I am currently writing an application that pulls new information from RSS sources and has to update those RSS sources in a certain frequency. Currently I am pulling only when the user requests a feed but I want to change that behavior to automatic periodic fetching.
I was writing a shellscript that would interact with the database and gets started periodically via cron – but this is lots of double effort so I was wondering what would be the “Rails Way” or “Ruby Way” to do this. I am using Ubuntu, Apache and Passenger. Can you suggest better methods that are maybe even included in the application, so I can easily deploy the app to another machine without having to mingle with cron?
I would suggest doing something like a rake task and using the whenever gem to generate your cron job to run the rake task.
Check out, http://railscasts.com/episodes/164-cron-in-ruby, for more information on the whenver gem.
The main benefit of the whenever gem is that it keeps your application requirements (i.e. the cron job running every x hours, in the application) inside your application, increasing the portability of your application.