Question

(I’m not using Rails)

I have a rake task that sets the environment that was passed in like:

rake some:task ENV=test

My task is:

  desc "environment"
  task :environment do
    env = ENV['ENV'] || 'development'
  end

Now if I have a task like:

 desc "t1"
  task :t1 [:environment] do
    puts env
  end

It fails saying env isn’t known, why is that?

I thought the dynamic nature of ruby would do this:

When running the environment task, it would create env variable, and since it is a dependancy that variable would be in scope of my other tasks.

How can I have it so it is in scope?

Note: in case it matters, some of my tasks are in different .rake files, just mentioning if that changes anything.

Answer 1

A Rakefile is just like any other Ruby code. Block variables (variables created inside do-end) are local to the block.

To make your env variable visible in other blocks just assign it to an instance variable instead:

@env = ENV['ENV'] ...
...
puts @env

Or you could use a constant too:

MYENV = ENV['ENV'] ....
...
puts MYENV

Or create the variable outside the block scope before you use it:

env = nil

task :environment do
  env = ENV['ENV'] ....
end

task :othertask ... do
  puts env
end