Is Rails's "delayed_job" for cron task really?

Question

delayed_job is at http://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job

Can delayed_job have the ability to do cron task? Such as running a script every night at 1am. Or run a script every 1 hour.

If not, what are the suitable gems that can do that? And can it be monitored remotely using a browser, and have logging of success and error?

Answer 1

I worked on a project that tried to use DelayedJob to schedule future items. It sucked.

Instead I recommend you use the whenever gem:

http://github.com/javan/whenever

Whenever is a Ruby gem that provides a clear syntax for defining cron jobs. It outputs valid cron syntax and can even write your crontab file for you. It is designed to work well with Rails applications and can be deployed with Capistrano. Whenever works fine independently as well.

Code looks like this (from github)

  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

  every :hour do # Many shortcuts available: :hour, :day, :month, :year, :reboot
    runner "SomeModel.ladeeda"
  end

  every :sunday, :at => '12pm' do # Use any day of the week or :weekend, :weekday
    runner "Task.do_something_great"
  end

Here's a RailsCast video on how to use it.

And the corresponding ASCIICast.