I'm developing a standalone app that is self composed and has some data (task lists). I'm now looking to supplement this data with an outside source (the Asana API).
I was looking to implement this as a command-line tool that is invoked by cron. However, I can't seem to be able to figure out how to get access to my Rails environments from the script.
So, the question would be: how do I get the functionality to get and manipulate models from within a simple ruby script inside {app_root}/bin/.
You could do something like this:
require '/path/to/app/config/application'
MyApp::Application.instance.initialize!
# now you have access to your app environment
But usually this is solved by creating a rake task in your application that you can run by CRON.
Related
I have a Rails app set up with a model Account that should be updated every morning with data coming from an external API I'm calling (a CRM). Basically either I create new accounts in my app that I find in the CRM and some of the fields that are mapped with my columns, either I find the account if it already exists and I update it.
So far, I've been putting this code into the seeds.rb file and from Heroku, where the app is hosted, I set up a scheduler with the command : rails db:seed that runs periodically.
My issue is that I'm sure there is a better way of doing this. I've read about rake tasks but I did not quite understand how that applied to my case. Otherwise I thought of putting my method in the models/account.rb file as a self method. But I don't really know how I can invoke it in a rake command to allow me to set up a scheduler in Heroku.
Any idea on where would be the best place to put this method, and how to call it from command line?
Thanks in advance.
You can create a script directory in your project, and put your script from db/seeds.rb into this directory, maybe called update_accounts.rb. Then you can run it with
rails runner script/update_accounts.rb
and schedule that task in heroku. More info about rails runner here.
I would suggest using a background processor such as Sidekiq: https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
Once using Sidekiq, you need a scheduler like https://github.com/moove-it/sidekiq-scheduler to make sure it happens periodically as you require.
This will become easier to maintain as your application grows and you need more workers. It also moves your scheduling into version control.
This question is about starting a rails server of the external project from a rspec environment.
There is 2 projects.
First project act as the Admin Back Office, it's the central application where users interact with web pages. I call it BackOffice
Second project is a Json API Server which will receive commands from the Admin Back Office through json requests.I call it ApiServer
I am trying to test API interaction between those 2 rails projects, and I would like to set-up rspec so I can write and maintain my spec files in BackOffice project. Those specs would start a ApiServer rails server and then play around to perform the tests.
My issue is about starting the ApiServer rails server. After looking at the rails app initialization files, I assumed I had to add a require to "config/environment".
But when I insert into BackOffice/spec/spec_helper.rb
require File.expand_path('../../../ApiServer/config/environment', __FILE__)
I get the error
`initialize!': Application has been already initialized. (RuntimeError)
# Backtrace to the file:
# ApiServer/config/environment.rb
# Line:
# Rails.application.initialize!
I also tried to simply call the following in backticks
`cd /api/path; bundle exec rails s -p 3002`
but got the same kind of error
Then I got inspiration from Capybara source code, and required the "ApiServer/application", then I am able to create a ApiServer.new object, but as soon as I call initialize! on it it I get the same message.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Cheers
Actually the second app is nothing more then an external service, which is better to stub for the tests.
There is one nice article from thoughtbot about using vcr gem to mock external web services:
https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-to-stub-external-services-in-tests
Obligatory "don't do that unless you really need to".
However, since it seems you know what you need:
Short answer:
You need to isolate both application in system environment and launch it from there using system-calls syntax.
Long answer:
What you're trying to do is to run two Rails applications in the same environment. Since they both are Rails applications they share a lot of common names. Running them ends in name clash, which you're experiencing. Your hunch to try simple back ticks was good one, unfortunately you went with a bundler in already existing environment, which also clashes.
What you have to do in order to make it work is to properly isolate (in terms of code, not in terms of network i.e. communication layer ) application and then run launcher from rspec. There are multiple ways, you could:
Use Ruby process control (Check this graph, you could try to combine it with system level exec)
Daemonize from Operating System level (init.d etc.)
Encapsulate in VM or one of the wrappers (Virtualbox, Vagrant, etc.)
Go crazy and put code on separate machine and control it remotely (Puppet, Ansible, etc.)
Once there, you can simply run launcher (e.g. daemon init script or spawn new process in isolated environment) from RSpec and that's it.
Choosing which way to go with is highly dependent on your environment.
Do you run OSX, Linux, Windows? Are you using Docker? Do you manage Ruby libraries through things like RVM? Things like this.
Generally it's a bad idea to require launching another service/application to get your unit tests to pass. This type of interaction is usually tested by mocking or vcring responses, or by creating environment tests that run against deployed servers. Launching another server is outside the scope of rspec and generally, as you've discovered, will cause a lot of headaches to setup and maintain.
However, if you're going to have these rails projects tightly coupled and you want them to share resources, I'd suggest investigating Rails Engines. To do this will require a substantial amount of work but the benefits can be quite high as the code will share a repository and have access to each other's capabilities, while maintaining application isolation.
Engines effectively create a rails application within another rails application. Each application has it's own namespace and a few isolating guards in place to prevent cross app contamination. If you have many engines it becomes ideal to have a shell rails application with minimal capabilities serving each engine on a different route/namespace.
First you need to create housing for the new api engine.
$ rails plugin new apiserver --mountable
This will provide you with lib/apiserver/engine.rb as well as all the other scaffolding you'll need to run your API as an engine. You'll also notice that config/routes.rb now has a route for your engine. You can copy your existing routes into this to provide a route path for your engine. All of your existing models will need to be moved into the namespace and you'll need to migrate any associated tables to the new naming convention. You'll also have some custom changes depending on your application and what you need to copy over to the engine, however the rails guide walks your through these changes (I won't enumerate all of them here).
