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I'm writing a Rails 3 plugin that uses another Rails 3 plugin that I recently wrote. Let's call them July and August. So in August's gemspec, I add the line:

s.add_dependency "july", "~> 0.0.1"

and I run bundle install. Then I create some models and fixtures. Next I need to migrate the database:

$ cd test/dummy
$ rake august:install:migrations
$ rake db:migrate

Now, the August (the plugin I am creating) tables are in the development and test databases, but the July tables are not. But my August tables have foreign keys to my July tables, so before I can run any tests, I need to create the July tables and write appropriate fixtures. I would expect to run rake -T and see 

rake august:install:migrations
rake july:install:migrations

but all I see is the august rake task. So how do I create the July database tables (other than creating a new migration, which would violate DRY since I've already done that in my July codebase)?

Isaac Betesh
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1 Answers1

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The Dummy App has to be directly dependent on "july" for it to load "july"'s rake tasks. So I need to include it in the Gemfile, not the gempspec. However, putting it in Gemfile won't force real (non-dummy) apps to install july when I bundle install after putting "august" in their Gemfile/gemspec.

So I need to include it in both places--in the Gemfile for the rake task (and this can be in a :development group), and in the gemspec (using add_dependency or add_runtime_dependency) to force installation of the dependency. That's the solution, but I don't understand why.

I tried explaining my thoughts on this in my comment here but wasn't really able to pinpoint any logic that explains this design methodology. Could someone please explain the true reason?

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Isaac Betesh
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