= Reap

User Friendly Project Assitant for Ruby

== What's This?

Reap is a user friendly project assistant for Ruby developers
built on top of Rake. By organizing your project in a semi-formal
manner (the same as setup.rb), Reap makes it easy to do the
following tasks:

* Generate RDocs.
* Run unit tests.
* Create Ruby Gem packages.
* Create standard .tgz, tbz (bzip2) and/or .zip packages.
* Publish documents to Rubyforge or other web sites.
* Announce a release to Ruby-talk or other mailing list.
* Prepare files for distribution (i.e. chmod, tag, etc.).
* Upload packages (coming soon!).

If you have special needs that Reap doesn't accomodate,
new task are farily easy to create. And we are always
happy to hear suggestions.

== Installation

=== Gem Install

Install the ruby gem as you would any other:

  <tt>gem install reap</tt>

Reap requires Nano Methods.

=== Manual Install

To install manually follow the usual setup.eb steps:

1. Download the compressed package.
2. Unpack it.
3. Change into the unpacked directory.
4. run <tt>./setup.rb</tt>

You should be good to go.

== Usage

=== Using a Reap Task

Reap makes it pretty easy to use it's built-in tasks.
Not only will it grab common data from a ProjectInfo
YAML file if available, but it defines convenience methods
to make writing Rakefiles easier. For instance, to create
a "package" target all you generally need in your Rakefile is:

  require 'reap/tasks'

  include ReapTask

  package_task :package

The reaon this can be so simple, is b/c Reap extrapolates the
information it needs from a comon ProjectInfo file. You will
of course need to create this file in you projects main directory.
A template is provided and a command line tool to copy it to your
current directory. Simply type:

  > reap template

Then edit the ProjectInfo file. The fields are fairly self
explanitiory. Apart from Reap such a file is nice to have on
it's own merits too.

=== Building a Reap Task

Building a Reap task differs from building a Rake task
by two important factors. First there is only one target
per task (this may change) Second, task blocks are yeilded
_prior_ to the #init routine being exectuted. So your #init
routine should expect data to already be present in
the tasks attribute and take that into account (usually that
means using ++||=++)

Here's an, oh so simple, example:

  class MyOhSoSimpleTask < Reap::Task

     # This creates the convenience method
     register 'my_oh_so_simple'

     default_desc 'this is a custom reap task'

     attr_accessor :message

     def init
       @message ||= master['default'] || 'None Found!'
     end

     # run the target task
     def run
       puts @message
     end

   end

The corresponding settings in the ProjectInfo file (master) will then be:

   default: Default text, if any.

And to use it in your Rake file:

  ReapTask::my_oh_so_simple_task :mytarget

== Status

Reap is currently Usable Beta. Most of the tasks
work very well. Refinements are still common though,
and a few important tasks are still being planned.

== Legal

Reap
Copyright(c)2004-2005 Thomas Sawyer
Ruby License