I'm okay with everything above this line. I think it's a great idea to wrap the daemons gem depending logic into a rake task and make things like 'bundle exec rake server:start' a possibility. I'm not quite sure why an additional server task is needed that automagically (depending on the presence of the pid file) decides to start or stop the server. It kinda seems to conflict with the 'there should be one way to do something and that way should be blindingly obvious' design principle.

On a somewhat similar note, I'm also wondering why we need a rake task to encapsulate an rm command that deletes the log file. I can understand wrapping logic that relies on a the deamons gem, but why wrap a simple unix command? Is there a use case that you've come across that was made easier by doing this? I feel like I might be missing something obvious :(.