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
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.
I usually just run "heroku run rake jobs:work" from the command line. The great thing about this apporach is that I get intimidate feedback on whether a job failed or not and what jobs are currently processing.
However, now I need to run "heroku ps:scale worker=1"
Is there a way to see what the worker is processing just like with the rake task via the command line?
You can use the heroku command like to access the log of the worker.
heroku logs -t --ps worker will show you what is currently being executed on your worker.
I also recommend to use gem workless which scales your worker up only when needed. This can save you a lot of money
You didn't say specifically what queue you are running, but it sounds like delayed_job. If so, you can install the delayed_job_web gem. Basic setup is as simple as adding it you your Gemfile and adding a route for it. Then you can browser to your site /delayed_job and manage the jobs.
As you can see from the attached image, I've got a couple of workers that seem to be stuck. Those processes shouldn't take longer than a couple of seconds.
I'm not sure why they won't clear or how to manually remove them.
I'm on Heroku using Resque with Redis-to-Go and HireFire to automatically scale workers.
None of these solutions worked for me, I would still see this in redis-web:
0 out of 10 Workers Working
Finally, this worked for me to clear all the workers:
Resque.workers.each {|w| w.unregister_worker}
In your console:
queue_name = "process_numbers"
Resque.redis.del "queue:#{queue_name}"
Otherwise you can try to fake them as being done to remove them, with:
Resque::Worker.working.each {|w| w.done_working}
EDIT
A lot of people have been upvoting this answer and I feel that it's important that people try hagope's solution which unregisters workers off a queue, whereas the above code deletes queues. If you're happy to fake them, then cool.
You probably have the resque gem installed, so you can open the console and get current workers
Resque.workers
It returns a list of workers
#=> [#<Worker infusion.local:40194-0:JAVA_DYNAMIC_QUEUES,index_migrator,converter,extractor>]
pick the worker and prune_dead_workers, for example the first one
Resque.workers.first.prune_dead_workers
Adding to answer by hagope, I wanted to be able to only unregister workers that had been running for a certain amount of time. The code below will only unregister workers running for over 300 seconds (5 minutes).
Resque.workers.each {|w| w.unregister_worker if w.processing['run_at'] && Time.now - w.processing['run_at'].to_time > 300}
I have an ongoing collection of Resque related Rake tasks that I have also added this to: https://gist.github.com/ewherrmann/8809350
Run this command wherever you ran the command to start the server
$ ps -e -o pid,command | grep [r]esque
you should see something like this:
92102 resque: Processing ProcessNumbers since 1253142769
Make note of the PID (process id) in my example it is 92102
Then you can quit the process 1 of 2 ways.
Gracefully use QUIT 92102
Forcefully use TERM 92102
* I'm not sure of the syntax it's either QUIT 92102 or QUIT -92102
Let me know if you have any trouble.
I just did:
% rails c production
irb(main):001:0>Resque.workers
Got the list of workers.
irb(main):002:0>Resque.remove_worker(Resque.workers[n].id)
... where n is the zero based index of the unwanted worker.
I had a similar problem that Redis saved the DB to disk that included invalid (non running) workers. Each time Redis/resque was started they appeared.
Fix this using:
Resque::Worker.working.each {|w| w.done_working}
Resque.redis.save # Save the DB to disk without ANY workers
Make sure you restart Redis and your Resque workers.
Started working on https://github.com/shaiguitar/resque_stuck_queue/ recently. It's not a solution to how to fix stuck workers but it addresses the issue of resque hanging/being stuck, so I figured it could be helpful for people on this thread. From README:
"If resque doesn't run jobs within a certain timeframe, it will trigger a pre-defined handler of your choice. You can use this to send an email, pager duty, add more resque workers, restart resque, send you a txt...whatever suits you."
Been used in production and works pretty well for me thus far.
Here's how you can purge them from Redis by hostname. This happens to me when I decommission a server and workers do not exit gracefully.
Resque.workers.each { |w| w.unregister_worker if w.id.start_with?(hostname) }
I ran into this issue and started down the path of implementing a lot of the suggestions here. However, I discovered the root cause that was creating this issue was that I was using the gem redis-rb 3.3.0. Downgrading to redis-rb 3.2.2 prevented these workers from getting stuck in the first place.
I've cleared them out from redis-cli directly. Luckily redistogo.com allows access from environments outside heroku.
Get dead worker ID from the list. Mine was
55ba6f3b-9287-4f81-987a-4e8ae7f51210:2
Run this command in redis directly.
del "resque:worker:55ba6f3b-9287-4f81-987a-4e8ae7f51210:2:*"
You can monitor redis db to see what it's doing behind the scenes.
redis xxx.redistogo.com> MONITOR
OK
1380274567.540613 "MONITOR"
1380274568.345198 "incrby" "resque:stat:processed" "1"
1380274568.346898 "incrby" "resque:stat:processed:c65c8e2b-555a-4a57-aaa6-477b27d6452d:2:*" "1"
1380274568.346920 "del" "resque:worker:c65c8e2b-555a-4a57-aaa6-477b27d6452d:2:*"
1380274568.348803 "smembers" "resque:queues"
Second last line deletes the worker.
In resque 2.0.0, here's one way that seems to work to remove only actually appearantly-dead workers in resque 2.0.0:
Resque::Worker.all_workers_with_expired_heartbeats.each { |w| w.unregister_worker }
I am not an expert in what's going, it's possible there's a better way to do this or that this will have problems. I'm just trying to figure this out too.
This seems to remove workers that haven't sent a "heartbeat" in much longer than expected from the resque worker list.
If the phantom worker was in a "running" state, then a new entry in the "failed" job queue will be created corresponding to phantom job.
I had stuck/stale resque workers here too, or should I say 'jobs', because the worker is actually still there and running fine, it's the forked process that is stuck.
I chose the brutal solution of killing the forked process "Processing" since more than 5min, via a bash script, then the worker just spawn the next in queue, and everything keeps on going
have a look at my script here: https://gist.github.com/jobwat/5712437
If you are using newer versions of Resque, you'll need to use the following command as the internal APIs have changed...
Resque::WorkerRegistry.working.each {|work| Resque::WorkerRegistry.remove(work.id)}
This avoids the problem as long as you have a resque version newer than 1.26.0:
resque: env QUEUE=foo TERM_CHILD=1 bundle exec rake resque:work
Keep in mind that it does not let the currently running job finish.
If you use Docker, you can also use this command:
<id> is the worker id.
docker stop <id>
docker start <id>
I have a rails app with the whenever gem installed to setup cron jobs which invoke various rake tasks. For reasons unbeknownst to me, each rake task gets invoked twice at precisely the same time. So my db backup task backs up the db twice at 4:00am.
Inspecting crontab reveals correct syntax for all of the cron jobs, so I don't think this is an issue with the whenever gem not correctly configuring the cron jobs. Also confusing is that in both staging and production environments and can invoke tasks on the command line and they only run once.
Any thoughts on what would cause this? I'm at a complete loss troubleshooting wise.
The number of cron jobs that run depends on the number of application instances running in the server box. Are you have two instances of rails application running in the same server box?