Rufus Scheduler not running when rails server runs as daemon - ruby-on-rails

I have a a rails app that is using Rufus Scheduler. When I turn on the rails server with:
rails s --port=4000
Rufus scheduler runs its tasks. If I run the rails server with:
rails s --port=4000 --daemon
Rufus no longer does its tasks. I added a couple of log messages. Here is the schedule code:
class AtTaskScheduler
def self.start
scheduler = Rufus::Scheduler.new
p "Starting Attask scheduler"
scheduler.every('5m') do
# test sending hip chat message
issue = Issue.new
issue.post_to_hipchat("Starting sync with AtTask","SYNC")
p "Launching Sync"
Issue.synchronize
end
end
end
Hipchat never gets the message from the scheduler and the log never gets the statement "Launching Sync".
Any ideas on what may be causing this?

There is documentation of this issue in the rufus-scheduler docs:
There is the handy rails server -d that starts a development Rails as
a daemon. The annoying thing is that the scheduler as seen above is
started in the main process that then gets forked and daemonized. The
rufus-scheduler thread (and any other thread) gets lost, no scheduling
happens.
I avoid running -d in development mode and bother about daemonizing
only for production deployment.
These are two well crafted articles on process daemonization, please
read them:
http://www.mikeperham.com/2014/09/22/dont-daemonize-your-daemons/
http://www.mikeperham.com/2014/07/07/use-runit/
If anyway, you need something like rails server -d, why not try bundle exec unicorn -D
instead? In my (limited) experience, it worked out of the box (well,
had to add gem 'unicorn' to Gemfile first).

Related

Rufus Scheduler not running in production Nginx/Passenger

I have a Rails app running on Nginx/Passenger. It has a rufus-scheduler cron job that runs in the background and sends out notifications via email.
When I start up the app in production on Nginx/Passenger, the emails don't get sent. In the production logs it doesn't show any logs for rufus-scheduler.
I'm stuck in this problem. Not able to debug the scheduler.
But after reading some issues & articles, I am sure that scheduler thread is kill on production by passenger.
Code snippet:
Example:
require 'rufus-scheduler'
scheduler = Rufus::Scheduler::singleton
scheduler.cron '0 12 * * *' do
puts "alert scheduler called at"
puts Time.now
system("rake trigger:email RAILS_ENV=production")
end
Kindly help me on the conf for the passenger/nginx that allow the scheduler thread to run & trigger the mails.
You need to set this in passanger config block
passenger_spawn_method direct;

Is there is something like cron in rails application on windows?

I'm trying to use cron in my application to send mails every week but I think it doesn't work on Windows.
Does anybody knows any equivalent to cron solution that works on Windows?
Windows equivalent of Unix's cron is a "Task Scheduler". You can configure your periodical task there.
Purely Ruby solution
If you want a purely Ruby solution look into:
rufus-scheduler - it's Windows cron gem.
crono - it's a in-Rails cron scheduler, so it should work anywhere.
Web services - there are plenty of free online services that would make a request to a given URL in specific time periods. This is basically a poor man's cronjob.
I recommend taking a look at Resque and the extension Resque-scheduler gems. You will need to have a resque scheduler process running with bundle exec rake resque:scheduler and at least one worker process running with QUEUE=* bundle exec rake resque:work.
If you want these services to run in the background as a windows service, you can do it with srvany.exe as described in this SO question.
The above assumes you are ok with installing Redis - a key-value store that is very popular among the Rails community as it can be easily used to support other Rails components such as caching and ActionCable, and it is awesome by itself for many multi-process use cases.
Resque is a queue system on top of Redis that allows you to define jobs that can be executed asynchronously in the background. When you run QUEUE=* bundle exec rake resque:work, a worker process runs constantly and polls the queue. Once a job is enqueued, an available worker pops it from the queue and starts working on it. This architecture is quite scalable, as you can have multiple workers listening to the queues if you'd like.
To define a job, you do this:
class MyWeeklyEmailSenderJob
def self.perform
# Your code to send weekly emails
end
end
While you can enqueue this job to the queue yourself from anywhere (e.g. from a controller as a response to an action), in your case you want it to automatically be placed into the queue once a week. This is what Resque-scheduler is for. It allows you to configure a file such as app/config/resque_schedule.yml in which you can define which jobs should be enqueued in which time interval. For example:
send_weekly_emails:
cron: 0 8 * * Mon
class: MyWeeklyEmailSenderJob
queue: email_sender_queue
description: "Send weekly emails"
Remember that a scheduling process has to run in order for this to work with bundle exec rake resque:scheduler.
thanks guys , actually i tried rufus scheduler gem and it worked for me , i guess it's the best and easier solution

