Requiring a gem inside a gem's rake task

Question

I'm using jeweler to create a gem for Rails 3. The gem contains a rake task and one of the things it does is wiping the DB, so I'm using 'database_cleaner'.

I'm specifying the gem dependency inside the gem's Gemfile

gem 'database_cleaner'

And in the Rakefile

Jeweler::Tasks.new do |gem|
  ...
  gem.add_dependency 'database_cleaner'
end

Then inside lib I've created the files my_gem.rb and tasks.rake. As follows, my_gem.rb:

module MyGem
  class Railtie < Rails::Railtie
    rake_tasks do
      load 'tasks.rake'
    end
  end
end

And tasks.rake:

task :my_task do
  DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
  DatabaseCleaner.clean
end

I installed the gem (sudo rake install), created an empty rails project and added the gem dependency in the rails' Gemspec (gem 'my_gem'). But when I try to run rake my_task I get the error uninitialized constant DatabaseCleaner.

I've also tried adding require 'database_cleaner' from inside the task, which raises the error no such file to load -- database_cleaner and gem 'database_cleaner' that raises the error database_cleaner is not part of the bundle. Add it to Gemfile..

Is there a way to solve this without adding gem 'database_cleaner' to the rails project's Gemspec?

Thanks

UPDATE (adding the link to the source code): https://github.com/jordinl/dummy_tasks

Answer 1

Here is what I did to make it work:

tasks.rake

require 'database_cleaner'
require 'dummy_tasks'

namespace :db do
  task :dummy => :environment do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
    DatabaseCleaner.clean                                             
    Rake::Task['db:seed'].invoke    
  end
end

There may be a more elegant way to do this, but this should at least prevent you from having to add the database_cleaner gem to the app Gemfile