Is it possible to make an interactive Rake task?

Question

I want to run a Rake task that asks the user for input.

I know that I can supply input on the command line, but I want to ask the user if they are sure they wa

Answer 1

A handy feature for user input is to put it in a do..while loop, to only continue when a user has supplied valid input. Ruby doesn't explicitly have this construct, but you can achieve the same thing with begin and until. That would add to the accepted answer as follows:

task :action do
  STDOUT.puts "I'm acting!"
end

task :check do
  # Loop until the user supplies a valid option
  begin
    STDOUT.puts "Are you sure? (y/n)"
    input = STDIN.gets.strip.downcase
  end until %w(y n).include?(input)

  if input == 'y'
    Rake::Task["action"].reenable
    Rake::Task["action"].invoke
  else
    # We know at this point that they've explicitly said no, 
    # rather than fumble the keyboard
    STDOUT.puts "So sorry for the confusion"
  end
end