What is the best way to schedule a sending-email task with Ruby on Rails?

Question

I would like to schedule a daily task : every day at 7 AM, I want an email to be sent (without human intervention).

I\'m working on the RoR framework and I\'m wonder

Answer 1

Add a class method to one of your models that will handle this for you. Now try to execute that method using the runner script

./script/runner "MyModel.send_daily_mail" RAILS_ENV=production

Ensure everything works ok. If it does, then we need to make the command work universally by setting up the path to the project properly.

cd /path/to/my/rails/project && ./script/runner "MyModel.send_daily_mail" RAILS_ENV=production

Now change to any random directiry and run that command. If it runs properly, run crontab -e and insert the command in there setup to run daily at 7AM. There are a ton of explanation about the cron format on there if you google for them and should be pretty simple to figure out.

Answer 2

BackgroundRB is what I use and it works perfect. I have several emails being sent, generated by BackgroundRB. I also have other tasks as well. Because it enables both scheduled tasks and asynchronous tasks (tasks that take longer than the normal client/server response cycle).

I use it and I am very happy with it.

Answer 3

Another option is to create a rake task that is run by a cron job. To do this, create a file some_file.rake and put it in your lib/tasks folder. Your file might look like this:

Rails 2.x:

task :send_daily_mail, :needs => :environment do
    Model.send_daily_mail
end

Rails 3.x:

task :send_daily_mail => :environment do
    Model.send_daily_mail
end

Then use cron to execute it as often as you like:

cd /path/to/app && /usr/bin/rake send_daily_mail

Note you might need to put RAILS_ENV=production in your crontab if your app is in development mode by default.

Answer 4

Go with a rake task and cron job, as the accepted answer already says. However, note that, updating the cron file itself is a manual task. That may be fine if you are not changing it during development. Otherwise, here how you can let Capistrano do it for you: http://push.cx/2008/deploying-crontab-with-your-rails-app

Answer 5

I was impressed by (and plan to try) the rufus-scheduler gem discussed in this blog post

He describes something like this:

scheduler = Rufus::Scheduler.start_new  

scheduler.every("1m") do  
   DailyDigest.send_digest!  
end 

..which seems pretty simple. I wonder how easy it would be to add HTML-based configuration?