Rails cronjob?

Rails
1

I want to be able to write a script in Ruby which regularly consumes an
XML feed from a fixed source, re-formats it, produces a large file for
web delivery, and updates a database with the contained information.

It’s simple - just running a script from a cron job, and some basic data
manipulation… But I’d prefer to use the Rails database mapping
constructs than roll my own.

What steps do I need to take to include ActiveRecord and my database
models in a Ruby script?

Ben

2

One very easy way is write your script as a rake task and put it in
lib/tasks/application.rake

task :update_the_universe => :environment do

Put anything in here

end

Then just add a cronjob that executes ‘RAILS_ENV=production rake
update_the_universe’.

Alternatively, just create a file that requires config/boot (I think
that’s right … ). Something like:

#!/usr/bin/ruby1.8
require ‘config/boot’

Rest of code here

I’ve used the first solution, but not the second.

-Jonathan.

3

I wrote up a brief entry on this on my blog that you may find useful:

http://atomgiant.com/articles/2006/04/18/batch-processing-with-rails

Tom

On 6/27/06, Jonathan V. [email protected] wrote:

Alternatively, just create a file that requires config/boot (I think
On 6/28/06, DJ Tequila [email protected] wrote:

http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails

–
Tom D.

http://atomgiant.com
http://gifthat.com

4

Write a class method on a new class and put it in lib/

lib/maintenance.rb:

class Maintenance
def self.run
# Do your rails stuff here, using and relying
# upon the Rails environment.
end
end

then, in your crontab, call this:

/path/to/app/script/runner -e production ‘Maintenance.run’

You may also want to check out the very cool rails_cron
plugin:

www.kylemaxwell.com

He has a temporaryarily down page up right now, but I’m
guessing he’ll have that fixed right away.

–
– Tom M.

5

On 6/27/06, DJ Tequila [email protected] wrote:

I want to be able to write a script in Ruby which regularly consumes an
XML feed from a fixed source, re-formats it, produces a large file for
web delivery, and updates a database with the contained information.

It’s simple - just running a script from a cron job, and some basic data
manipulation… But I’d prefer to use the Rails database mapping
constructs than roll my own.

What steps do I need to take to include ActiveRecord and my database
models in a Ruby script?

Checkout http://svn.kylemaxwell.com/rails_cron/trunk/README.

Joe

6

To include railsy things you can always just require the rails gem.
But if you already have something on your RoR website that does this
you can just use script/runner.

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RunnerScript
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToRunBackgroundJobsInRails

On 6/27/06, DJ Tequila [email protected] wrote:

Ben

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