rake - A cron job for rails: best practices?

Question

What's the best way to run scheduled tasks in a Rails environment? Script/runner? Rake? I would like to run the task every few minutes.

Answer 1

I've used the extremely popular Whenever on projects that rely heavily on scheduled tasks, and it's great. It gives you a nice DSL to define your scheduled tasks instead of having to deal with crontab format. From the README:

Whenever is a Ruby gem that provides a clear syntax for writing and deploying cron jobs.

Example from the README:

every 3.hours do
  runner "MyModel.some_process"       
  rake "my:rake:task"                 
  command "/usr/bin/my_great_command"
end

every 1.day, :at => '4:30 am' do 
  runner "MyModel.task_to_run_at_four_thirty_in_the_morning"
end