Cron job not working in Whenever gem

Question

I have an application that contains a bunch of tasks, and every day I want to run a cron job that creates a DayTask for each Task in the database. A Task has_many DayTasks and these daytasks are what users will be checking off every day. I'm using the whenever gem but it doesn't seem to be running at all. Any ideas?

config/schedule.rb

every 1.day, :at => "12:01am" do
  runner "Task.generate_tasks_for_day"  
end

Task.rb

  def generate_tasks_for_day
    Task.all.each do |task|
      task.day_tasks.create(:target_date => Date.today)
    end 
  end 

result of running the 'whenever command'

1 0 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/grant/rails_projects/GoalTwist && script/rails runner -e production '\''Task.generate_tasks_for_day'\'''

Note: I've been changing the times in config/schedule.rb every time I want to test run it.

Brutish

can I check, when you say "result of running the 'whenever command'" have you also checked this is in crontab -l? Also, what OS is this on? I would normally run my server in UTC, and ensure whenever uses your local timezone to convert these to UTC times. – Unipolar

# Begin Whenever generated tasks for: daytask 42 18 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/grant/rails_projects/GoalTwist && script/rails runner -e production '\''Task.generate_tasks_for_day'\''' # End Whenever generated tasks for: daytask I'm running Linux Mint. And thanks for the heads up about the timezone difference. – Brutish

Answer 1

Finally I have solved how to run the gem Whenever. It's working good on production, but not in development mode (I think that to working good in dev mode you must do some tricks).

Then, these are the processes to do:

1. install the gem
2. write your scheduler.rb file
3. push to the remote server
4. login to the remote server (for example with ssh)
5. see if whenever is good uploaded by running in terminal: whenever
6. update whenever crontab by running: whenever --update-crontab
7. restart the server crontab (for example in Ubuntu server): sudo service cron restart
8. check if crontab is good implemented on the server: crontab -l

That's it!

Personally, I prefer to set up my crons directly from the server:

1. Edit the crontab: crontab -e
2. Append my cron (e.g. every day at 5:00 AM - can be little different for not-Linux-based server):
   0 5 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /path_to_my_app/current && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake my_cron_rake'
3. Check if good implemented: crontab -l
4. Done

Conde

Thanks! I didn't quite understand how it worked at first. I was expecting more magic ;) – Valine

I don't get why neither sidekiq or whenever mentions whenever --update-crontab – Gabriellia

I ran whenever on my prod server and it says 'command not found' although the cron job has been deployed crontab -l – Jaffna

I guess that your problem @Jaffna is not strictly related to this question. Anyway I guess that you have forgot to import or wrong installed the whenever binaries - please check the result of which whenever. Do you run this on another user? Has this user the corrects rights? If the problem still persist, I suggest you to search for similar question or open a new one. – Conde

Thanks for the answer @damoiser, if you have some time please take a look at THIS i've posted yesterday. – Jaffna

this is more of a comment to myself since I wind up here every few months, but hopefully it helps others too: bundle exec whenever --update-crontab on the AWS box – Toothlike

Answer 2

You have to actually register the job with the crontab by running:

whenever --update-crontab

Also if you're trying to get jobs running locally, add :environment => "development" to your task

runner "MyTask.some_action", :environment => "development"

Ancestry

Answer 3

if whenever command gives you -bash: whenever: command not found, try bundle exec whenever

Ciaphus