How do I run Ruby tasks that use my Rails models?

Question

I have a Rails app with some basic models. The website displays data retrieved from other sources. So I need to write a Ruby script that creates new instances in my database. I

Answer 1

I'd suggest creating custom rake tasks (lib/task/foo.rake). This give you easy access to most of the functionality of your rails app.

namespace :foo do
  desc 'do something cool'
  def something_cool
     test = MyModel.new
     test.name = 'test'
     test.save
  end
end

Then:

$ rake -T foo
rake foo:something_cool       # do something cool

You can even run the tasks via a cronjob.