A cron job for rails: best practices?

ruby-on-rails rake daemon cron runner
jes5199 picture jes5199 · Nov 12, 2008 · Viewed 106.1k times · Source

What's the best way to run scheduled tasks in a Rails environment? Script/runner? Rake? I would like to run the task every few minutes.

Answer

Jim Garvin picture Jim Garvin · Jun 16, 2011

I've used the extremely popular Whenever on projects that rely heavily on scheduled tasks, and it's great. It gives you a nice DSL to define your scheduled tasks instead of having to deal with crontab format. From the README:

Whenever is a Ruby gem that provides a clear syntax for writing and deploying cron jobs.

Example from the README:

every 3.hours do
  runner "MyModel.some_process"       
  rake "my:rake:task"                 
  command "/usr/bin/my_great_command"
end

every 1.day, :at => '4:30 am' do 
  runner "MyModel.task_to_run_at_four_thirty_in_the_morning"
end

Related questions

Rails DB Migration - How To Drop a Table?

I added a table that I thought I was going to need, but now no longer plan on using it. How should I remove that table? I've already run migrations, so the table is in my database. I figure rails …

Read More
Purge or recreate a Ruby on Rails database

I have a dev Ruby on Rails database full of data. I want to delete everything and rebuild the database. I'm thinking of using something like: rake db:recreate Is this possible?

Read More
Difference between rake db:migrate db:reset and db:schema:load

The difference between rake db:migrate and rake db:reset is pretty clear in my head. The thing which I don't understand is how rake db:schema:load different from the former two. Just to be sure that I am …

Read More