CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3herokucronruby-on-rails-3.2
at.
at.

Reputation: 52580

A pulse or cron job for Rails app running in Heroku

I need some code executed once per day. Can be more than once a day and missing a day isn't the end of the world. That code will make sure users get some bonus points based on certain criteria. I'll keep track if they've already received the bonus points so it doesn't double up..

Some simple cron job calling a particular controller once in a while is perfect:

curl http://localhost/tasks/pulse

Of course a real crontab entry works great. Or is there an internal mechanism for this kind of thing in Rails? I'm using the latest stable Rails (currently 3.2.9).

The only wrinkle is this needs to work in Heroku too.

I just noticed Heroku's Scheduler. Looks great for Heroku. I can just run those tasks in my dev/test environment manually. Is this the best way to handle pulses/cron jobs in Rails? With rake tasks? Easy to incorporate running rake tasks in tests?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 478

Answers (3)

Merouane Amqor
Merouane Amqor

Reputation: 63

Here's a quick example of how you can set it up, and how i'm currently using it on a prod environment

Add the sidekiq and sidekiq-cron gems to your Gemfile:

gem 'sidekiq'
gem 'sidekiq-cron'

Create a worker class for your tasks:

class RakeTaskWorker
  include Sidekiq::Worker
  def perform(task)
    output = `bundle exec rails #{task} 2>&1`
    status = $?.exitstatus
    if status.zero?
      Sidekiq.logger.info("Rake task '#{task}' executed successfully.")
    else
      Sidekiq.logger.error("Rake task '#{task}' failed with status #{status}: #{output}")
    end
  end
end

Define your cron job in config/schedule.yml:

daily_bonus_worker:
  cron: "0 0 * * *"
  class: "RakeTaskWorker"
  args:
    - "generate:daily_bonus"

https://github.com/sidekiq-cron/sidekiq-cron

Upvotes: 0

C.J. Bordeleau
C.J. Bordeleau

Reputation: 307

The Heroku Scheduler works great and is easy to set up!

Upvotes: 1

cih
cih

Reputation: 1980

You could check out this gem called whenever its a Ruby gem that provides a clear syntax for writing and deploying cron jobs. It's well maintained, not used it on Heroku myself but worth a look.

You can do loads of stuff like

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

Upvotes: 0

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