Self-Scheduling Ruby Scripts

[Whenever][1] is an awesome library that:

“provides a clean ruby syntax for defining messy cron jobs and running them Whenever.

Whenever has become very popular for use with Rails apps and there are plenty of tutorials on how to use it. This [RailsCast][2] is a good place to get started if you’re interested in that.

However, I haven’t seen too many people writing about using the library outside of Rails (or other web frameworks).

I have a lot of Ruby scripts running on different servers all scheduled via cron and it’s quite easy to forget what script is scheduled when and how often. I decided to try using Whenever to create the cron jobs instead of creating them manually. First, I set out to just slap arbitrary Ruby code inside of an every block. You know, something like this:

every :hour do
  puts "this is just some ruby that will execute every hour"
end

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. If it did, that would own because then we could simply wrap all our scripts inside an every block and call it a day. Instead the library lets you define a few different kinds of tasks inside an every block.

rake tasks
external commands
runner scripts (Rails)

So, we can use the command method to execute our pre-existing scripts like so:

every 1.day, :at => '4:30 am' do
  command "/scripts/daily_backup.rb"
end

So that’s cool, but now we have to create a separate file that houses our schedule definitions and manage it as well as the scripts we want to run. What would be really cool, I thought, would be to include the schedule definitions at the top of each script. The big win in this case is easily accessible & portable schedule documentation.

One way of accomplishing this is to prepend all your Ruby scripts with a snippet similar to this:

# filename: /scripts/weekly_backup.rb
every :sunday, :at => '12pm' do
    command "/scripts/weekly_backup.rb"
end if defined?(Whenever)

return unless __FILE__ == $PROGRAM_NAME

puts "this is the start of my backup script"

When this script is executed using the whenever command (which you use to actually generate and install the cron jobs), the first every block will be used and everything after the return line will be ignored. When this script is executed directly, the every block will be ignored and everything after the return line will be executed.

Writing the crontab with this script will look like this:

whenever -w -f /scripts/weekly_backup.rb

Which will install a cron job that looks like this:

0 12 * * 0 /scripts/weekly_backup.rb

The major drawback to this method is we have to hard code the full path to the script instead of using the __FILE__ variable, which hurts portability. This is because Whenever evals the content of the file read in and in this case __FILE__ is useless. There is access to the calling file path via Whenever::CommandLine.default_identifier but this is currently a protected method.

This is just my first attempt at embedding scheduling information inside the script being scheduled, so there are probably easier/better ways of getting this done. Know any?

[1]: “http://github.com/javan/whenever/” [2]: “http://railscasts.com/episodes/164-cron-in-ruby”

· Jerod Santo ·