ERROR: 'rake/rdoctask' is obsolete and no longer supported

Question

Out of the blue, I started getting the following error message:

(in /Users/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125@mysql2/gems/rails-0.9.5)
rake aborted!
ERROR: \'rake/         


        

Answer 1

Just to help anyone else who has had this hassle. If you are like me, then your problem is that the current version of rails is 4 and you are wanting to use an older version like 3.0.7

If you install rails fresh to learn it ,say, and the tutorial you are using is for a 3.0.x version of rails OR your job requires the use of the older version of rails.. then you can get into this hole.

In my case I got a 3.0.7 rails project dumped on me and was told to learn rails and make some enhancements to this code.

so, I just started learning rails and was following the tutorial until I got this error when doing a 'rake db:migrate'

rake aborted!
ERROR: 'rake/rdoctask' is obsolete and no longer supported. Use 'rdoc/task' (available in RDoc 2.4.2+) instead.
/Users/pj/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448/gems/railties-3.0.7/lib/rails/tasks/documentation.rake:1:in `require'
/Users/pj/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448/gems/railties-3.0.7/lib/rails/tasks/documentation.rake:1:in `'
/Users/pj/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448/gems/railties-3.0.7/lib/rails/tasks.rb:15:in `load'
/Users/pj/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448/gems/railties-3.0.7/lib/rails/tasks.rb:15:in `block in '

This happened cos I was using an older version of rails.. in my case 3.0.7 If you run a 'bundle show', like I did then, you may see that you are using the rake version 10.0.0 or something like that...and you need to be running rake 0.9.2 ... which is where the problem is coming from..

The solution for me was to (a) add a gem to my gemfile and (b) to a bundle install

So, in my gemfile I added:

gem 'rake', '0.9.2'

Then did a

'bundle install'

Got this message:

You have requested:
  rake = 0.9.2

The bundle currently has rake locked at 10.1.0.
Try running `bundle update rake`

And so I did that...

bundle update rake.

And that went fine.

then when I did the'rake db:migrate' it just worked.

Hope this helps somebody. Vida.

PS: if you are new to rails, like me, and you inherit an older rails app then for gods sake NEVER run 'bundle update' or you will enter a world of pain. That command updates all your gems to the very latest versions and you end up with a load of problems with incompatibilities. The only way out of it is if you are lucky enough to have git installed and can do a 'git checkout' to go back...