CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsdockercron
Ken J
Ken J

Reputation: 4562

Rails 5 Regular Tasks Without Cron

I'm new to Rails so I'm not sure if this is a stupid question but...

I have to run regular tasks to populate data to my Rails app. Today I use the whenever gem to create Cron entries to run these tasks on my system. I want to migrate my Rails app to Docker so that I can scale it more easily. I know that in Drupal(PHP) there is Poorman's Cron which uses requests to drive schedules.

Is there a way to implement scheduling inside Rails without using Cron or a better way of managing regular tasks that works well with Rails?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1632

Answers (2)

Esben Damgaard
Esben Damgaard

Reputation: 318

Yes, I created https://github.com/Ebbe/arask to keep stuff simple.

No need to install anything (other than the gem) or setup anything outside of rails. No background process, except for the actual job.

Add gem 'arask' to your Gemfile, run bundle install, rails generate arask:install and rails db:migrate.

Now you can setup your tasks in the file config/initializers/arask.rb:

arask.create script: 'puts "IM ALIVE!"', interval: :daily
arask.create task: 'my:awesome_task', interval: :hourly
arask.create task: 'my:other_awesome_task', interval: 2.hours

The tasks will automatically run if the server is running.

Upvotes: 3

max
max

Reputation: 101811

Is there a way to implement scheduling inside Rails without using Cron or a better way of managing regular tasks that works well with Rails?

Cron is pretty much the go to tool for running scheduled activities on *nix system and most gems actually leverage cron under the hood, in fact avoiding cron is probably a lot more work unless you want to use a third party service.

One of the new features of Rails 5 is ActiveJob:

Active Job is a framework for declaring jobs and making them run on a variety of queuing backends. These jobs can be everything from regularly scheduled clean-ups, to billing charges, to mailings. Anything that can be chopped up into small units of work and run in parallel, really.

It can be used with several backends:

Upvotes: 1

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