Use `bin/rails` rather than `rake` for deployment tasks

[jcoyne]

Because this is the documented way of running migrations https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_migrations.html#running-migrations

and this runs the migrations in the current bundle context if they are using bundler, without any extra capistrano gems required.

[mathagician]

@jcoyne Is it a suggestion or any code changes is required? can u guide ?

[jcoyne]

Yes, this was a feature request. I'm pretty sure the existing command is here:

rails/lib/capistrano/tasks/migrations.rake

Line 25 in 6c8603f

execute :rake, fetch(:migration_command)

but I'm not sure how to replace :rake with bin/rails as I'm not sure that method accepts non-Symbol arguments.

[matt17r]

I stumbled across this issue after executing a remote rake task with Capistrano and being warned that I'll need to execute it with bin/rails from Rails 8.1 onwards.

My current Capistrano task is:

desc "Invoke arbitrary rake tasks on the server"
task :invoke, [:command] => "deploy:set_rails_env" do |task, args|
  on primary(:app) do
    within current_path do
      with :rails_env => fetch(:rails_env) do
        rake args[:command]
      end
    end
  end
end

I naively thought it might be as simple as switching to execute and calling bin/rails directly with execute "bin/rails #{args[:command]}"

...but that fails because it can't find bin/rails. I've since learned from the SSHKit Readme that this is expected behaviour (within and with don't work when the execute command is a string instead of a symbol).

This doesn't address the OP's question/suggestion of switching to bin/rails for everything but I am now able to run a one off command using rake or bin/rails (via bundle exec*) using:

namespace :invoke do
  desc "Invoke arbitrary rake task(s) on the server"
  task :rake, [:command] => "deploy:set_rails_env" do |task, args|
    on primary(:app) do
      within current_path do
        with :rails_env => fetch(:rails_env) do
          rake args[:command]
        end
      end
    end
  end

  desc "Invoke an arbitrary bin/rails command on the server"
  task :rails, [:command] => "deploy:set_rails_env" do |task, args|
    on primary(:app) do
      within current_path do
        with :rails_env => fetch(:rails_env) do
          execute :bundle, :exec, :rails, args[:command]
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

*According to this (fairly old) StackOverflow answer, bundle exec eventually calls the rails binstub. The last path in that chain hasn't changed so I'm assuming this answer is still valid for Rails 8