Here is a simple rake task which will instantiate all of your Active Record models, provided that they are located in the RAILS_ROOT/app/models directory. Interestingly, all plugin models are instantiated by default when you run the task, for instance, if you are using the Acts As Taggable On plugin, you have access to Tag, Tagging without having to include the plugin models directory path to the task.
namespace :load_ar do desc "load up all active record models" task :models => :environment do models = ActiveRecord::Base.send(:subclasses) Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/models/*"].each do |file| model = File.basename(file, ".*").classify models << model unless models.include?(model) end end endIf your're in the console, you can get all the load paths for your Active Record models with the following from the API.
Rails.configuration.load_paths.each do |path| p path end
Just finishing up brewing up some fresh ground comments...