Lai Yu-Hsuan
Lai Yu-Hsuan

Reputation: 28091

What's the 'environment' task in Rake?

According to "Custom Rake Tasks":

desc "Pick a random user as the winner"
task :winner => :environment do
  puts "Winner: #{pick(User).name}"
end

As far as I know, the :winner => :environment means "do environment before winner". But what's environment? When should I use it?

I tried rake -T, but in the list I couldn't find environment.

Upvotes: 150

Views: 82412

Answers (3)

Sameer C
Sameer C

Reputation: 2797

You can get access to your models, and in fact, your whole environment by making tasks dependent on the environment task. This lets you do things like run rake RAILS_ENV=staging db:migrate.

See "Custom Rake Tasks".

Upvotes: 152

Lars Levie
Lars Levie

Reputation: 825

Including => :environment will tell Rake to load full the application environment, giving the relevant task access to things like classes, helpers, etc. Without the :environment, you won't have access to any of those extras.

Also => :environment itself does not make available any environment-related variables, e.g. environment, @environment, RAILS_ENV, etc.

Upvotes: 50

MrDanA
MrDanA

Reputation: 11647

It loads in your Rails environment so you can actually use your models and what not. Otherwise, it has no idea about those things.

So if you made a task that just did puts "HI!" then you don't need to add the :environment task to the dependencies. But if you wish to do something like User.find(1) well that will need it.

Upvotes: 54

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