I'm trying to set daily cron job to update my site stats, but it looks like it doesn't work.
Cron entry (for deployer user):
0 0 * * * cd /var/www/my_site/current && rake RAILS_ENV=production stats:update
I'm running ubuntu server, with rbenv.
Any idea what's wrong?
Many times $PATH is defined differently when cron runs compared to when you are working in your own shell. Do "whereis rake" to find the full path to rake and then replace "rake" with its full path. (I am assuming that the "cd" command is working, so I am focusing on whether "rake" is found / running properly.)
Has cron sent you any emails with error messages after you added your command to your crontab?
You might want to run "crontab -l" under the proper user account to make sure that your cron command is actually registered within the crontab, especially if you aren't receiving any emails.
The presence of a Gemfile can also affect the ability to properly run rake. See, for example, Error: "Could not find rake", yet Rake is installed
Related
I have a Rails runner task that I want to run from cron, but of course cron runs as root and so the environment is set up improperly to get RVM to work properly. I've tried a number of things and none have worked thus far. The crontab entry is:
* 0 * * * root cd /home/deploy/rails_apps/supercharger/current/ && /usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.3-p484/ruby bundle exec rails runner -e production "Charger.start"
Apologies for the super long command line. Anyhow, the error I'm getting from this is:
ruby: No such file or directory -- bundle (LoadError)
So ruby is being found in the RVM directory, but again, the environment is wrong.
I tried rvm alias delete [alias_name] and it seemed to do something, but darn if I know where the wrapper it generated went. I looked in /usr/local/rvm/wrappers and didn't see one with the name I had specified.
This seems like a common problem -- common enough that the whenever gem exists. The runner command I'm using is so simple, it seemed like a slam dunk to just put this entry in the crontab and go, but not so much...
Any help with this is appreciated.
It sounds like you could use a third-party tool to tether your Rails app to cron: Whenever. You already know about it, but it seems you never tried it. This gem includes a simple DSL that could be applied in your case like:
every :day # Or specify another period, or something else, see README
runner "Charger.start"
end
Once you've defined your schedule, you'll need to write it into crontab with whenever command line utility. See README file and whenever --help for details.
It should not cause any performance impact at runtime since all it does is conversion into crontab format upon deployment or explicit command. It's not needed, once the server is running, everything is done by cron after that.
If you don't want an extra gem anyway, you might as well check what command does it issue for executing your task. Still, an automated way of adding a cron task is easier to maintain and to deploy. Sure, just tossing a line into the crontab is easier — just for you and just this once. Then it starts to get repetitive and tiring, not to mention confusion for other potential developers who will have to set up something similar on their own machines.
You can run cron as different user than root. Even in your example the task begins with
* 0 * * * root cd
root is the user that runs the command. You can edit it with crontab -e -u username.
If you insist on running cron task as root or running as other user does not work for some reason, you can switch user with su. For example:
su - username -c "bundle exec rails runner -e production "Charger.start"
I am trying to get whenever to run my rake task but it doesn't work.
#Command Line
$ whenever -w
[write] crontab file written
#schedule.rb
every :year, :at => "2014-07-25 17:39:48 -0700" do
rake 'timeperiod:create_timeperiod'
end
The rake command saves a model in the db and puts text so I would know if it worked (which it does when I run rake). Is there syntactically something wrong with what I did?
Note, the time and date in schedule.rb is arbitrary, I keep changing it to two minutes from now before testing.
Your task is probably failing because the shell used by cron is not the same you use with your normal user.
Check the log of the crontab:
grep CRON /var/log/syslog
Why don't you verify that your command is getting added to the crontab?
$ crontab -l
You can also add the job manually.
$ whenever
* * * * * * bash -l 'cd /path/to/dir; rake your:task'
$ crontab -e
# add the cron job
Also, output from cron jobs doesn't output to the screen; it goes to your mail. Check your mailbox.
From the man page:
When executing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the
crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO environment variable in
the crontab, if such exists). The children copies of cron running
these processes have their name coerced to uppercase, as will be seen
in the syslog and ps output.
For me, I'm using command but I think it's not the best case. Says my repo is in $HOME/www/virtualspirit, in my repository. So my whenever command will be cd /www/virtualspirit && /$HOME/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.1.2/bin/rake timeperiod:create_timeperiod RAILS_ENV=production
double check it in crontab -e and see whether it saved.
There were a couple issues here.
The best way to add cron jobs to whenever is with the command whenever --update-crontab <name of identifier>
The format was incorrect. By specifying the time in cron directly, I was able to make it work.
For example:
#schedule.rb
every '13 15 26 7 *' do
rake 'timeperiod:create_timeperiod'
end
i deployed (with capistrano) a ruby on rails project on an aws micro server.
