Rake task error on Windows: No such file or directory

Question

I'm trying to run a Rake task on my computer running Windows but I'm having problem with the file paths. The rakefile was originally written by a user running Mac and OSX.

def compile
  `cp -r app/assets/images dist/`
  ...
end

Running the task above gives me an error: Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - cp -r app/assets/images dist/

The folders are there and the following command works in the terminal:

cp -r .\app\assets\images dist\

However, changing the command in the rake file to the following doesn't work:

`cp -r .\\app\\assets\\images dist\\`

Is there some way to run the original rakefile on my Windows machine? That would be the best. If that's not possible, how can I update the rakefile to make it work?

Answer 1

You'll have to modify the Rakefile. Main issue is that cp is an UNIX command and Windows uses copy / xcopy. I'm not a Windows expert, but I believe xcopy /E is for recursive copy.

I believe you can verify that Ruby will validate files paths by running:

RUBY_PLATFORM
# => "x64-mingw32" I'm on Windows too :(

File.exists? File.join('app', 'views', 'submissions.erb')
# => true
File.exists? 'app/views/submissions.erb' 
# => true
File.exists? 'app\views\submissions.erb' 
# => true
File.exists? 'app\\views\\submissions.erb'
# => true

The best solution IMO is to use FileUtils:

require 'fileutils'

FileUtils.cp_r('app/assets/images', 'dist/')