As one of my projects has increased in complexity I’ve started to use the environment.rb and the other specific environments to set up mocks and other tidbits.

Locales.current = Locales.locale_for_timezone(RegionPreference.find_or_initialize.timezone) rescue nil

This was all fine and dandy until I tried to set the app on a new machine.

$ rake db:schema:load RAILS_ENV=staging
(in /usr/home/voicebox)
rake aborted!
SQLite3::SQLException: no such table: region_preferences:
SELECT * FROM region_preferences LIMIT 1

What happened?

db:schema:load depends on the environment task, which loads your Rails environment. The same goes for db:migrate. My environment was being loaded and trying to call the database before db:schema:load could do it’s job.

Lesson: Accessing your database from within your environment set up is evil.

You can’t assume your database exists, or is an up-to-date version, when your environment’s are being executed.

The fix? Moving the code to the model where it should have been in the first place.

module Locales
  def self.current
    @@current ||= locale_for_timezone(RegionPreference.find_or_initialize.timezone)
  end
end