It's reasonably clear:
-If I import a project from github in my www dir, then rake db:create/migrate work as expected and the site runs fine. -If I import a project from github to any other directory (including subdirectories of www) I get errors when running rake db:migrate (usually to do with plugin initialization).
Now, I've tried checking environment variables and .rvm's configuration files looking for a path to my www directory but I haven't come across any explicit mentions of it. I'm on Ubuntu and do have apache installed but I'm not trying to run rails with apache. Now the www dir I'm talking about isn't /var/www because I setup a different virtualhost on my machine to ~/www so it's odd that rails would focus on it by default. I don't exactly know what's going on but for now at least I know how to get sites going.
