Rails model fails

Question

I have a data model which has the name 'rack'. When I generate a model with this name in my Rails project, I get errors when launching the server.

load_missing_constant: uninitialized constant ActiveRecord (NameError)

I am not using Rack Middleware and I don't see 'rack' as a reserved word in Ruby or Rails. Is there something I'm missing here?

Answer 1

Did you change your config/environment.rb file to remove ActiveRecord?

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  #...

  # Skip frameworks you're not going to use. To use Rails without a database,
  # you must remove the Active Record framework.
  config.frameworks -= [ :active_record ]

  #...
end

Answer 2

What version of rails are you running?

As of 2.3, rails runs on Rack

Answer 3

Well, if you're using a recent version of Rails, you actually are using Rack middleware, since that's how several Rails components are implemented these days (Rails as a whole is, in fact, a Rack application now). As such, there's already a constant named Rack, so when you try to create an ActiveRecord model called Rack, there's a collision. I'm not sure why you get that particular error, though - when I tried it on a toy project, I got this error trying to run the migration:

jhyland@john-hylands-macbook: ~/tmp/foo $ rake db:migrate
(in /Users/jhyland/tmp/foo)
rake aborted!
Rack is not a module

Regardless, I strongly suspect that this is the underlying cause of your problem. Would it be possible to change the name of your model?