It took a coworker about a week of work to get a complicated engine copied into another complicated rails server while development on both apps was occurring and with preserving version control history. A simpler app -- like an api only service -- I imagine would be quicker to establish.
What this gives you is another namespace scope at the application root. You can change this configuration around as you add more engines and shared code to match various other directory structures that make more sense.
app
models
...
apiserver
app
...
And once you've moved your code into the engine, you can test against your engine routers:
require "rails_helper"
describe APIServer::UsersController do
routes { APIServer::Engine.routes }
it "routes to the list of all users" do
expect(:get => users_path).
to route_to(:controller => "apiserver/users", :action => "index")
end
end
You should be able to mix and match routes from both services and get cross-application testing done without launching a separate Rails app and without requiring an integration environment for your specs to pass.
Task rabbit has a great blog on how to enginize a rails application as a reference. They dive into the what to-do's and what not-to-do's in enginizing and go into more depth than can be easily transcribed to a SO post. I'd suggest following their procedure for engine decision making, though it's certainly not required to successfully enginize your api server.
You can stub requests like:
stub_request(:get, %r{^#{ENV.fetch("BASE_URL")}/assets/email-.+\.css$})
I'm relatively new to RoR working on Windows. I built a simple app in Rails that sends email using ActionMailer. I'd like to add a task to my windows scheduler to run a batch routine that calls my email method inside of my controller. The web app will not be running when I do this, so I can't do a CURL or something similar. Is there a way to run Ruby.exe with some args to launch a rails app (similar to irb) and call a controller:method?
Update: I took the advice in the answer I marked correct, but I thought I'd elaborate in case a RoR newbie like myself needs a bit more guidance.
I created a folder app\classes and I created a .rb file for my class
I had to create an initialize method to handle some setup
Created a few methods that simple return variables
I made sure I could run the steps in rails console
Created a file in lib\tasks with the code below
Ran this in DOS in the project folder - rake runMe --trace
task :runMe => :environment do
#s = ScrapeTools.new
#bears = #s.getBears
#bulls = #s.getBulls
UserMailer.stock_email(#bears,#bulls).deliver
end
Please let me know if you see any errors
There is. rails runner <path to script> will run the given script under your Rails app. Have some docs
This is a good example of why you don't want to put logic in your controller. Much better than putting that functionality in a controller method, refactor it to a method in a module or class. Then you call that method from your controller as well as from a rake task that is straight-forward to execute in your batch routine.
I am building a script in on of my controllers to fill a database with an excel files data. I would build the function, then access it through a route. (That i guess i can protect with cancan) But i thought about it, and it doesn't seem very ... 'Railsy'.
I know the scripts folder exists, and it is probably for these kinds of tasks. I've tried googling stuff like 'rails execute script' and other stuff, but i can't find any good advice for what to do next.
I'm sorry if this seems kind of stupid, but in my apps i've been kind of hacking around stuff to make it work, so any advice on this task would be appreciated.
If you need to upload the file in the app and process it, it should probably go in the "lib"directory and be accessed like any other Ruby library/module/etc.
If it's something you need to run locally, "on demand", "scripts" is fine. If you need access to your rails environment when running it like any Rails models, you can run it from "rails console" or "rails runner".
As Aln said, there are a variety of ways it could be scheduled as well.
You could simply do
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
# regular ruby code here
and have it running just like any other util. Of course you can always call any *.rb with simply
ruby somescript.rb
If you need some scheduled script, check into rufus-scheduler gem.
This may be a stupid question but I was just wondering where, or if its possible to run a ruby script which is kind of unrelated to the rails application I would like it to run in. To clarify, I am working on an automation test suite that is written mainly in bash, but I want to create a front end (my rails application) that allows other users to run automated tests not through the command line. So I guess basically I want a user to select certain parameters, from a database or form fields, then take those parameters and pass them to a ruby script which calls my bash automation script.
I hope this is clear. Thanks!
If you want to call a script from a rails app it gets complex. You would want to use a background job or some sort of queue to run these jobs because they do block the server and your users would be waiting for the call to complete and the results to load, most likely hitting a timeout.
See delayed_job
and you might want to try creating a small wrapper script in ruby that can interface with your application.
Good luck!
for short tasks you should use system or popen
when tasks are longer then they are still needed in case of delayed_job
You can add a script to your scripts folder in the root of your rails app. Start your script like this:
your script can be [name here].rb
The reason why we load in the environment is so we can use rails models and rails related things in your script:
#!/bin/env ruby
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = "production" # Set to your desired Rails environment name
require '/[path to your rails app on your server]/config/environment.rb'
require 'active_record'
If you want to run this on your server, then you have to edit your crontab on your server. Or you can use the whenever gem (which I''m having trouble with, but the entire universe doesn't). Conversely, if you have heroku, then there's the heroku scheduler that makes running scripts easy.
You can run Ruby code with rails runner.
… let us suppose that you have a model called “Report”. The Report model has a class method called generate_rankings, which you can call from the command line using
$ rails runner 'Report.generate_rankings'
Since we have access to all of Rails, we can even use the Active Record finder method to extract data from our application.
$ rails runner 'User.pluck(:email).each { |e| puts e }'
charles.quinn#highgroove.com
me#seebq.com
bill.gates#microsoft.com
obie#obiefernandet.com
Example taken from The Rails 5 Way by Obie Fernandez.