I am not sure if this question is of the correct format for SO.
I have a rails app with deployment on Heroku. In development I am using the "crono" gem to send a simple email out every week to remind users of various things. I can see how to use this in production with Heroku. There is almost nothing on this in a google search. Therefore my question is: "what is the best way to implement a simple weekly job in a rails app that is deployed on Heroku. Heroku has "scheduler" but this is a "best effort" add on that can claim to be reliable (according to their documentation)
Thanks
There's two ways to achieve what you want:
1. Use the Heroku scheduler (I would)
Honestly it's just so simple to set up, I would use this. It's also extremely cheap because you only pay for the dyno while the job is running. After it's run Heroku destroys the dyno (it's a one off dyno)
The best way to implement it is to have you background jobs callable by a rake task, and simply have the scheduler call that.
If you have a time interval Heroku doesn't support, simply handle that in your code. For example if you want to send e-mails once a week, have a timestamp to record when the last email was sent. Run the scheduler once a day and just check to see if it's ok to send another email, if not do nothing.
2. Use some kind of scheduler gem
There's a bunch of them out there. For example, rufus.
In this case, you'd write your rufus jobs. You would then need to have a worker dyno always running for rufus, this is much more expensive.
You'd tell the dyno to run rufus and keep running rufus by specifying the command rufus needs in your procfile. Something like:
scheduler: rake rufus:scheduler # Add rake task for rufus scheduler process
(credit for the above snippet How to avoid Rufus scheduler being called as many times as there are no.of dynos?)
first of all, I'm a newbie.
I just made a single ruby file, which crawls something on the certain web and put data into my google spreadsheet.
But I want my crawler to do its job every morning 9:00 AM. Then what do I need? Maybe a gem and server? Please let me know as detail as a beginner got understood enough...
I have tested my file on local (OS X) so far and have no server. Thank you!
If your computer is going to be on everyday at 9am, you could schedule it using cron.
If your computer is not going to be on everyday at 9am, you can simply buy a cheap VPS server from digitalocean, linode or one of the many other VPS hosting providers and setup a cron job there just like you did with your local computer.
The cron job would look like this:
0 0 9 1/1 * ? * ruby /path/to/my/ruby/file.rb
You can read more about setting up cron jobs here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/2368/how-do-i-set-up-a-cron-job
We have an app running on heroku that we need to put into maintenance mode for an hour during the night while Amazon performs maintenance on the RDS instance we are using.
Does anyone know of a good way to schedule this?
I could create a cron job on one of the machines in the office to do it, but that seems a bit inelegant.
I'd rather do it from within the application itself, perhaps using delayed_job (which we are already using), or from a scheduled task. However I can't find any documentation about interacting with the Heroku management system from within a running application. Am I just not searching for the right thing?
I am about to deploy my 1st Rails app. I am stuck as I don't know what exactly I need to do. I know about Heroku, AWS, Capistrano and the like, but don't know exactly what they do, and what their benefits are.
I kinda know some things, but all are blurry and ambiguous since I have no formal training and learn as I go. So basically I need someone to explain the general anatomy of Rails deployment.
Something like: 'To make any app working on the web you need the following components... Ways to make this component work with Rails are following. Alternatives are these. These are pros and cons.' Not into too much detail, but general and comprehensive 101 guide.
The reason you may be confused is that there are a number of ways to do it. :D
Heroku provides one of the easiest solutions for basic deployments. You don't need capistrano, just git. (they provide a toolset to assist). Just git push heroku master. Also nice is that a simple deployment on heroku is free; you can pay for more power when you actually need it.
But if you need a little extra functionality that heroku can't provide, you have to host elsewhere, such as a private virtual host.
Capistrano is a set of recipes that help build a deployment environment, sort of like rake tasks. It does so in a very organized manner and allows for easy rollbacks. You define the hosts, their roles, and then the recipes use ssh and scp to set up the evironment. (the server also has to be ready to accept rails applications, through something like passenger)
The Rails and Ruby World(s) are pretty noisy, so I understand your confusion.
At the end of the day, you need your rails app on a server.
Now, even the term server can be a little confusing, because it is generally associated with
A remote machine
A program handling HTTP requests.
(for example webrick or thin which you start when you are developing on your computer and type rails s)
In your case you actually want a remote computer (hooked up to the net) which is running a program called a server to process HTTP requests and forward these to your app which in turn produces a request...
Heroku will help you out with that. (However Heroku adds several layers of abstraction to the mix. So it is not like you have one computer sitting somewhere in the heroku office, serving your application.) Heroku is dead simple to setup with git and rails.
And in the end all that is need to get your app to the "remote server" is a simple git push.
Read the beginner articles on https://devcenter.heroku.com/
I would also suggest for now: Forget about Capistrano.
Oh and you can think of AWS (or probably S3) as some sort of external hard drive, which your app can use to store larger pieces of data (like images, videos etc.)
I have a deployment guide with a good shell script which support Nginx + RVM + Unicorn: deploy_rails
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A little about myself. I am 24 years old, I graduated from NC State with a Master's in Analytics last year. Statistics, mathematics, that kind of thing. I don't have a strong programming background, which is pretty important for my question. If I say anything that doesn't make any sense, that is why. Ever since graduation, I have been working full time on a Rails app with a few other people. My programming experience is mainly Ruby on Rails (1.2 years.) I know R, SAS (statistical languages, not helpful for this question.)
Obviously, that means it has been over a year in development, and we aren't done yet. The main developer is an excellent programmer, just that he has a full time job already, and does this app in his spare time. Due to him not having enough time recently, I have been given practically full responsibility for the app.
