Question

I am using ‘rake 0.8.7’ in my Rails project and yet when I still try either rake routes or bundle exec rake routes I still get

rake aborted!
uninitialized constant Rake::DSL

If I try putting the recommended require 'rake/dsl_definition' in my Rakefile it gives me

rake aborted!
no such file to load -- rake/dsl_definition

So, I’m stuck at how to fix this. I can’t run any rake commands…

Answer 1

That error sounds like you are using something in your app that requires a more recent version of rake than 0.8.7. Believe Rake::DSL only showed up in rake 0.9.0.

The most recent version of Rails advertises itself as working with rake as old as 0.8.7. Perhaps it’s wrong. More likely you’re using some other gem in your project which requires a more recent rake.

Why and how are you using rake 0.8.7 in your project instead of a more recent one? Unless you’ve locked to rake 0.8.7 in your gemfile (or are using some other gem that insists on 0.8.7), you should be able to run bundle update rake to upgrade to the most recent version of rake.

If you have multiple versions of rake installed, you may have to run bundle exec rake ..., as you noted. But in your project, bundle exec rake still gets you 0.8.7, because for whatever reason that’s the version of rake your Gemfile.lock is currently set to — but your project is using something that wants a more recent version.