If I’m thinking about my Rails app in terms of a hexagonal architecture, I find it also pays to consider every rake task to be an Adapter. Thus:

The true picture is a little more complicated than that, but the principal ideas are there. The rake task acts as a mediator, allowing me to send messages to (ie. call methods on) my application’s objects.

In general, we want our Adapters to be as thin as possible (and no thinner). That’s because the Adapter code inherently depends on some framework, and that fact will usually make its tests difficult and/or slow. We still need those tests, but we want to have as few paths through the Adapter as possible, and thus fewer tests of the Adapter, so that the total test complexity and test run-time are minimized.

As an example, suppose I have a rake task that validates the posts and comments on my blog:

I want to maximize the unit tested percentage of the code executed during the task, so I move the code out of the rake task and into a new domain object. That new object “is” the task, and usually my rake tasks can then slim down to a single line of code.

Stripping all of the code out of the rake task and moving it into a domain object is analogous to the approach currently being explored by @mattwynne and @tooky in their Rails controller refactorings. In my own code I call these task objects “use case objects”. Currently I keep them in a UseCases namespace within app/models, although I’m open to exploring alternative conventions. One of the nice side-effects of this is that I sometimes discover synergies between the work done by rake tasks and that done by controllers. By pulling Use Case objects out of both kinds of adapter I’m creating a convention for some of the code that turns out to be cleaner, more (quickly) testable, and which names things better.

Please let me know if you try this — or indeed if you’re already doing it.