I'm on ruby 1.9.2-290 and rails 3.2.6 and i also use bundler.
I developed a task rake in my opt/rails-project/lib/tasks/tasks.rake
namespace :myclass do
task "my-task" => :environment do
# do the stuff which work nicely if i enter my command line manually
end
end
This is how i call it in my crontab :
*/3 * * * * cd /opt/rails-project/current && /opt/rails-project/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/bin/rake myclass:my-task RAILS_ENV=production >> ~/logs-my-task.txt
The file ~/logs-my-task.txt is created and updated every 3min as it does. This file only contains info of the version release from capistrano but nothing from my task rake.
As i said in my comment in my task rake, if i launch this command directly in the server via ssh, my task rake does its job...
I searched the web all day/night long and can not figure it out.
I tried to remove the http_basic auth from rails but same problem.
Hope you have a idea,
Thanks for help !
Try to put this part
cd /opt/rails-project/current && /opt/rails-project/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/bin/rake myclass:my-task RAILS_ENV=production >> ~/logs-my-task.txt
inside some file, somescript.sh, give execution permissions:
chmod +x somescript.sh
and try to run it manually:
/path/to/somescript.sh
If it works, try to put it into crontab:
*/3 * * * * /path/to/somescript.sh
It often helps to put complex stuff inside script to run in from crontab.
Next step, ensure that you PATH environment variable the same for your shell and for cron. You can set it inside crontab or inside your script.
After I used a shell script as recommended by denis.peplin and launched it manually, I got the problem described here: Ruby on Rails and Rake problems: uninitialized constant Rake::DSL.
I included the following line in my Rakefile and let my crontab as it was before:
require 'rake/dsl_definition'
I'm using delayed job to create job queues such as 'mailer'
For this to work I have to run this:
$ RAILS_ENV=development QUEUE=mailer rake jobs:work
But if the server crashes and is restarted, I need the worker to start running again automatically.
What would be the recommended way to deal with this?
You need to use a third-party service like monit/bluepill/god/upstart to watch the process and restart it. I recommend using the combination of foreman and upstart. See here: http://blog.daviddollar.org/2011/05/06/introducing-foreman.html
Some time ago I wrote a patch for the DelayedJob to reload the classes for every job in development mode. Same patch should work for your requirement also.
betamatt's approach is definitely one way to do it if you have such a monitoring tool in place.
Another way to do it would simply be to add a script to your OS's startup which runs the RAILS_ENV=development QUEUE=mailer rake jobs:work command under a user who has the necessary permissions.
Here's an example of how to do it on Ubuntu using Upstart, but if you lookup similar init.d methods, or whatever is the relevant for your server OS, you'll find other ways. What you're looking for, basically, is "How to run a script on startup [your OS name]", and then wrap your command in an executable script.
I had the same issue with my application am working with. So i wrote a rake task which runs every minute(as a cron job). When delayed job starts it will create a .pid file in the temp folder. I used this to check the existence of a delayed job process. If the file doesn't exist i ran the console command through code.
delayed_job_status = File.file?("./tmp/pids/delayed_job.pid")
This will check the existence of process. If nil response go to next statement
./bundle exec script/delayed_job start production
This will start delayed job
My solution was creating the bash script in user's home "delayed_job_startup.sh"
which contain
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/deploy/project/current/
RAILS_ENV=production bin/delayed_job start
and in file /etc/rc.local I run this script from my user
su -s /bin/bash - deploy /home/deploy/delayed_job_startup.sh
I have a very simple task called update_feeds:
desc "Update feeds"
task :update_feeds do
run "cd #{release_path}"
run "script/console production"
run "FeedEntry.update_all"
end
Whenever I try to run this task, I get the following message:
[out :: mysite.com] sh: script/console: No such file or directory
I figured it's because I am not in the right directory, but trying
run "cd ~/user/mysite.com/current"
instead of
run "cd #{release_path}"
Also fails. Running the exact same commands manually (through ssh) works perfectly.
Why can't capistrano properly cd (change directory) into the site directory to run the command?
Thanks!
Update: Picked an answer, and thank you so much to all who replied.
The best answer may actually be the one on server fault, though the gist of both (the one on server fault and the one on stack overflow) is the same.
You want to use script/runner. It starts an instance of the app to execute the method you want to call. Its slow though as it has to load all of your rails app.
~/user/mysite.com/current/script/runner -e production FeedEntry.update_all 2>&1
You can run that from the capistrano task.
I cannot imagine that you would be able to remotely log into rails console from capistrano. I suggest you call your model method from a rake task.
How do I run a rake task from Capistrano?
As for the latter part of your question, are you logging into the server with the same user account as capistrano?