What does bundle exec rake db:migrate mean? Or just bundle exec rake <command> in general?
I understand that bundle takes care of maintaining things in the Gemfile. I know what the word "exec" means. I understand that rake maintains all the different scripty things you can do, and I know that db:migrate is one of those. I just don't know what all these words are doing together. Why should bundle be used to execute rake to execute a database migrate?
When you directly run the rake task or execute any binary file of a gem, there is no guarantee that the command will behave as expected. Because it might happen that you already have the same gem installed on your system which have a version say 1.0 but in your project you have higher version say 2.0. In this case you can not predict which one will be used.
To enforce the desired gem version you take the help of bundle exec command which would execute the binary in context of current bundle. That means when you use bundle exec, bundler checks the gem version configured for the current project and use that to perform the task.
I have also written a post about it which also shows how we can avoid using it using bin stubs.
