Programatically remove a task by name in Rake

rake_remove_task.rb

# Monkeypatch to remove tasks
module Rake
  def self.remove_task(task_name)
    Rake.application.instance_variable_get('@tasks').delete(task_name.to_s)
  end
end

# Example: disable all of the tasks in the db namespace
namespace :db do |ns|
  ns.tasks.each do |task|
    Rake.remove_task(task)
  end
end