Rails scheduled SMS sender - ruby-on-rails

Question

I want send an SMS each 5 minutes to my users. At the moment, my application sends an SMS during the creation of an account.
# users_controller.rb
def create
#user = User.new(user_params)
if #user.save
#user.send_activation_email
#user.send_daily_sms
flash[:info] = "Veuillez contrôler votre boîte mail pour activer votre compte."
redirect_to root_url
else
render 'new'
end
end
# user.rb
def send_daily_sms
# put your own credentials here
account_sid = '**********************'
auth_token = '**********************'
# set up a client to talk to the Twilio REST API
#client = Twilio::REST::Client.new account_sid, auth_token
#client.account.messages.create({
:from => '**********',
:to => '***********',
:body => 'Salut',
})
end
I already have scheduled mails working in my project by doing this :
# schedule.rb
every :day, :at => '12pm' do
rake "email_sender_daily"
end
# My task
task :email_sender_daily => :environment do |_, args|
User.find_each do |user|
UserMailer.daily_mail(user).deliver_now if user.daily == true
end
end
# My UserMailer
def daily_mail(user)
#user = user
mail to: user.email, subject: "Mail journalier"
end
I'm showing you this because, with the UserMailer, I know how to access it from an other file. Here, I'd like to do the exactly the same for SMS, but how can I access the method that is in my Model ? If not, where can I put this method to be able to access it from my rake task ?

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.
It looks to me like you have all the parts you need. If send_daily_sms is a method in your User class then all you require is a rake task like so:
task :sms_sender_daily => :environment do |_, args|
User.find_each do |user|
user.send_daily_sms if user.daily == true
end
end
And then your schedule.rb would look like:
every :day, :at => '12pm' do
rake "email_sender_daily"
rake "sms_sender_daily"
end
I would warn that sending sms messages to all your users via one method that calls the API over and over again is somewhat fragile. If one message fails to send because of a timeout or some other error then the task will throw an error and not be able to complete sending all the messages.
I'd suggest sending both emails and sms messages by workers using a background queue, like Rails's ActiveJob. If you are on the latest Rails 4.2 then you can use a gem called Textris that works much like ActionMailer and then you could define a UserTexter class like this:
class UserTexter < Textris::Base
default :from => YOUR_NUMBER
def daily_sms(user)
#user = user
text :to => #user.phone_number
end
end
Then your tasks could look like this:
task :email_sender_daily => :environment do |_, args|
User.find_each do |user|
UserMailer.daily_mail(user).deliver_later if user.daily == true
end
end
task :sms_sender_daily => :environment do |_, args|
User.find_each do |user|
UserTexter.daily_sms(user).deliver_later if user.daily == true
end
end
Check out the Textris documentation for more on how to use the gem.
Let me know if this helps at all!