Hoe ↑

home

www.zenspider.com/projects/hoe.html

code

github.com/seattlerb/hoe

bugs

github.com/seattlerb/hoe/issues

rdoc

docs.seattlerb.org/hoe/

doco

docs.seattlerb.org/hoe/Hoe.pdf

clog

github.com/seattlerb/hoe/blob/master/History.rdoc

other

github.com/jbarnette/hoe-plugin-examples

DESCRIPTION: ↑

Hoe is a rake/rubygems helper for project Rakefiles. It helps you manage, maintain, and release your project and includes a dynamic plug-in system allowing for easy extensibility. Hoe ships with plug-ins for all your usual project tasks including rdoc generation, testing, packaging, deployment, and announcement.

See class rdoc for help. Hint: ‘ri Hoe` or any of the plugins listed below.

For extra goodness, see: docs.seattlerb.org/hoe/Hoe.pdf

FEATURES/PROBLEMS: ↑

SYNOPSIS: ↑

% sow [group] project

(you can edit a project template in ~/.hoe_template after running sow for the first time)

or:

require 'hoe'

Hoe.spec projectname do
  # ... project specific data ...
end

# ... project specific tasks ...

Deployment, the DRY way ↑

Hoe focuses on keeping everything in its place in a useful form and intelligently extracting what it needs. As a result, there are no extra YAML files, config directories, ruby files, or any other artifacts in your release that you wouldn’t already have.

Structure Overview ↑

project_dir/
  History.txt
  Manifest.txt
  README.txt
  Rakefile
  bin/...
  lib/...
  test/...

README.txt ↑

Most projects have a readme file of some kind that describes the project. Hoe projects are no different, but we take them one step further. The readme file points the reader towards all the information they need to know to get started including a description, relevant urls, code synopsis, license, etc. Hoe knows how to read a basic rdoc formatted file to pull out the description (and summary by extension), urls, and extra paragraphs of info you may want to provide in news/blog posts.

History.txt ↑

Every project should have a document describing changes over time. Hoe can read this file (also in rdoc) and include the latest changes in your announcements.

Manifest.txt ↑

manifest [noun] a document giving comprehensive details of a ship and its cargo and other contents, passengers, and crew for the use of customs officers.

Every project should know what it is shipping. This is done via an explicit list of everything that goes out in a release. Hoe uses this during packaging so that nothing embarrassing is picked up.

Imagine, you’re a customs inspector at the Los Angeles Port, the world’s largest import/export port. A large ship filled to the brim pulls up to the pier ready for inspection. You walk up to the captain and his crew and ask “what is the contents of this fine ship today” and the captain answers “oh… whatever is inside”. The mind boggles. There is no way in the world that a professionally run ship would ever run this way and there is no way that you should either.

Professional software releases know exactly what is in them, amateur releases do not. “Write better globs” is the response I often hear. I consider myself and the people I work with to be rather smart people and if we get them wrong, chances are you will too. How many times have you peered under the covers and seen .DS_Store, emacs backup~ files, vim vm files and other files completely unrelated to the package? I have far more times than I’d like.

"Ultimately, the manifest represents professionalism of the
 deployment process – making sure you know what you think you are
 releasing. Auto-generating the manifest should be avoided – and
 this comes from a man who loves to generate things."

-- dr nic

VERSION ↑

Releases have versions and I’ve found it best for the version to be part of the code. You can use this during runtime in a multitude of ways. Hoe finds your version and uses it automatically during packaging.

Releasing in 1 easy step ↑

% rake release VERSION=x.y.z

That really is all there is to it. Behind the scenes it:

That ‘VERSION=x.y.z` is there as a last-chance sanity check that you know what you’re releasing. You’d be surprised how blurry eyed/brained you get at 3AM. This check helps a lot more than it should.

Plugins: ↑

Hoe has a flexible plugin system that allows you to activate and deactivate what tasks are available on a given project. Hoe has been broken up into plugins partially to make maintenance easier but also to make it easier to turn off or replace code you don’t want.

Again, this must be done before the Hoe spec, or it won’t be useful.

Plug-ins Provided: ↑

Known 3rd-Party Plugins: ↑

Writing Plugins: ↑

A plugin can be as simple as:

module Hoe::Thingy
  attr_accessor :thingy

  def initialize_thingy # optional
    self.thingy = 42
  end

  def define_thingy_tasks
    task :thingy do
      puts thingy
    end
  end
end

Not terribly useful, but you get the idea. This example exercises both plugin methods (initialize_#{plugin} and define_#{plugin}_tasks and adds an accessor method to the Hoe instance.

How Plugins Work ↑

Hoe plugins are made to be as simple as possible, but no simpler. They are modules defined in the ‘Hoe` namespace and have only one required method (`define_#{plugin}_tasks`) and one optional method (`initialize_#{plugin}`). Plugins can also define their own methods and they’ll be available as instance methods to your hoe-spec. Plugins have 4 simple phases:

Loading ↑

When Hoe is loaded the last thing it does is to ask rubygems for all of its plugins. Plugins are found by finding all files matching “hoe/*.rb” via installed gems or ‘$LOAD_PATH`. All found files are then loaded.

Activation ↑

All of the plugins that ship with hoe are activated by default. This is because they’re providing the same functionality that the previous Hoe was and without them, it’d be rather useless. Other plugins should be “opt-in” and are activated by:

Hoe::plugin :thingy

Put this above your hoe-spec. All it does is add ‘:thingy` to `Hoe.plugins`. You could also deactivate a plugin by removing it from `Hoe.plugins` although that shouldn’t be necessary for the most part.

Please note that it is not a good idea to have a plugin you’re writing activate itself. Let developers opt-in, not opt-out. Just because someone needs the ‘:thingy` plugin on one project doesn’t mean they need them on all their projects.

Initialization ↑

When your hoe-spec is instantiated, it extends itself all known plugin modules. This adds the method bodies to the hoe-spec and allows for the plugin to work as part of the spec itself. Once that is over, activated plugins have their optional ‘initialize_#{plugin}` methods called followed by their optional `activate_#{plugin}_deps` methods called. This lets them set needed instance variables to default values and declare any gem dependencies needed.. Finally, the hoe-spec block is evaluated so that project specific values can override the defaults.

See “Hoe Plugin Loading Sequence” in hoe.rb for full details.

Task Definition ↑

Finally, once the user’s hoe-spec has been evaluated, all activated plugins have their ‘define_#{plugin}_tasks` method called. This method must be defined and it is here that you’ll define all your tasks.

REQUIREMENTS: ↑

INSTALL: ↑

LICENSE: ↑

(The MIT License)

Copyright © Ryan Davis, seattle.rb

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.