How do rails environments work?

Rails environments are wonderful. But they can be a bit confusing do to some inconsistency in terms of which environments are affected when you run certain rake tasks.

After some digging I think I figured it out.

db:create – affects both development and test environments
db:drop – only affected development (though this has changed)
db:migration – runs against your current environment (usually development)

hence the need for
db:test:prepare (to apply migrations against your test environment)

So in summary, you always need to specify the environment your rake tasks run against

$ rake foo RAILS_ENV=test

With the exception of db:create and db:drop above.

Links that helped:

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/2419
http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=6648
http://jasonseifer.com/2010/04/06/rake-tutorial