I'm Jerry Wohlgemuth.

I recently made the mistake of writing a rake task and, when I had duplicate logic across two of the tasks, decided to pull it out into a helper method inside the namespace block. I also gave it a general name, update_foo. This first task ran and worked fine.

namespace :foo do
  desc 'Updates foo'
  task :update, [:foo] => [:environment] do |_, args|
    foo = Foo.find_by_bar(args[:foo])
    update_foo(foo)
  end

  desc 'Updates all foos'
  task update: [:environment] do
    Foo.all.each { |foo| update_foo(foo) }
  end

  def update_foo(foo)
    do_something
  end
end

Then, I had another set of tasks that also shared similar logic and had an update_foo helper method. I ran the second task and was baffled when it didn't work.

After some debugging, it became clear that the helper method of the same name, in the other rake task was being called. update_foo was being defined globally and was overwritten by definition inside the other rake task. Instead of doing this, I should've extracted this common logic into its own class.