Rails - Passenger and Nginx preventing rufus-scheduler from scheduling in production mode

I am using Rufus Scheduler to call a function once every 2 minutes.
In development mode when running rufus scheduler with WEBrick the system works as expected and my function is called every 2 minutes.
When I deploy to our production server which runs passenger and NGINX the scheduler does not call the function anymore.
I am assuming this is to do with threads, with the scheduler running on a separate thread that might be getting destroyed on our production server.
I have seen answers for similar issues when using Passenger and Apache together, but I am unable to come up with a solution for running rufus scheduler with passenger and NGINX in production mode.
Any help would be appreciated.
Code below setting up rufus
# :nocov:
require 'rufus-scheduler'
include TwitterParser
unless ENV['NODAEMON'] || Rails.env != 'production'
scheduler = Rufus::Scheduler.new
TwitterParser.set_up
scheduler.every '2m' do
begin
TwitterParser.parse_tweets
rescue Twitter::Error::TooManyRequests => error
puts 'Too Many Twitter requests, resets in: ' + error.rate_limit.reset_in.to_s
end
end
end
# :nocov:
Please read the rufus-scheduler FAQ.
https://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-scheduler#faq
It contains links to (old) articles about Passenger + rufus-scheduler
Amog them, this SO answer by one of the authors of Passenger might help:
rufus cron job not working in Apache/Passenger
Have a good time.

Rails Active Job usage , or running watcher thread automatically with Rails

It's nice to see Rails 4.2 come with Active Job as a common interface for background jobs. But I can't find how to start a worker in the document. It seems that the document is still immature (e.g. the right version of Sneakers is only referred to in Rails' Gemfile), so I'm not sure if the "running workers" part is not in Active Job or just not mentioned in docs.
So with Active Job, do I still need to manually start the job watcher threads like sidekiq or in my case, rake sneakers:run? If so, where should I put these commands to let rails server run these parallel tasks automatically in a develop environment?
ActiveJob is just a common interface. You still need the backend gem, and you still need to launch it separately from your server (it is a separated process, which is the objective).
Sample using resque:
In the Gemfile:
gem 'resque'
In the terminal, launching a worker:
bin/resque work
The case is similary when using sidekick, delayed job or something else.
If you want to launch the server & worker in a single command, you can create a short bash script for it, but I would advise not doing so: having two separated console helps to watch what is happening on each side (web app & worker).
A better solution would be to use the foreman gem to manage starting & stopping your process.
You can create a simple Procfile with the processes to start:
web: bundle exec rails s
job: bundle exec resque work
And then just start both using foreman:
foreman start
By default, foreman will interleave the logs of the process in the console, but this can be configured.
You still have to run the job thread watcher.

Keeping a rake job running

I'm using delayed_job to run jobs, with new jobs being added every minute by a cronjob.
Currently I have an issue where the rake jobs:work task, currently started with 'nohup rake jobs:work &' manually, is randomly exiting.
While God seems to be a solution to some people, the extra memory overhead is rather annoying and I'd prefer a simpler solution that can be restarted by the deployment script (Capistrano).
Is there some bash/Ruby magic to make this happen, or am I destined to run a monitoring service on my server with some horrid hacks to allow the unprivelaged account the site deploys to the ability to restart it?
For me the daemons gem was unreliable with delayed_job. Could be a poorly written script (was using the one on collectiveidea's delayed_job github page), and not daemons fault, I'm not really sure. But for whatever reason, it would restart inconsistently on deployments.
I read somewhere this was due to it not waiting for the process to actually exit, so the pid files would get overwritten or something. But I didn't really bother to investigate. I switched to the daemons-spawn gem using these instructions and it seems to be much more reliable now.
The delayed_job docs suggest that you use a monitoring service to manage the rake worker job(s). I use runit--works well.
(You can install it in the mode where it does not replace init.)
Added:
Re: restart by Capistrano: yes, runit enables that. Just do a
sudo sv kill delayed_job
in your Capistrano recipe to kill the delayed_job worker. Runit will then restart it with your newly deployed code base.
I have implemented small rake task that restarts the jobs task over and over again:
desc "Start a delayed_job worker in a endless loop to prevent exits."
task :jobs => :environment do
while true
begin
Delayed::Worker.new(:min_priority => ENV['MIN_PRIORITY'],
:max_priority => ENV['MAX_PRIORITY'],
:quiet => false).start
rescue Exception => e
puts "Exception occured (#{e})"
end
puts "Task jobs:work exited, clearing queue and restarting"
sleep 1
Delayed::Job.delete_all
end
end
Apparently it did not work. So I ended with this simple solution:
for (( ;; )); do rake jobs:work --trace; done
get rid of delayed job and use either whenever or resque

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