WebRake

WebRake is a Rails engine designed for production environments that provides a secure web interface for executing essential Rake tasks in your deployed Rails application. It includes HTTP basic authentication for security and automatically mounts at /rails/tasks without requiring any route configuration.

Purpose

This gem is specifically designed for production/deployed applications where you need quick access to:

  • Seed your database with db:seed
  • Run custom data population tasks (like sample_data)
  • Execute other custom maintenance tasks

Perfect for situations where you don't have shell access or need to quickly run tasks on deployed platforms like Render, Heroku, or similar services.

Features

  • Exposes db:seed and custom Rake tasks from lib/tasks/ directory
  • Web interface with one-click task execution
  • HTTP basic authentication for security
  • Real-time output capture (stdout and stderr)
  • Execution timing and status reporting
  • Clean, responsive UI
  • Zero configuration required for routes

Which Tasks Are Shown

WebRake displays:

  • The db:seed task for database seeding
  • Custom Rake tasks defined in your lib/tasks/ directory

System tasks (like db:migrate, db:drop, assets:precompile, etc.) are intentionally hidden for security reasons.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'web_rake'

And then execute:

bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

gem install web_rake

Configuration

Environment Variables

WebRake uses HTTP basic authentication to protect access to the rake task interface. Set these environment variables in your .env file or deployment configuration:

WEB_RAKE_USERNAME=your_username
WEB_RAKE_PASSWORD=your_secure_password

Important: Choose strong credentials, especially in production environments, as anyone with these credentials can execute rake tasks on your application.

Optional Ruby Configuration

You can also configure the credentials programmatically in an initializer:

# config/initializers/web_rake.rb
WebRake.configure do |config|
  config.username = 'custom_username'
  config.password = 'custom_password'
end

Note: Environment variables take precedence over Ruby configuration.

Usage

Once installed and configured, WebRake automatically mounts at /rails/tasks in your Rails application.

  1. Navigate to http://your-app.com/rails/tasks
  2. Enter your HTTP basic auth credentials
  3. You'll see a list of all available Rake tasks with descriptions
  4. Click "Run Task" on any task to execute it
  5. View the output, errors (if any), and execution time

How It Works

  • WebRake is a Rails engine that automatically mounts itself at /rails/tasks
  • It discovers all loaded Rake tasks in your Rails application
  • Tasks are executed in the same process as your Rails app
  • Output is captured using StringIO redirection
  • Tasks are automatically re-enabled after execution for repeat runs

Development

After checking out the repo, run:

bundle install

To run tests:

bundle exec rspec

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/firstdraft/web_rake.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.