Question

I have a Rails 3.2.8 app which is running nicely in development on my machine, with Postgres as the db backend for ActiveRecord. However, when I deploy my code to an EC2 server, either via capistrano or by rsync’ing my project to the EC2 instance, rake no longer lists any of the db: tasks:

$ rake -T
rake about              # List versions of all Rails frameworks and the environment
rake assets:clean       # Remove compiled assets
rake assets:precompile  # Compile all the assets named in config.assets.precompile
rake doc:app            # Generate docs for the app -- also available doc:rails, doc:guides, doc:plugins (options: TEMPLATE=/rdoc-t...
rake load_gml           # Load GML source files into the environment database
rake log:clear          # Truncates all *.log files in log/ to zero bytes
rake middleware         # Prints out your Rack middleware stack
rake notes              # Enumerate all annotations (use notes:optimize, :fixme, :todo for focus)
rake notes:custom       # Enumerate a custom annotation, specify with ANNOTATION=CUSTOM
rake rails:template     # Applies the template supplied by LOCATION=(/path/to/template) or URL
rake rails:update       # Update configs and some other initially generated files (or use just update:configs, update:scripts, or u...
rake routes             # Print out all defined routes in match order, with names.
rake secret             # Generate a cryptographically secure secret key (this is typically used to generate a secret for cookie se...
rake stats              # Report code statistics (KLOCs, etc) from the application
rake test               # Runs test:units, test:functionals, test:integration together (also available: test:benchmark, test:profil...
rake test:recent        # Run tests for {:recent=>"test:prepare"} / Test recent changes
rake test:single        # Run tests for {:single=>"test:prepare"}
rake test:uncommitted   # Run tests for {:uncommitted=>"test:prepare"} / Test changes since last checkin (only Subversion and Git)
rake time:zones:all     # Displays all time zones, also available: time:zones:us, time:zones:local -- filter with OFFSET parameter,...
rake tmp:clear          # Clear session, cache, and socket files from tmp/ (narrow w/ tmp:sessions:clear, tmp:cache:clear, tmp:sock...
rake tmp:create         # Creates tmp directories for sessions, cache, sockets, and pids

rake -P also reports no db: tasks.

I’m guessing it’s some sort of dependency problem, but I can’t see what that would be since I’m declaring all my gem dependencies in a Bundler Gemfile. Postgres 9.2.1 is installed and working, but even if it wasn’t I don’t get why the rake task would vanish.

Any clues as to what’s going on gratefully received!

Answer 1

And it turns out to be stupid-simple: I had copied the deploy.rb file from a previous project which didn’t use ActiveRecord, so I hadn’t set the role db:. I’m still not sure why that meant that the rsync’ed copy of my project also didn’t have any rake db: tasks, but I’m not going to spend any more cycles worrying about that.