Rake is a software task management and a build automation tool created by Jim Weirich. It allows the user to specify tasks and to describe dependencies as well as to group tasks into namespaces. It is similar to SCons and Make. Rake was written in Ruby and has been part of the standard library of Ruby since version 1.9.

The tasks that should be executed need to be defined in a configuration file called Rakefile. A Rakefile has no special syntax and contains executable Ruby code.

The basic unit in Rake is the task. A task has a name and an action block, that defines its functionality. The following code defines a task called greet that will output the text "Hello, Rake!" to the console.

When defining a task, you can optionally add dependencies, that is one task can depend on the successful completion of another task. Calling the "seed" task from the following example will first execute the "migrate" task and only then proceed with the execution of the "seed" task.

Tasks can also be made more versatile by accepting arguments. For example, the "generate_report" task will take a date as argument. If no argument is supplied the current date is used.

A special type of task is the file task, which can be used to specify file creation tasks. The following task, for example, is given two object files, i.e. "a.o" and "b.o", to create an executable program.

Another useful tool is the directory convenience method, that can be used to create directories upon demand.

When a file is named as a prerequisite but it does not have a file task defined for it, Rake will attempt to synthesize a task by looking at a list of rules supplied in the Rakefile. For example, suppose we were trying to invoke task "mycode.o" with no tasks defined for it. If the Rakefile has a rule that looks like this: