Comments on: Scheduling tasks in Ruby / Rails

By: schedule jobs with ruby | keyongtech

schedule jobs with ruby | keyongtech — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:08:46 +0000

[...] windows scheduled jobs as i am having issue with it. You may want to take a look at this article http://www.igvita.com/2007/03/29/sch…in-ruby-rails/ [...]

By: John Mettraux

John Mettraux — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:07:07 +0000

Karthik,

the best place to ask questions about rufus-scheduler (ex openwferu-scheduler) is at http://groups.google.com/group/rufus-ruby

Best regards,

John

By: Karthik

Karthik — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:58:50 +0000

Thanks. Your post was really helpful. I used OpenWFEru gem for my requirement. But I have made it as a stand-alone ruby code. But I want it to run with my rails application. When I put the rb file in config/initializers, the server is not getting started because of this scheduler. Am I doing anything wrong? Or is there any other good way to achieve this?

By: Alfie

Alfie — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:04:39 +0000

Great, thanks. What I was looking for more in that question was where to put the .rb file that I write. I have since found that I should put it into the config/initializers folder and it works great. Thanks again for your help.

By: Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 03:27:36 +0000

Alfie, you have to instantiate / write some Ruby code to get rufus-scheduler to work. Take a look at one of the examples in my original post. Unlike cron, or other utilities, it’s not a command line utility. (Though cron is definitely a viable alternative)

By: Alfie

Alfie — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:33:08 +0000

I found John’s rufus-scheduler gem and I seem to understand how the code works, but what I don’t understand is where you put it and how you ensure that it is running. I was originally performing update tasks manually with custom rake tasks, but I’d like to schedule them.

The task is to update a few database tables from parsed text files that change daily.

Thanks for the write-up. It has already answered a lot of questions for this beginner.

By: sijo

sijo — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:17:59 +0000

For scheduling what I am doing is to write a task and call it periodically using cron

By: Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:42:36 +0000

Hmm, very cool. Haven’t seen the CronEdit gem before!

By: viz

viz — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:14:26 +0000

Sometimes the old good *nix Cron jobs can be just the right thing. And instead of writing external scripts (as you noted) you can use CronEdit gem. Basically, it provides CRUD for cron jobs comfortably from within your code.

By: Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 01:14:40 +0000

Peter, I would add a number of calls to ‘logger.info’ within your workers to ensure that the tasks are not crashing. Basically, see if you can get any response from backgroundrb. Likewise, double check your config in your Rails app. BackgrounDRB can be rather picky when it comes down to syntax.

Pamthree, yes indeed, that’s exactly what any of the above solutions are designed for. Anytime you need to do an asynchronous request/task, you should use a separate thread and/or process.