Precompile / preload cached fragments in Rails - ruby-on-rails

Question

Using Rails 3.1.1 and Herkou
I have 1.000 products in my app. They all have a very slow controller which is effectively solved by fragment caching. Although the data doesn't change very often, it still needs to expire (which I do by sweeping) periodically, in my case once a week.
Now, after sweeping the cached views I don't want my users to create the new fragments by trying to access the products one after another (takes about 6-8 secs at the first load, 2-3 sec for the cached load). I assume I can do that with some sort of script that will load each Product Page one by one and thus make the server create those fragments.
I can imagine this can be handled in three ways:
Run a script on my local machine that will try to access each url with some sort of get-command - Downside: Not very pretty and will affect visitor stats in a way I would not prefer.
Run the same type script on the server after the sweeper, that will load each Product. How can I do that, in that case?
Using a smart Rails command to do this automatically. Is there such an elegant command?

Answer 1

I made this script and it works. The "product.slug" is because I have friendly_id installed. It will produce url-variables with names such as www.mydomain.com/productabc-123/ which will be read by Nokogiri (Nokogiri gem is needed for this solution).
PLEASE NOTE THAT I SWITCHED FROM FRAGMENT CACHING TO ACTION CACHING IN THIS SOLUTION (as opposed to the question, where I am using fragment caching). The important difference for this is when I check the cache if Rails.cache.exist?('views/www.mydomain.com/' + product.slug). For fragment_caching it should be the fragment name there instead.
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
Product.all.each do |product|
url = 'http://www.mydomain.com/' + product.slug
begin
if Rails.cache.exist?('views/www.mydomain.com/' + product.slug)
puts url + " is already in cache"
else
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
puts "Reads " + url
# Verifies if the caching worked. Only for trouble shooting
if Rails.cache.exist?('views/www.mydomain.com/' + product.slug)
puts "--->" + url + " is NOW in the cache"
else
puts "--->" + url + " is still not in the cache!"
end
sleep 1
end
rescue
puts 'Normal rescue of ' + url
rescue Timeout::Error
puts 'Timeout rescue of ' + url
puts 'Sleep for 5 sec'
sleep 5
retry
end
end

Answer 2

Create a script that runs as rake task, or better yet a worker, that runs and curls the page. There is no need to include a gem when you can just call curl
`curl -A "CacheRefresher" #{ENV['HOSTNAME']}/api/v1/#{klass.name.underscore.pluralize}/#{id} >/dev/null 2>&1`