How do I properly manage the rails tmp directory?

Question

After I deploy a rails application in production mode, do I need to schedule a periodic cleanup of the rails tmp directory? aka: rake tmp:clear (or its sub-parts tmp:sessions:clear, tmp:cache:clear, tmp:sockets:clear).

I know a few major revisions of rails back this was something that was needed to be done. I'm currently using Rails 4.1.x. Thanks.

Answer 1

Add one or more of those to your crontab file and that should do it for you...

rake tmp:cache:clear              
rake tmp:clear                     
rake tmp:create                     
rake tmp:sessions:clear              
rake tmp:sockets:clear   

Keep in mind, clearing sessions will kill all active sessions to. I don't recommend that. You could create a model called:

Periodic with something like this in it:

def self.run
      CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore::Session.
        destroy_all( ['updated_at <?', 48.hours.ago] )
  end

then cron your script/runner like this

script/runner -e production Periodic.run