Running foreman from a rake task

Question

I have the following Rake task:

namespace :foreman do
  task :dev do
    `foreman start -f Procfile.dev`
  end
end

desc "Run Foreman using Procfile.dev"
task :foreman => 'foreman:dev'

The forman command works fine from the shell, however when I run rake foreman I get the following error:

/Users/me/.gem/ruby/2.0.0/gems/bundler-1.5.2/lib/bundler/rubygems_integration.rb:240:in `block in replace_gem': foreman is not part of the bundle. Add it to Gemfile. (Gem::LoadError)
    from /Users/me/.gem/ruby/2.0.0/bin/foreman:22:in `<main>'

Forman specifically states:

Ruby users should take care not to install foreman in their project's Gemfile

So how can I get this task to run?

Answer 1

If you must make it work via rake, try changing the shell-out via backtick to use a hard-coded path to the system-wide foreman binary

`/global/path/to/foreman start -f Procfile.dev`

You just need to use 'which' or 'locate' or a similar tool to determine the path that works outside your bundler context. If you are using rbenv, then this might be sufficient :

$ rbenv which rake
/home/name/.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p448/bin/rake

I hope that helps you move forward.