Can you access environment variables in a rake task?

Yes, you can access environment variables in a Rake task in Ruby. Rake tasks run in the context of your Ruby application, so they have access to all the environment variables defined in your system or within the context of your application.

To access an environment variable in a Rake task, you can use the ENV constant, which is a Ruby hash representing all the environment variables.

Here's how you can access environment variables in a Rake task:

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# lib/tasks/sample_task.rake

namespace :my_namespace do
  task :my_task do
    # Accessing environment variables
    my_variable = ENV['MY_VARIABLE']

    puts "Value of MY_VARIABLE: #{my_variable}"
  end
end

In this example, we define a Rake task named my_task in the namespace my_namespace. The task accesses an environment variable named MY_VARIABLE using ENV['MY_VARIABLE'] and prints its value.

When you run the Rake task, you can pass the environment variable in the command line:

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rake my_namespace:my_task MY_VARIABLE=value

Replace value with the actual value you want to set for the environment variable. The Rake task will then access the environment variable and display its value.

Note that if you are using Rails, Rails also provides a convenient way to access environment variables through the Rails.application.credentials object or using the dotenv gem to load variables from a .env file. These methods can be useful if you want to keep your sensitive environment variables in a secure manner.