My hovercraft is full of eels

I converted a Ruby project over to use Bundler for gem dependency management today. For the most part it worked flawlessly except, that is, when the CI build ran for the first time after the conversion:

LoadError: no such file to load -- vendor/gems/environment

Stacktrace:
tasks/spec.rb:8:in `require'
tasks/spec.rb:8:in `<top (required)>'
...
Rake aborted!

The short story: The spec task definition needed the RSpec gem to be loaded but it wasn’t until after all tasks had been defined.

Now, I could single out the spec task definition and ensure it was loaded last but that would mean adding a bunch of code to my otherwise trivial Rakefile. The other option was to somehow defer the creation of the spec task until actually needed. After a bit of searching I couldn’t find anything particularly useful so I rolled my own:

namespace :spec do

  desc "Run specifications"
  task :run => :define do
    Rake::Task[:_run].invoke
  end

  task :define do

    require 'spec/rake/spectask'

    Spec::Rake::SpecTask.new(:_run) do |t|
      t.spec_opts << "--options" << "spec/spec.opts" if File.exists?("spec/spec.opts")
    end

  end

end

The spec:run task depends on the spec:define task to create a “hidden” spec:_run task to actually do the work.

The nice thing about this all the ickiness is hidden – remove the tasks/spec.rb file and nothing else really cares – and means I can treat the spec task like any other when creating my task dependencies.

As always, YMMV.