Rails: Why am I getting uninitialized Constant for a rake task, Rails 4.1.8

Question

I have a problem when I do:

namespace :xaaron do   task :get_roles do     roles = Xaaron::Role.all     puts roles   end      task :get_role, [:name] do |t, args|     role = Xaaron::Role.find(args[:name].parameterize)     puts role   end end 

The first task will work fine. I can even add binding.pry and run Xaaron::Role and get information about Roles back. But the second task fails with:

NameError: uninitialized constant Xaaron::Role 

I run each task in my main app because these tasks are inside an engine, using:

bin/rake xaaron:get_roles` and `bin/rake xaaron:get_role 

I can run bin/rails c in the main application that uses the engine and run Xaaron::Role and get information about Roles table.

Why is the second one failing but the first one is not? Is there scoping with arguments?

Answer 1

I'm not sure why either works, but if this is Rails and those are Rails models, your tasks should depend on the environment:

task :get_roles => [ :environment ] do 

By depending on the :environment task, it first loads Rails.

Also see: What's the 'environment' task in Rake?.