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I am currently writing an application that pulls new information from RSS sources and has to update those RSS sources in a certain frequency. Currently I am pulling only when the user requests a feed but I want to change that behavior to automatic periodic fetching.
I was writing a shellscript that would interact with the database and gets started periodically via cron - but this is lots of double effort so I was wondering what would be the "Rails Way" or "Ruby Way" to do this. I am using Ubuntu, Apache and Passenger. Can you suggest better methods that are maybe even included in the application, so I can easily deploy the app to another machine without having to mingle with cron?
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Cron is a job scheduler that lets you execute recurring tasks at fixed times (e.g. every minute, every hour, every day at 3pm).
With a file called lib/tasks/cron. rake .. To execute from the command line, this is just "rake cron". This command can then be put on the operating system cron/task scheduler as desired.
rake extension and are placed in Rails. root/lib/tasks . You can create these custom rake tasks with the bin/rails generate task command. If your need to interact with your application models, perform database queries and so on, your task should depend on the environment task, which will load your application code.
A cron job is the scheduled task itself. Cron jobs can be very useful to automate repetitive tasks. For example, you can set a cron job to delete temporary files every week to conserve your disk space. Some programs, such as Drupal, may require you to set up a cron job to perform certain functions.
I would suggest doing something like a rake task and using the whenever gem to generate your cron job to run the rake task.
Check out, http://railscasts.com/episodes/164-cron-in-ruby, for more information on the whenver gem.
The main benefit of the whenever gem is that it keeps your application requirements (i.e. the cron job running every x hours, in the application) inside your application, increasing the portability of your application.
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