Schedule an ActiveJob in Rails

Question

I'm doing a weather API which will get, process and save data from another API. In order to get the daily updates (request URL info, get the JSON/XML data, construct my data and save it to my database) I think the most proper way is to use an ActiveJob.

I want to schedule the job to run periodically. I would like something like UNIX cron or Spring @Scheduled annotation for Java.

I have seen another questions on Stack Overflow(this one) about scheduling jobs but they use external gems like whenever. I have been looking for a backend that allows to execute the job in the Rails API (Backends), but it seems that none of the available allows scheduling a job.

Is there anything on the Rails framework (version 5) that allows me to do what I'm trying to? Or I must use an external gem?

Thank you so much.

Edit If is useful for anyone, here is the schema for the job:

class ImportDailyDataJob < ApplicationJob
  queue_as :default

  def perform(*args)
    # Do something later
  end

  private

  def prepare_request
    # return the request object
  end

  def request_data
    # Get the data from external API.
  end

  def process_data
    # Process the data
  end

  def save_processed_data
    # Saves the data to the database
  end
end

Answer 1

This is not real scheduling, but you can fake it in certain situations if you don't need the scheduling to be totally accurate, i.e. in your case run the job once a day:

class WeatherJob < ApplicationJob
  def perform
    reschedule_job

    do_work
  end

  def do_work
    # ...
  end

  def reschedule_job
    self.class.set(wait: 24.hours).perform_later
  end
end

enqueuing jobs to run in the future using ActiveJob should work with DelayedJob or Sidekiq, might not be supported in all active job backends?

Answer 2

I think you should go for sidekiq using redis write a task to schedule a job, to do so just install these two gem and can go for their documentation:

gem 'redis-rails'

then install sidekiq

gem 'sidekiq'