Cronjob / .rb help clearing session table (new to cronjobs)

Rails
1

I just launched my first ROR app and i need to implement the session
database cleanup. I am new to cronjobs. I have used one once but it
was all copy/paste.
I was hoping someone knew of a good tutorial or resource to get started
here or might be able to give me a little help.

I have seen a lot of posts that reference setting a cron job to clear
old sessions but I am not clear on:

Can you put the script in the crontask?

If not, should the .rb live anywhere (/username/) or does it have to be
in one of the cron directories (houly/daiily/etc)?

Or can you just run straight SQL out of the crontab (that seems like it
would be the most efficient)?

I saw the “ruby script/runner” reference in a couple of posts. Is this
some other way of solving this problem?

Are there a few ways to solve this problem? Would anyone mind telling me
which is the best one?

My guess, at this point, is that i set the cronjob to run a standalone
.rb that does something like

Session.find(:all, :conditions => [“updated_at <=
?”,date_to_delete_from]).destroy

Anyway, i think it is clear that I am confused any help or even a little
direction would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

2

dinshaw gobhai wrote:

Are there a few ways to solve this problem? Would anyone mind telling me
which is the best one?

My favorite way is to use SessionCleanup. (Well, duh, I wrote it!:slight_smile:

Basically, you put it in your lib directory, and call it from some
convenient place in one of your controllers where an extra second or two
every few hours won’t be noticed.

You set the interval at which it runs and how long it should keep
sessions before deleting them. You can have it pass the session hash for
each session being deleted to a block, in case there are external
workfiles or whatever associated with the sessions.

You can get SessionCleanup here:

http://www.alevans.com/dl/session_cleanup-0.3.0.tgz

Hope this helps!

–Al Evans