I have a rails app with a Location model, which has a rating, and a rating_count field. Now, I need to reset every Location's rating and rating_countattributes to 0 at a specific time everyday, lets say 12:00:00 UTC.
How would I accomplish this? I'm using the default sqlite3 databases.
The best option is to use cron. You can find tons of documentation out there!Although if you are running a Rails app you should check out whenever a pretty neat gem for managing cron jobs for your app!
The easiest thing is to write a rake task that does that job, and then use whatever scheduling system your host uses (cron).
An alternative is to use delayed_job which allows to push work to a background process. While delayed-job is not exactly suited for something like this, it is perfectably capable of doing this. If your rails process starts, you add a new job, to run at 12:00. And the running of the job reschedules the job.
The nice thing of delayed-job is that your code runs in the context of a rails-process, so you can use methods you already have. Also nice: jobs are stored in the database, so you can have an overview.
If you're on a *nix box, write a script to do the updates (eg. in PHP, or Perl) and simply add it to crontab. Check out cron.
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Hi I making a petition site. In my site i Have three types of petitions, every have self period. When period is passed it need to change petition status(integer value) automaticaly.
How to do this better? And wich time rails use on server, from my pc or from server?
I ask about because I need somehow to test it manually.
I'm noviece, so if it's possible help me with simpliest alghoritm. I don't need a pure safety and performance.
I would suggest implementing it as a rake task, that will run every day as a cron job and update the mentioned value if record matches the condition(exactly one year passed).
Using this way you avoid problems related to performance as the rake task launches in separate background and also you may run the task when your server isn't overloaded by other tasks, for example at night.
Following gem is useful to setup jobs by schedule https://github.com/javan/whenever
I'm am going to set up some functionality for my app that is Rails 3.2.3 and on Heroku. The idea is to have a task, or job (or whatever you want to call it) run every day, to make sure user information from the external API is up to date with the user information in my db. I'm curious what is the the best way to set this up? Should it be a cron job that runs a rake task?
Seems like there are quite a few ways to do this and I'm interested in the ways others are doing this. The only way I can think to do it is to run a rake task in a cron job, but would love to figure out what best practices are, or the most simple way to do it. Seems like there are a lot of ways to skin this cat... lots of different tools out there too.
If there was a pure rails way to do this, I think that would be better so I don't have to screw around with every system I place my app onto.
For a simple sync job that runs once a day, I believe having a cronjob would be sufficient and likely more stable in the long run.
Honestly, solutions such as Resque and Sidekiq is a bit overkill in my opinion (for your needs). You're still required to use a scheduler to send messages to these systems.
Check out the gem 'whenever' if you're looking at making the deployment and writing of crontabs easier: https://github.com/javan/whenever/
Railscasts regarding 'whenever': http://railscasts.com/episodes/164-cron-in-ruby
There are two options. They're better than options you mentioned in your question
Resque.
Sidekiq.
Try the later one. It is faster, lightweight and based on multithreading so there isn't interference with system. You'll need to look into scheduler of both the gem for processing everyday.
Hope this helps!
Use the Heroku scheduler add on to the handle scheduling itself. You can have it run a rake task, resque, or whatever.
Here is a few to choose from :
resque (with resque-scheduler. But you have to use redis with it)
rufus-scheduler ( if you want something simple, resque uses rufus-scheduler itself)
You may try delayed_job with a few tricks like this one. Not that great for scheduling but can use your application database.
I am trying to find out the best way to run scripts in the background. I have been looking around and found plenty of options, but many/most seem to have become inactive in the past few years. Let me describe my needs.
The rails app is basically a front-end to configure when and how these scripts will be run. The scripts run and generate reports and send email alerts. So the user must be able to configure the start times and how often these scripts will run dynamically. The scripts themselves should have access to the rails environment in order to save the resulting reports in the DB.
Just trying to figure out the best method from the myriad of options.
I think you're looking for a background job queuing system.
For that, you're either looking for resque or delayed_job. Both support scheduling tasks at some point in the future -- delayed_job does this natively, whereas resque has a plugin for it called resque_scheduler.
You would enqueue jobs in the background with parameters that you specify, and then at the time you selected they'll be executed. You can set jobs to recur indefinitely or a fixed number of times (at least with resque-scheduler, not sure about delayed_job).
delayed_job is easier to set up since it saves everything in the database. resque is more robust but requires you to have redis in your stack -- but if you do already it's pretty much the ideal solution for your problem.
I recently learned about Sidekiq, and I think it is really great.
There's also a RailsCast about it - Sidekiq.
Take a look at the gem whenever at https://github.com/javan/whenever.
It allows you to schedule tasks like cron jobs.
Works very well under linux, and the last commit was 14 days ago. A friend of mine used it in a project and was pretty satisfied with it.
edit: take a look at the gem delayed_job as well, it is good for executing long tasks in the background. Useful when creating a cron job only to start other tasks.
Is there a way to setup a callback in ROR that would trigger at a specific time?
Lets say I'm running a contest that expries at a certain time. Lets say Monday July 28th at 9:00. I'd like to set up an observer that ran a function at Monday July 28th at 9:00. Does rails have a method to do this?
There's a run_at field in Delayed Job. You have to have a worker process in the background always running and looking for jobs that a set to run, but if your application is doing this a lot, it might be easier than always writing new cron jobs.
So, you could have a method in your Contest model that gets called in a after_create callback that sets up a delayed job to send out an email to a random winner at the date that's specified.
If it's a one time, or very infrequent deal, though, I'll agree about using whenever
You'd be better off writing a ruby script that runs via crontab at the exact time you need it to.
I agree about crontab, but I like whenever. It has a nice integration into cron that you can store with your repo and it integrates nicely with capistrano.
I'm using Delayed Job to manage background work.
However I have some tasks that need to be executed at regular interval. Every hour, every day or every week for example.
For now, when I execute the task, I create a new one to be executed in one day/week/month.
However I don't really like it. If for any reason, the task isn't completely executed, we don't create the next one and we might lose the execution of the task.
How do you manage that kind of things (with delayed job) in your rails apps to be sure your regular tasks list remains correct ?
If you have access to Cron, I highly recommend Whenever
http://github.com/javan/whenever
You specify what you want to run and at what frequency in dead simple ruby, and whenever supplies rake tasks to convert this into a crontab and to update your system's crontab.
If you don't have access to frequent cron (like I don't, since we're on Heroku), then DJ is the way to go.
You have a couple options.
Do what you're doing. DJ will retry each task a certain number of times, so you have some leniency there
Put the code that creates the next DJ job in an ensure block, to make sure it gets created even after an exception or other bad event
Create another DJ that runs periodically, checks to make sure the appropriate DJs exist, and creates them if they don't. Of course, this is just as error prone as the other options, since the monitor and the actual DJ are both running in the same env, but it's something.
Is there any particular reason why you wouldn't use cron for this type of things?
Or maybe something more rubyish like rufus-scheduler, which is quite easy to use and very reliable.
If you don't need queuing, these tools are a way to go, I think.