Rant - Flexible, Ruby based make

Similar to make, the rant command line tool reads a file called Rantfile, which contains task definitions. Unlike make, however, a Rantfile is just a valid script written in the Ruby programming language. Since Ruby comes with many useful libraries and is portable across many different operating systems, it's very easy to write portable Rantfiles.

Striking features:

• Defining custom tasks.
• Automated packaging, testing and RDoc generation for Ruby applications and libraries.
• Creation of a monolithic script tailored to the needs of a specific project which can be used instead of an Rant installation - users don't need to install Rant.
• Creating gzipped tar and zip archives -- without installing additional software.
• Optional recognition of file changes based on MD5 checksums instead of file modification times.
• Support for compiling C# sources and resources
• Dependency checking for C/C++ source files (integrated makedepend replacement).

Getting started

1. Install Ruby

Issue the command: % ruby --version
which prints the Ruby version number you've installed. If it isn't equal or higher to 1.8.0, get a newer version from the Ruby homepage or the One-Click Installer for Windows.

2. Install Rant

Issue the command: % gem install --remote rant
which should download and install Rant. If you don't have the gem command, download the package from RubyForge, unpack it and run % ruby install.rb.

3. Read the documentation

If you want to start with the basics, continue here.

If you want to get an overview, continue here.