Faster rake tasks in Rails

Rake tasks are awesome for project specific scripts among other things, but in rails projects they suck for short tasks that don’t depend on rails. Here’s why:

1. You type rake my_task_that_doesnt_depend_on_the_rails_environment
2. Rails loads (10-20 seconds)
3. Only then does your superfast rake task run. Boring!

Looking for a solution I came across Xavier Shay’s attempt to deal with this.

His solution is to maintain a list of rails tasks which depend on Rails (like rake db:migrate) in your Rakefile, and have the Rails environment autoload when any of those tasks are called. Any tasks in lib/tasks will now run nice and fast.

This helped, but it means you have to maintain a list of all the Rails tasks you may want to use (and any rake tasks included by gems used in your app) in your Gemfile, or remember to append LOAD_RAILS=1 to your rake call to force rails to load.

Because I can’t be bothered trying to remember which of my tasks depend on rails, I modified his Rakefile to autoload the Rails environment if Rake can’t find a task (on the assumption that it’ll be hidden in Rails/gem somewhere. This has the side-benefit of loading the :environment task, that any tasks which require the Rails environment depend on, if and when needed.

If you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them, the gist is here.