Do you recognize this situation? You run a rake task (for example, rake spec), which you know it's going to take some time (e.g. 3 or 4 minutes). You say "Great moment to check what's going on on Twitter". 10 minutes and 3 tabs with blog posts later, you realize you were actually waiting for a task to finish, a task which finished long before. Bye, bye, productivity!!
rakegrowl tells you when your rake tasks end via Growl.
You need to have Growl and growlnotify installed to get the notifications. Anyway, rakegrowl is harmless if there is no Growl.
To install rakegrowl, which is packaged as a gem, you need to run:
gem install rakegrowl
In order to get your notifications, you have to run rake this way:
$ rake -rubygems -r rakegrowl this:task that:another:task
You can even setup your system so you can run rake as usual and still get your notifications, by adding this into your .bashrc file:
alias rake='rake -rubygems -r rakegrowl'
From now on, whenever you run a rake task, you'll get a notification when it finishes.
Copyright (c) 2010-2011 Sergio Gil. MIT license, see LICENSE for details.