM   0m 58s  bump build                              ...
Fri, Jun 06 04:48PM  23m 11s  Fix LH#106: Section not correctly loadin...
Fri, Jun 06 04:25PM  34m 25s  Fix for LH#107, images were not showing ...
Fri, Jun 06 03:51PM   9m 48s  Fix for LH#110, can't view usages of a p...
Fri, Jun 06 03:41PM  11m 12s  Fix for LH#113, check to see if there is...
Fri, Jun 06 03:30PM   2m 52s  Fixed LH#114, documentation typo        ...
Fri, Jun 06 03:27PM   0m 38s  bump build number                       ...
Fri, Jun 06 03:26PM   5h 38m  Fix for LH#98, tags not getting updated ...
Fri, Jun 06 09:48AM  33m 14s  Fixed LH#105, deleted portlets showing u...

It doesn't actually truncate the commit messages, I just did that here to make each one fit on a line. If the time interval is over 24 hours, it doesn't bother printing the interval, because you probably didn't actually work on that one commit for 37 hours straight. I've been thinking if you really want to track time this way then each time you sit down to start hacking on a project, you just make a minor change to the .gitignore or something and then commit it with a message like "started hacking on foo", so then when you commit your first chunk of actual work, you will know how long you spend on that.

Posted in Technology | Tags Git, Rake, Ruby | 2 Comments

The Busy Rails Developer's Intro To Rake

April 20, 2009

This is just a quick 60 second intro to Rake. If you are doing development with Ruby on Rails, you undoubtedly use Rake on a daily basis. For example, you use rake db:migrate to run your migrations or rake test:units to run your unit tests. But do you know how to write your own Rake tasks? If you never have done that, you might hesitate to write a rake task instead thinking you ran just write a quick ruby script rather than take the time to figure out how to write a Rake task.

So to create a rake task, in an existing Rails app, create a file called lib/tasks/app.rake. You can name it whatever you want as long as it ends in .rake. I'm choosing to use app because we are going to write some app-specific tasks. In the file, put this:

task :hello_world

Now from the command line you can run your task with rake hello_world. Nothing happens, but it runs. Now let's have it print hello world:

task :hello_world do
  puts "Hello, World!"
end

Now when you run your task, it prints "Hello, World!". Let's add a description to our task to let people know what it does:

desc "Prints 'Hello, World!'"
task :hello_world do
  puts "Hello, World!"
end

Now if you run rake -T, you will see your hello_world task in the list of tasks. rake -T only shows tasks that have a description. You can also run rake -D hello_world to see the full description of the task. You should give all of your tasks that you expect users to run from the command-line a description.

Now a problem with our task is what happens if someone else wants to write a task named hello_world? Well, we would have a namespace problem. So what we want to do is put all of our tasks into the app namespace:

namespace :app do
  desc "Prints 'Hello, World!'"
  task :hello_world do
    puts "Hello, World!"
  end
end

So now we can run our task as rake app:hello_world.

So this is obviously not a real task. Let's say we want to know what the load path of our app looks like. Easy, we'll just do this:

namespace :app do
  desc "Prints load path of this app"
  task :load_paths do
    Rails.configuration.load_paths.each do |p|
      puts p
    end
  end
end

When you try to run this rake tast, you will get this error:

rake aborted!
uninitialized class variable @@configuration in Rails

The problem is that by default, a rake task doesn't load the Rails environment. It's easy to tell it to do that with this:

namespace :app do
  desc "Prints load path of this app"
  task :load_paths => :environment do
    Rails.configuration.load_paths.each do |p|
      puts p
    end
  end
end

By saying :load_path => :environment, you are saying that the load_path task depends on the environment being loaded. Or more specifically, you are saying "run the environment task before running this task". There is a task called "environment", and it loads the Rails environment. You won't see it under rake -T, because it has no description because it is not a task you should run directly, only as a dependency of other tasks.

Now that we have the Rails environment loading, when you run the rake task, you will get the output you expect. If you make your task depend on environment, you will also be able to access your models from within your task. Now that you know the basics of Rake, you can easily get going making Rake tasks for your Rails app.

Posted in Technology | Tags Rails, Rake, Ruby | 4 Comments