Whenever¶ ↑

Whenever is a ruby gem that provides a ruby syntax for defining cron jobs. It was designed to work well with Rails applications, but can be used independently as well.

Installation¶ ↑

To install Whenever in a Rails (2.1 or greater) application:

in your “config/environment.rb” file:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.gem 'javan-whenever', :lib => 'whenever', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
end

To install this gem (and all other missing gem dependencies), run rake gems:install (use sudo if necessary).

In older versions of Rails:

$ gem sources -a gems.github.com $ gem install whenever

in your “config/environment.rb” file:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  ...
end

require "whenever"

Getting started¶ ↑

$ cd /my/rails/app $ wheneverize .

This will create an initial “config/schedule.rb” file you.

Example schedule.rb file¶ ↑

set :runner_path, '/var/www/apps/my_app' # Whenever will try to use your RAILS_ROOT if this isn't set
set :runner_environment, :production # Whenever defaults to production so only set this if you want to use a different environment.
set :cron_log, '/path/to/my/cronlog.log' # Where to log (this should NOT be your Rails log)

every 2.hours do
  runner "MyModel.some_process" # runners are the script/runners you know and love
  command "/usr/local/bin/my_great_command" # commands are any unix command
end

every 1.day, :at => '4:30 am' do # If not :at option is set these jobs will run at midnight
  runner "DB.Backup", :cron_log => false # You can specify false for no logging or a string a different log file to override logging.
end

every :hour do # Many shortcuts available: :hour, :day, :month, :year, :reboot
  runner "SomeModel.ladeda"
end

every :sunday do # Use any day of the week or :weekend, :weekday
  runner "Task.do_something_great"
end

Cron output¶ ↑

$ cd /my/rails/app $ whenever

And you’ll see your schedule.rb converted to cron sytax

Capistrano integration¶ ↑

Use the “whenever:write_cron” task to automatically write your crontab file with each deploy.

in your “config/deploy.rb” file do something like:

after "deploy:symlink", "whenever:write_cron"

THIS WILL COMPLETELY OVERWRITE ANY EXISTING CRONTAB ENTRIES!

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Better documentation on the way!