What's the 'environment' task in Rake?

Question

According to \"Custom Rake Tasks\":

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


        

Answer 1

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".

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.