With the recent changes a new concept has been introduced: Tasks. Well, tasks are not entirely new as tasks were already used by bake2 (which no longer exists). But now tasks are for shells what components are for controllers.

Tasks are placed in app/vendors/shells/tasks if they are application-specific resp. in vendors/shells/tasks if they are general-purpose tasks. Like shell scripts, task classes have to extend the “Shell” class, but the class name has to end with “Task”. Here a simple example of a task:

// vendors/shells/tasks/test.php
class TestTask extends Shell {

    function execute() {
        // do something
    }
}

In the core tasks (and in this test task) the main function is called “execute”, but you are free to use any name you want.

The test task can now be used in the shell script in the following way:

// vendors/shells/demo.php
class DemoShell extends Shell {
    var $tasks = array('Test');

    function initialize() {
        // empty
    }

    function main() {
        $this->Test->execute();
    }
}

Happy baking :)

The 1.2 release now comes with some test cases. You find instructions about how to run them in the announcement. As I prefer to run the tests via command line, I wrote a simple bake task to execute those core tests. You can find it in the downloads section. Its usage is:

php bake2.php coretest  // runs all tests
php bake2.php coretest libs/view  // runs all tests in the folder cake/tests/cases/libs/view and its subfolders
php bake2.php coretest group no_database  // runs the specified group test

At the moment it is recommended to run the group test “no_database”, because the tests for AclNode and DboSource will fail (they are not included in that group test).

Happy baking :)

The AppTask creates the application skeleton. The usage is:

php bake2.php app alias /path_to_app_dir

It does almost the same as:

php bake.php -project /path_to_app_dir

The differences are:

• bake2 doesn’t ask you any questions
• you can define an application alias

The idea of the application alias is to make it easier to work with multiple applications. So you can use just the alias to refer to a specific application. The alias/application mapping is stored in apps.ini, in the root folder of your cake installation.

After the AppTask you will usually execute the DbconfigTask to create the database configuration. This task allows a lot of parameters, but most of them are optional. Here is its usage:

php bake2.php dbconfig alias database username [password] [-c=config name] [-d=database driver]
                                               [-persistent] [-h=host[:port]] [-p=prefix]

That’s it. Feedback and bug reports are welcome :)

The following call:

php bake2.php sqlscripts users profiles profiles_users

creates app/config/sql/create.sql:

CREATE TABLE users (
  id INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  created DATETIME,
  modified DATETIME,
  PRIMARY KEY (id)
); 

CREATE TABLE profiles (
  id INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  created DATETIME,
  modified DATETIME,
  PRIMARY KEY (id)
); 

CREATE TABLE profiles_users (
  profile_id INT(11) NOT NULL,
  user_id INT(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (profile_id, user_id)
);

and app/config/sql/drop.sql:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS users;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS profiles;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS profiles_users;

That’s it. You can find the code in the download section. Happy baking :)