Local rake tasks require development gems to be in production group

I have some rake tasks that I only perform locally. However since I refer to the some gem classes in rake tasks, this seems to require that the gem be installed and loaded on the production server. Among other things this increases deploy time and memory usage on the server.

This may or may not have to do with my setting:

config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"]

I have a number of lib files and subdirectories.

I guess my options are to

move all my lib files somewhere else and add that path to autoload_paths
try to exclude the tasks dir from autoload_paths
do something fancy in the rake tasks themselves (if possible) to avoid the need to have the gems present.
configure rake tasks to live somewhere else (seems like a bad idea)

This seems like a pretty common issue and probably has a common way to solve it or avoid it. What am I missing?

Solution

Maybe not the most exciting answer but I just moved the require 'dev_gem' inside the rake task block for that task.

namespace :elasticbeanstalk do
  desc 'Creates a new web & worker environment pair for testing'
  task :create do
    require 'aws-sdk-elasticbeanstalk'

     # Do stuff with beanstalk that we wouldn't from a production env
  end
end

This way the library only gets loaded when the rake task is invoked rather than when the rake task is defined.