RakeServer is a lightweight client/server architecture for running Rake tasks. The server is a long-running process that loads tasks from a Rakefile and waits for requests to execute tasks. Each time a task is requested, the server forks, runs the task, and streams the output from the task back to the client.

When the server is started, it can be given tasks to eager-run; this is mainly useful for loading application code into the pre-fork environment.

The main intended use case for RakeServer is to provide a means for production deployments to run Rake tasks in the background (e.g. via a cron) without needing to load the application environment from scratch each time a task is executed. It may also be useful for remote invocation of Rake tasks, but that is not the main goal.

$ cd /path/to/my/rails/app
$ rake-server environment
$ rake-client db:migrate