Just to follow up on this old topic; here’s what I think a current Rakefile (since a long ago) should do there. It’s an upgraded and bugfixed version of the current winning answer (hgimenez):
desc "Testing environment and variables"
task :hello, [:message] => :environment do |t, args|
args.with_defaults(:message => "Thanks for logging on")
puts "Hello #{User.first.name}. #{args.message}" # Q&A above had a typo here : #{:message}
end
This is how you invoke it (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/v4.2/command_line.html#rake):
rake "hello[World]"
For multiple arguments, just add their keywords in the array of the task declaration (task :hello, [:a,:b,:c]...
), and pass them comma separated:
rake "hello[Earth,Mars,Sun,Pluto]"
Note: the number of arguments is not checked, so the odd planet is left out:)