Question

I have a model, let’s call it Foobar. I want to be able to run a cron job to update an attribute of all objects that are instances of Foobar. So, in pseudocode, it might be something like this:

Foobar.all.each do |foobar|
  foobar.update_attributes({:my_attribute => 'updated'});
end

Now, let’s say I wrap that in a class method called Foobar.run_update().

Calling Foobar.run_update() would work fine from the controller, or even from a view. But, what I want to do is run run_update() from the Rakefile so that I can tie it into a cron run. But, the Foobar class is not available to Rake when it is called from crontab.

How can I resolve that? How can I access the class methods of Foobars from Rake, when Rake is called from cron?

Thank you very much for your help.

Answer 1

You can load up the Rails environment by requiring config/environment.rb:

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= "production"
require '/where/your/rails/project/is/config/environment.rb'