Cron job not working in Whenever gem

Grant David Bachman picture Grant David Bachman · Sep 25, 2011 · Viewed 22.3k times · Source

I have an application that contains a bunch of tasks, and every day I want to run a cron job that creates a DayTask for each Task in the database. A Task has_many DayTasks and these daytasks are what users will be checking off every day. I'm using the whenever gem but it doesn't seem to be running at all. Any ideas?

config/schedule.rb

every 1.day, :at => "12:01am" do
  runner "Task.generate_tasks_for_day"  
end

Task.rb

  def generate_tasks_for_day
    Task.all.each do |task|
      task.day_tasks.create(:target_date => Date.today)
    end 
  end 

result of running the 'whenever command'

1 0 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/grant/rails_projects/GoalTwist && script/rails runner -e production '\''Task.generate_tasks_for_day'\'''

Note: I've been changing the times in config/schedule.rb every time I want to test run it.

Answer

damoiser picture damoiser · Nov 6, 2012

Finally I have solved how to run the gem Whenever. It's working good on production, but not in development mode (I think that to working good in dev mode you must do some tricks).

Then, these are the processes to do:

  1. install the gem
  2. write your scheduler.rb file
  3. push to the remote server
  4. login to the remote server (for example with ssh)
  5. see if whenever is good uploaded by running in terminal: whenever
  6. update whenever crontab by running: whenever --update-crontab
  7. restart the server crontab (for example in Ubuntu server): sudo service cron restart
  8. check if crontab is good implemented on the server: crontab -l

That's it!

Personally, I prefer to set up my crons directly from the server:

  1. Edit the crontab: crontab -e
  2. Append my cron (e.g. every day at 5:00 AM - can be little different for not-Linux-based server):
    0 5 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /path_to_my_app/current && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake my_cron_rake'
  3. Check if good implemented: crontab -l
  4. Done