--- title: Configure rake tasks to accept arguments slug: configure-rake-tasks-to-accept-arguments published_at: 2021-04-23 17:00:08 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:16 +0000 summary: description: #rails #rubyonrails tags: [] views: 1617 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/configure-rake-tasks-to-accept-arguments youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAe77HHFLfM youtube_id: NAe77HHFLfM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/NAe77HHFLfM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NAe77HHFLfM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Configure rake tasks to accept arguments *Published: April 23, 2021* *Views: 1617* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAe77HHFLfM) [![Configure rake tasks to accept arguments](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NAe77HHFLfM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAe77HHFLfM) ## Description #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript welcome back everyone in this episode we're going to go through the process of adding some rake tasks that kick off our background jobs that we want to run periodically so that when we deploy to heroku we can run those in the background using heroku scheduler so right now i don't have any tasks so i'm just going to say rake or rails g task and then i'm going to say like i don't know like sec for and then let's see like uh backfill companies so we're going to have a several tasks one of them is to backfill companies one is one of them is going to be to backfill like fetch recent prices one of them is going to be the backfill prices um so let's just let's just jump in here and take a look at this new task that we've written um so the description for this is just gonna be uh like uh back fill companies in the database from indexes uh and then we're gonna write another one here that is going to backfill filings in the database from indexes filings and i think that's probably a good place to start so we've got we've got a couple of tasks here already our jobs so back fill here's our backfill filings job and right now that doesn't take any arguments but theoretically we could say like maybe we take in the year and the quarter that we want it to run so if we say year and quarter then we can get rid of these two where we're just sort of looping over right and maybe we put them into the the actual task here uh and then we want to say um let's see so we want to perform it on a year in a specific year and quarter so we can say backfill filingsjob.perform later and we're going to pass in the year and the quarter so that should run in the background for those specific years we could also make it so that our task accepts some arguments where we pass in maybe we just like pass in the year to run that so um but for now i think this is okay and then back for backfilling companies it's very similar the job looks like this and yeah let's do this let's do the same things we'll say um we will accept the year and the quarter as arguments and we will write those directly into the task so that our job doesn't actually depend on those being passed in also you'll notice that these are actually pretty similar that we're like fetching the filing using rest client then we're like dropping the head and taking some of them off so the the the munging that we're doing for each filing i've kind of kept it um pretty like raw in the actual implementation of the job but later on we might come back and refactor that into some sort of class that helps us work with indices but for now i think it's a pretty good start so we want to say backfill companies job here and we'll say.perform later year and quarter okay so now if we were to say like rake sec colon backfill companies it should run this task so if we just say let's just like remove um all of those quarters and say we're going to print out like back filling companies from 20 well from your quarter and let's just test it out so we can say rake and then sec rake scc back fill companies and that should like actually kick off the task and it should print out okay backfilling companies from that year and quarter and then in the background somewhere we should be running those you can't really see it happening anywhere because we don't actually have any any background tasks set up we have another episode that i recorded about setting up um about setting up background jobs with rescue and redis and both how to run them locally and how to deploy to heroku so i just wanted to like quickly run through the process of setting up some rake tasks um and then we will i'm gonna get this deployed to heroku so that we can run it on heroku and actually like backfill some data on heroku but we have those other episodes so head over and check those out um but yeah i'm gonna skip over the actual implementation of how to set up background tests because i'm going to use the same exact pattern as we did before but the one thing i wanted to do was see if we can accept the year and quarter as arguments into a rake task so i believe we can say something like args here um and then we let's actually yeah let's just experiment with it and say like you know puts args and then i think we can do something like rake sec backfill companies and then we can pass in like 20 21 and 20 i don't know and one like that maybe or maybe it's just like this oh you know because i'm in zsh i think i need to wrap this in quotes um okay so that didn't work as expected uh rake all right so how does this work let's go look this up uh pass args to rake task how to use arguments in a rake task right so this is where we're passing in the name oh cool um and ah right okay so we need to accept or like specify which arguments we want to take and then the block is going to take in t for the task and then the args okay so this is going to be t and then args and we need to tell it what we're going to accept here and we're going to say year quarter goes to environment i think these may be symbols and i think we might be able to say like puts year is args at year maybe and same thing for quarter let's see i don't know if it's in separate square brackets when you have multiple arguments or if it's just like a comma separated list or something um okay what's going on here it doesn't like that hash rocket all right let's try it with just one with just one argument so year quarter goes to environment do yeah i think or let's see okay so this one is using a comma okay so this is actually like this that might have been the problem originally so then do i pass it the second one like that okay definitely not is it like a comma like that maybe okay so let's see sec four dot rake and if we say year quarter nice all right great so we've got the year and the quarter there um and that's how we'll pass in um the arguments to backfill companies for specific years and quarters uh back fill actually let's do um yeah so that that actually should work fine now we can in fact we can take away both of those and now we have it just like completely written as a rake task that we can then use scheduler to to do the same thing um so we're gonna let's let's uh make the same changes here so we're gonna take in year and quarter and get back the environment and then this is going to accept in t and args and then yeah actually we need to do it year is uh ear i wonder if i can actually uh s st nah that's all right i was gonna suggest destructuring it inside of the uh inside of the block here but i don't think that yeah no need no need we can just do it do it like this okay so this should totally work and it should kick off our backfill company's job saying perform that later and then we can run it in the background so that is how you can set up a rake task to perform some action you can pass in some arguments this can be really really handy when you're working with heroku scheduler or just generally working with with rake tasks cool well i hope that was useful and we'll see you next one you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- 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