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 => '4am' do
  command "cd #{RAILS_ROOT} && rake thinking_sphinx:stop RAILS_ENV=#{RAILS_ENV}"
  command "cd #{RAILS_ROOT} && rake thinking_sphinx:index RAILS_ENV=#{RAILS_ENV}"
  command "cd #{RAILS_ROOT} && rake thinking_sphinx:start RAILS_ENV=#{RAILS_ENV}"
end

However when I update my crontab using

whenever --update-crontab appname --set environment=production

the cron jobs still have RAILS_ENV=development. My tasks on production and development are the same right now, I just need to change the environment variable because thinking_sphinx needs to know the current environment. Any ideas on how to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

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 2

I would consider using the "rake" shortcut to make it even cleaner:

every 1.day, :at => '4am' do
  rake "thinking_sphinx:stop"
  rake "thinking_sphinx:index"
  rake "thinking_sphinx:start"
end

Answer 3

what sets the value of RAILS_ROOT? I am currently having problems running whatever on the following (based on Ryan BAtes' tute):

every :saturday, :at => "4:38am" do command "rm -rf #{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/cache" end

Answer 4

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