Perhaps you have a non-Rails project (let’s say it’s in ruby and maybe some other languages, too) and you use Rake tasks to automate some of the dirty work. So you’ve got a bunch of methods that you wish to keep neatly sorted into .rake files in some dir’s (probably a sub folder of lib like lib/tasks) and a single Rakefile in your project’s root directory. Including those external .rake files in your project’s Rakefile via require statements won’t work :
require 'lib/some_rake_file' # or require 'lib/some_rake_file.rake'
=> rake aborted!
no such file to load — /home/your_project/lib/some_rake_file
Rake assumes the ‘require’d files end in .rb, so it won’t find your .rake files. You need to import rake files:
import 'lib/some_rake_file'
This is fine for individual files, but I wanted to include all files that end in .rake in my tasks dir:
Dir.glob('tasks/*.rake').each { |r| import r }…and there you go. While dead simple, this exemplifies an important distinction between require and import that I found to be poorly documented. Keep your rake tasks organized and remember that Rake isn’t just for rails apps!