Solving "cannot remove Object::ClassMethods"

Most likely you run rake and your code is causing an exception which is not the one shown in your terminal.

Rails tries to catch this exception and clean up constants but -- while it's still booting up -- fails on this which causes another exception:

Copyrake aborted!
cannot remove Object::ClassMethods

Running rake with the --trace parameter will give you no love; the backtrace is useless in most cases.

Try these approaches:

First: Check if there is a helpful error message

• Have a look at the environment's log file instead
• Open up a Rails console (may give you more information than the logs)

If you're lucky it's a helpful message, like a missing database. Unfortunately, the error often is too generic and you don't know where it originates from.

If that won't work: Dig really deep

In any case, Rails usually breaks on the blame_file! call where it tries to show you the source of the error. You can (temporarily) hack Rails' require call in .../gems/activesupport-2.3.12/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb and show the error before Rails gets it into its hands:

Copy  def require(file, *extras)
    if Dependencies.load?
      Dependencies.new_constants_in(Object) { super }
    else
      super
    end
  rescue Exception => exception
    puts "ERROR: '#{exception}' in #{file}" # This is new.
    exception.blame_file! file
    raise
  end

When you rake --trace after that you may see some "no such file to load" issues (which usually stay hidden) but should also see the file causing the actual error.