Recurring Tasks in Delajed Jobs without firing up Rails?

Question

Hi guys,

If I need to create recurring tasks in delayed jobs, what is a clean solution? I have an import task that I want to run every 5 minutes, but I don't want to fire up rails/rake in order to tell it to create a Delayed job that can be picked up. If Rails is already running on a system, perhaps I can just create an HTTP request that will make the rails app fire off a DJ? I could put that cron task in a ruby script which runs every 5 minutes, making requests to a server, but without firing up rails. What do you think?

Answer 1

The cron approach still seems to be quite clean. It need only involve running a rake invocation, not a full Rails server. Rake doesn't need Rails to be running to work.

However if you really don't like that approach then you could arrange for the recurring jobs to be re-queue themselves when they are being processed setting a run_at time to 5 minutes (or whatever) in the future. Obviously you'd need to prime the queue the first time and make sure the delayed_job server stays running

Answer 2

This fork of delayed_job has recurrence built right in (and there may be other forks that do the same):

http://github.com/andrewroth/delayed_job