Why are some rake tasks missing?

Question

All of the db:test:* rake tasks are missing from my rake -T listing, but I am still able to call them normally. What could cause this?

Answer 1

Apparently the Rails team decided that rake -T gave too much output; many of the descriptions of the Rake tasks are commented out. See https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/29acc17 and https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/9838156 for an example (which includes some tasks from db:test:*).

Answer 2

I feel that they could have made a separate switch for listing all commands as well. But until that is done, I recommend using rake -P as it will list all the available commands and their dependencies -sadly without descriptions-, which is a bit overdoing the job. If you are on Linux like OS then using grep on the list will give you a more refined list.