Where should I put background processes in rails?

Question

I'm building a Rails project that has a cron-type job that I'm managing with Rufus Scheduler. I have two questions about how to set this up appropriately in Rails:

1. Where's the best place to put the job's code?
2. Where should I place the Rufus code to schedule the job? How should I kick it off?

Pallid

Answer 1

To control the scheduler I would create a config/initializers/task_scheduler.rb:

task_scheduler = Rufus::Scheduler.start_new  

task_scheduler.every("1m") do  
   Something.to_do! # Do something every minute! 
end

Now for the Something.to_do code, that sort of depends on what it does. Perhaps it is a data model and it should go in the app/models directory, but if it is something more generic you might want to place it in lib/. If you wind up with a number of scheduled tasks you might want to create a app/scheduled_tasks directory, but that might be overkill for just one file.

Tour

Though this solution is simple one, there will be issues when you deploy your rails app in multiprocess server like unicorn or passenger, your job might be executed multiple times. – Dirndl