Scheduled jobs for your Rails app

If you need to run scheduled jobs in your Rails app (!= background jobs as in Resque), you should use the excellent whenever gem.

However, one detail that is really easy to miss is which shell environment the cron job actually runs under.

bundle: command not found

And an easy way to confuse yourself even further is by trying to debug issues in this area by:

1. Logging into your  server as the deployment user
2. Doing crontab -l to see which entries whenever installed
3. Testing an entry by cut’n’pasting it to the shell prompt

The outcome will not be reliable, because you’re running it from a login shell and cron is not. So for example, your rbenv shims may be in the path while testing, but cron does not load your .bashrc or .bash_profile files.

On a project I work on, the staging and production machines are currently quite different. In production we use RVM (globally installed) while staging has rbenv locally installed for the deployment user.

So in staging I need to assume that no binaries are available and use the full path to bundler, in my case /home/passenger/.rbenv/versions/1.9.2-p290/bin/bundle.

(I know, symlinking this to eg. /usr/local/bin/bundle would probably be more elegant, but I actually like the reminder of where my ruby is actually installed. I don’t spend much time on the servers, so I tend to forget.)

Running stuff only on certain stages

EDIT: See Markham’s comment for a better way to do achieve the same result.

Another issue I struggled with for a while is how to schedule jobs only in production. For example, I don’t want to run S3 backups from staging.

I use capistrano/multistage, so I needed to inspect the value of the current “stage” from schedule.rb. It turns out that by including this:

require 'capistrano/ext/multistage'

set :whenever_environment, defer { stage }
require "whenever/capistrano"

…the stage is available in schedule.rb as @environment. Very simple, but it took some googling to find.

Example schedule.rb

Below is my anonymized schedule.rb. It should be pretty self explanatory, post questions in the comments if not.

def production?
 @environment == 'production'
end

set :bundler, production? ? "gp_bundle" : "/home/passenger/.rbenv/versions/1.9.2-p290/bin/bundle"

job_type :gp_rake, "cd :path && RAILS_ENV=:environment :bundler exec rake :task --silent :output"
job_type :gp_runner, "cd :path && :bundler exec rails runner -e :environment ':task' :output"
job_type :gp_bundle_exec, "cd :path && RAILS_ENV=:environment :bundler exec :task"

every 5.minutes do
 gp_rake "thinking_sphinx:index"
end

every 30.minutes do
 gp_runner "FooBar.update"
end

every 1.day, :at => "4:00am" do
 gp_runner "Baz.purge_inactive"
end

if production?
 every 1.day, :at => "4:00am" do
   gp_bundle_exec 'backup perform --trigger my_backup --config-file config/backup.rb --log-path log'
 end
end

EDIT: Jakob Skjerning posted this snippet in the comments:

job_type :rake, “cd /var/www/appname/#{environment}/current && /home/appname/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2010.02@appname-#{environment}/bin/bundle exec /home/appname/.rvm/wrappers/ree-1.8.7-2010.02@appname-#{environment}/rake –silent RAILS_ENV=#{environment} :task :output”