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.

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.

• 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

• 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

After checking out the repo, run:

bundle install

To run tests:

bundle exec rspec

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

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