Planet CakePHP

Most web applications have to perform some periodic tasks. For this purpose, you usually define some cron jobs.
With the “whenever” Ruby gem you can define those cron jobs directly in your Rails application.
After installing the gem (with “gem install javan-whenever”) you either have to create the file “/config/schedule.rb” manually, or you can use “wheneverize” to generate this file (call “wheneverize .” from your project root). You can then add your application-specific cron jobs to this file.
For example, let’s say you want to clean up the users table and remove all users who didn’t activate their accounts, then you would write something like:

every 1.day, :at => '2am' do
runner "User.cleanup_inactive_users"
end

This will execute the “cleanup_inactive_users” method of the “User” model daily at 2am (you could also use “every :friday do” to run it every friday, or “every 2.hours do” to run it every two hours, and so on) . The “runner” keyword allows you to execute Ruby code (it uses “script/runner”, hence the name). You can also use “command” to execute command line tools, or “rake” for running rake tasks.
So far we simply described our cron job, though no cron job is active yet. To change this, we have to tell cron about our cron job with:

whenever --update-crontab example

“example” is a unique identifier for our application, and is used by “whenever” to determine which cron jobs it has to modify when you update “schedule.rb” and re-run the above command. It is probably best to put this command in the deployment script of your application to keep your cron jobs up-to-date.
With “crontab -l” we can see the job(s) added by “whenever”:

# Begin Whenever generated tasks for: example
0 2 * * * /home/dho/projects/example/script/runner -e production "User.cleanup_inactive_users"
# End Whenever generated tasks for: example

With that, our cron job should be executed like any other cron job on our system.
I hope I could give you a short overview about this quite useful gem, for more information see:
http://github.com/javan/whenever
ASCIIcasts “Episode 164 – Cron in Ruby”