Rails 4.1 ships with spring preloader, and
New Rails 4.1 applications will ship with “springified” binstubs. This means that bin/rails and bin/rake will automatically take advantage of preloaded spring environments.
which means that the “springified” bin/rake will attempt to preload the app, which in turn will attempt to run the initilizers resulting in the problem you’re seeing.
To fix / work around this you want to run the initial setup rake tasks without spring. One way to achieve that is to run it with bundler instead:
bundle exec rake db:create