How to fix "uninitialized constant" in a Rake task

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?.