How can you load the Rails environment from CloudCrowd actions?

Question

I'm writing an "action" for CloudCrowd which needs access to the Rails environment (for some ActiveRecord stuff) but the standard means of loading the environment is resulting in fishy errors.

I tried each of the following at the top of my action .rb file:

require(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../..', 'boot'))

and

require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../../environment")

When I try to start the node I get this error:

»crowd node
Starting CloudCrowd Node on port 9063...
Missing the Rails 2.3.2 gem. Please `gem install -v=2.3.2 rails`, update your RAILS_GEM_VERSION setting in config/environment.rb for the Rails version you do have installed, or comment out RAILS_GEM_VERSION to use the latest version installed.

And I of course do have the gem installed:

»gem list | grep -i rails
rails (2.3.4, 2.3.2, 2.2.2, 1.2.6)

Answer 1

Somebody from @documentcloud saw my plea and helped me work through it. Had to prefix the action script with this:

RAILS_GEM_VERSION = nil
RAILS_ROOT = File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../../..'))
RAILS_ENV = ENV['RAILS_ENV'] || 'development'

if CloudCrowd.node?
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'activerecord'
  ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
  require File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../..', 'environment'))
end

Answer 2

Nice! I've actually had some trouble with your RAILS_ROOT path and replaced '../../..' with '../..'. Also, since you've already declared the RAILS_ROOT constant, you could chop off a few things in the environment requirement. Here's my version:

RAILS_GEM_VERSION = nil
RAILS_ROOT = File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../..'))
RAILS_ENV = ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = ENV['RACK_ENV']

if CloudCrowd.node?
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'activerecord'
  ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
  require "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/environment"
  # and if you need to import 
  # anything from lib just go ahead and
  require 'my_custom_lib/name_of_file'
end