We have it deployed on Slicehost right now. The app is at a point where we don't need to program anything else (unless we think of more features.) The reason I am asking if we should migrate to Heroku is that it seems to me that Heroku is a simple platform to which to deploy. Slicehost seems too complicated for me. The other developer dealt with it, and not me. I looked at how to deploy the app on Heroku, and it looks like I would be able to do it. We need our app to scale if it needs to, which Heroku offers. As far as money, I would start it at the minimum (free) and see how it goes. I can pay for additional features if I need to.
We are using Redmine for project management and repository (not git, which I think we need to use on Heroku.) Is git similar to Redmine? Is it easy to use?
Right now, on Slicehost, we have 4 daemons (constantly running processes.) We have 8 delayed_job workers. I know the command line to start the daemons and delayed_job workers. Would these work on Heroku?
I am wondering if I can still use RAILS_ENV=production script/console with Heroku.
The user interface is a javascript file. In development mode, if I do script/server in a terminal, and go to http://localhost:3000 in a browser, I can see it. Would Heroku load this page the way I want?
We have a working website for the app, with our own domain name. I don't really know what DNS is, so I probably wouldn't be able to link the Heroku app to it, unless there is an easy way. I think Heroku links it to appname.heroku.com as a default.
Based on my programming experience, would Heroku be easy enough for me to use, should I find another job, or should I commit seppuku?
Yes, you should definitely deploy your application in heroku. To do this, this is what you will need to do:
Make sure you have git installed in your computer
Create a heroku account here
Install the heroku gem and do the rest as mentioned in this page
Track your application with git, and create your heroku application as shown here
After you do this, heroku will provide you with a URL for your application, such as http://blah-bleep-123.heroku.com. Now, the next step would be to associate your domain to this heroku URL.
Configure your domain DNS Server as shown in this page. Mind you, after you change your DNS, it might take upto 48 hours for it to work. You can change your domain DNS by logging into the site where you bought your domain, for e.g. godaddy.com, hostingdude.com, etc.
Add this code to your ApplicationController. You can follow this from this page as well
class ApplicationController
before_filter :ensure_domain
APP_DOMAIN = 'www.mydomain.com'
def ensure_domain
if request.env['HTTP_HOST'] != APP_DOMAIN
# HTTP 301 is a "permanent" redirect
redirect_to "http://#{APP_DOMAIN}", :status => 301
end
end
end
Make sure you migrate all your database in heroku, by doing heroku rake db:migrate
After you have completed all these steps, you should be good. Check out your domain URL, everything should work pretty :).
If you see any errors in your page, you can view the log by heroku logs
You can access console as heroku console
With features as these, heroku is very convenient to work with.
Please let me know if you need more help.
It seems to me like you should seriously consider Heroku. I have used it for weekend projects and we use it at work as well, quite successfully. Deployment is a breeze, you don't have to worry about setup (for the most part) and system administration. It's super easy to add modules and "pay as you grow".
As for your needs, you could (I believe) run your redmine on Heroku itself, being a rails app. The only thing is that you mention you use Redmine as "repository" and I'm not sure I understand what you mean, since Redmine is not a version control system. Redmine has integration points for various VCS (SVN, git, Mercurial, CVS, and others). Yes, Heroku uses git and that is what you would need to use in order to push code to the server. If you're familiar with Mercurial, it's pretty similar.
For delayed jobs, Heroku offers free cron jobs that run once a day and hourly ones for a fee (see cron add-on). There is also a delayed job plugin (see this) but I don't have any experience with it.
You should be able to access the Rails console (see heroku docs). Just run 'heroku console' and voila, you're there.
If your app works by running script/server, it should work out of the box in heroku too.
As for the DNS, getting it to work with your custom domain is not hard. Out of the box, you can access your app with appname.heroku.com, to set up your custom domain check heroku docs here, but basically you have to add the custom domain add-on (free unless you want subdomains), configure heroku to respond to your domain's requests (couple of simple commands) and set your DNS provider to point to Heroku (there's even a short video in the docs on how to do this with GoDaddy).
The only drawback I've seen with Heroku, and it's not a huge one, is that if your app does not receive any traffic for an extended period of time, the instances kind of "go to sleep", making the next request to arrive somewhat slow (sometimes even timing out), but once the instance is awake, everything is good to go.
All in all, I think Heroku is a great way to take a ton of the burden off of you as a dev and making a lot of things really easy to implement without having to go into the nitty gritty of setting up a server. The downside: once you start growing, it can become somewhat expensive, but hey, if you're growing it probably means you have the cash now to hire someone that can take care of the nitty-gritty.
You might also want to take a look at this blog post which compares Slicehost and Heroku
Best of lucks
YES, go for it.
If you've managed thus far on the strength of your 'programming experience' then you'll be fine. Have some confidence and ship something! To quote Paul Graham:
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you're wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.
The functionality you outline is easily replicated and well documented and it's free to start with. What else could you ask for?
If you have the free time, you might as well sign up for a free account and give it a shot.
HOWEVER, this is going to come with some pretty severe headaches.
Version control will be one, since heroku uses git, but another one that no one's mentioned yet is that your 12 processes ("dynos" in heroku speak) would cost you $35 * 11 = $385 per month! You can set up an hourly cron for $3/month that will flush your delayed_job queue (instead of having workers running at all times), but is that going to be adequate? (If you're running 8 workers, I'm guessing not). This may or may not require some code changes.
Once you get it set up, deployment and admin is really easy (nonexistent), but it'll cost you if you start needing new features.
YES, go for it.
Its good deployment environment any its fast and easy scale out and scale in feature.
even you can use for your testing or demo usage its provide you free account usage of 1 dynos per app.
List of add-on tools available you can add as per your requirement.