Extending & Custom Tasks

It's now easier than ever to create your own tasks that take advantage of the Albacore infrastructure.

Start with the following skeleton to build a task that executes any arbitrary Ruby code (in or out of a module, we don't follow good module guidelines here). I'll explain what each part is for and show you where to put your custom code.

require "albacore"

class Foo
  include Albacore::Task

  attr_accessor :bar, :baz

  def initialize()
    @bar = "whatever"
  end

  def execute()
    @logger.debug "tell me something interesting"
    # ... do something! ...
  end
end

Now, for the breakdown...

• require "albacore" - load the entire Albacore library
• class Foo - this will become the name of your custom task (down-cased)
• include Albacore::Task - magic Albacore infrastructure stuff
• attr_accessor :bar, :baz - user configurable properties
• def initialize() - a parameterless constructor is required, default values can be assigned in the body of the constructor
• def execute() - a parameterless execute method is required and will be run by Albacore
• @logger - comes along with the include

Tasks that execute a command line application need a little bit more (exe, bat, or whatever else is executable in your shell).

require "albacore"

class Foo
  include Albacore::Task
  include Albacore::RunCommand

  attr_accessor :bar, :baz

  def initialize()
    @bar = "whatever"
  end

  def execute()
    @logger.debug "tell me something interesting"

    # ... setup the cli properties! ...
    p = []
    p << @bar if @bar
    p << "/baz \"#{@baz}\"" if @baz

    run_command("foo", p)
  end
end

And, the statements of interest here are...

• include Albacore::RunCommand - provides access to the run_command and other methods of interest
• p = []; p << @bar - you need to build up the parameters to your command, make the strings work and quote and escape whatever is necessary, we'll take care of @command, @working_directory, and @parameters for you
• result = run_command(...) - actually run the command!

You can make some properties required by using a guard-clause in the execute method, like

raise "foo requires #bar" unless @bar

You can pick the name of your custom task method, instead of having it assigned from the class name, provide this line inside your class

TaskName = :fizz

You should now be able to write a task like

require "albacore"
require "albacore-foo"

foo :whatever do |foo|
  foo.bar = "bar"
  foo.baz = "baz"
end

Global & YAML Configuration

To have your custom task participate in Albacore's global configuration block or YAML configuration, you need to jump through a few hoops (the API is a little wonky and, honestly, I'm not sure how much of this is necessary, but I know this style "just works")...

require "albacore"

module FooConfig
  include Albacore::Configuration

  def self.fooconfig()
     @config ||= OpenStruct.new.extend(OpenStructToHash).extend(Foo)
  end

  def foo()
    config || = FooConfig.fooconfig()
    yield(config) if block_given?
    config
  end
end

# in addition to all the other parts (above)
class Foo
  include FooConfig

  def initialize()
    super()
    update_attributes(foo.to_hash)
  end
end