Question

I have been trying to run rake but it seems that ever since I updated ruby gems rake is failing.

This morning I ran:

gem update --system

And ever since, rake has been failing with the following error:

$ rake db:migrate                                                                                 
rake aborted!
undefined method `specifications' for "/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1":String
/home/cknadler/projects/ecommerce/Rakefile:7:in `<top (required)>'
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

I have been reading about this problem and it seems that there is a problem with rake 0.9.x that breaks rails but when I check my rake version, I am running 0.8.7:

$ rake --version                                                                                    
rake, version 0.8.7

I have tried uninstalling rake and reinstalling it, using bundler, etc and at this point I am pretty stuck. Thanks in advance.

Edit:

My Rakefile (located in my app root directory)

# Add your own tasks in files placed in lib/tasks ending in .rake,
# for example lib/tasks/capistrano.rake, and they will automatically be available to Rake.

require File.expand_path('../config/application', __FILE__)
require 'rake'

Ecommerce::Application.load_tasks

Answer 1

I would suggest using the bundled binary version of rake to avoid this issue.

bundle exec rake db:migrate

If you installed your bundle using binstubs (bundle install --binstubs) then you can also use the bin version of rake which is equivalent to the bundle exec rake command:

bin/rake db:migrate

P.S: I would also recommend using RVM instead of installing Ruby using sudo for all users. This allows you to keep more modular ruby and gem installation.