I have a Rails task: should I use script/runner or rake?

Question

For ad hoc Rails tasks we have a few implementation alternatives, chief among which would seem to be:

script/runner some_useful_thing 

and:

rake some:other_useful_thing 

Which option should I prefer? If there's a clear favourite then when, if ever, should I consider using the other? If never, then why would you suppose it's still present in the framework without deprecation warnings?

Answer 1

The difference between them is that script/runner boots Rails whereas a Rake task doesn't unless you tell it to by making the task depend on :environment, like this:

task :some_useful_task => :environment do   # do some useful task end 

Since booting Rails is expensive, it might be worth skipping if you can avoid it.

Other than that, they are roughly equivalent. I use both, but lately I've used script/runner executing a script separately more.