Daily reminder emails

Rails
1

hi all,

my app needs a daily application running to check the database on some
changes and sending out some emails to customers.

Is this possible with ruby and/or rails and does anybody know if I need
a full root server - or can this be done on a shared hosting account?

Thanks for any hint!

Andreas

2

Andreas S. wrote:

hi all,

my app needs a daily application running to check the database on some
changes and sending out some emails to customers.

This is certainly possible. We have a cron job that wakes up every day
at some fixed time and sends out an email to customers who have
indicated they want our mailing.

ActionMailer is quite nice to work with, although suffers from some
minor foibles (eg in current versions the path to sendmail is not a
configurable option).
ActionMailer can either talk directly to sendmail or it can use smtp to
send mail.

Fred

3

Thanks Fred,
I am new to rails and I never heard something about a cron job. I think
I need to read about it first. :slight_smile:

any good sources to start on?

Andreas

Frederick C. wrote:

Andreas S. wrote:

hi all,

my app needs a daily application running to check the database on some
changes and sending out some emails to customers.

This is certainly possible. We have a cron job that wakes up every day
at some fixed time and sends out an email to customers who have
indicated they want our mailing.

ActionMailer is quite nice to work with, although suffers from some
minor foibles (eg in current versions the path to sendmail is not a
configurable option).
ActionMailer can either talk directly to sendmail or it can use smtp to
send mail.

Fred

4

cron is nothing to do with rails. it’s a unixy thing that allows you to
schedule the execution of stuff, which can of course include a ruby
script.
You could also have a long running rails process which spends most of
its time sleeping and occasionally wakes up to send an email

Fred