Rails cron with whenever, setting the environment

Question

This question will probably only make sense if you know about the whenever gem for creating cron jobs. I have a task in my schedule.rb like

every 1.day, :at =&g         


        

Answer 1

Watch out if you want to pass more than one param to whenever.
You have to do it like that:

whenever --update-crontab appname --set 'environment=production&cron_log=/path/to/log'

Answer 2

I was having an issue where environment wasn't being set up for whenever cron jobs - /usr/bin/bundle was being picked up instead of /usr/local/bin/bundle.

The solution was to add following to top of schedule.rb

env 'PATH', ENV['PATH']

Answer 3

Something else you may want to try if you're using bundler and capistrano.

In your deploy.rb file, when you set the :whenever_command, DO NOT simply do this:

set :whenever_command, "bundle exec whenever"

Instead, do this:

set(:whenever_command) { "RAILS_ENV=#{rails_env} bundle exec whenever" }

Now, the RAILS_ENV environment variable will be available when the schedule.rb file is loaded, so in schedule.rb you can now do this:

set :environment, ENV['RAILS_ENV']

Voila! You're ready to go.

Answer 4

Add the following line of code at top of config/schedule.rb.

 ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = "#{@pre_set_variables[:environment]}"

and update the crontab using following command.

whenever --update-crontab pvcnxt --set 'environment=production'

and then finally restart crontab using command

service crond restart

Thats it!

Final config/schedule.rb looks this way

 ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = "#{@pre_set_variables[:environment]}"

 env :PATH, ENV['PATH']

 require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/environment")

 set :output, "#{Rails.root}/logs/cron_log_#{ENV['RAILS_ENV']}.log"

 every 1.day, :at => '00:00 am' do
  command "cd #{Rails.root}/lib/tasks && rake clean__posts_table_rake"
 end

Answer 5

Don't write the RAILS_ENV variable. It should set it automatically.

every 1.day, :at => '4am' do
  command "cd #{RAILS_ROOT} && rake thinking_sphinx:stop"
  command "cd #{RAILS_ROOT} && rake thinking_sphinx:index"
  command "cd #{RAILS_ROOT} && rake thinking_sphinx:start"
end

It works in my app:

every 4.days do
  runner "AnotherModel.prune_old_records"
end

$ whenever --set environment=production
0 0 1,5,9,13,17,21,25,29 * * /Users/weppos/Sites/git/app/script/runner -e production "AnotherModel.prune_old_records"

$ whenever --set environment=development
0 0 1,5,9,13,17,21,25,29 * * /Users/weppos/Sites/git/app/script/runner -e development "AnotherModel.prune_old_records"

Answer 6

Whenever doesn't detect your environment, it just defaults to using production. You can set the environment for all jobs using set:

set :environment, 'staging' 

Or per job:

every 2.hours do 
  runner 'My.runner', :environment => 'staging' 
end