How can I force Rails to load all models?

Question

Rails does model loading on demand. For a rake task that I'm writing, I need to be able to iterate over all ActiveRecord::Base instances (which is possible with ActiveRecord::Base.send(:subclasses)).

However, for the above to work, they have to already be loaded. Anyone know of a way to force all models to load? Ideally I'd like to not have to poke through app/models since I'd like to catch models added by plugins as well.

Answer 1

Not sure if I got you right, but I put this on top of my rake task: task :task_name => :environment do

Answer 2

rails 2:

Dir[Pathname(RAILS_ROOT) + 'app/models/**/*.rb'].each do |path|
  require path
end

rails 3:

Dir[Rails.root + 'app/models/**/*.rb'].each do |path|
  require path
end

another way:

(ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables - %w[schema_migrations]).each do |table|
  table.classify.constantize rescue nil
end