Question

I have installed whenever gem:

I want to clean the directory public/uploads/tmp in my app ruby on rails 3.1 each 5 minutes.

every 5.minutes do 
 #here go the code for clean the directory tmp
end

How can I do it?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You could try using FileUtils#rm_rf included in the standard library. For example:

FileUtils.rm_rf Dir.glob("#{Rails.root}/public/uploads/tmp/*")

Edit (to use it with whenever gem)

An approach by using a rake task could be:

1) Create a rake task in f.ex: lib/tasks/cleanup.rake with something similar to the following:

require 'fileutils'

namespace :app do
  desc "Cleanup temp uploads"
  task :cleanup => :environment do
    FileUtils.rm_rf Dir.glob("#{Rails.root}/public/uploads/tmp/*")
  end
end

2) In config/schedule.rb (created by whenever after running the wheneverize command):

every 5.minutes do 
  # run the previous app:cleanup task
  rake "app:cleanup"
end

3) Whenever is only a wrapper to easily define crontab jobs, so now we need to export the defined schedule into the crontab file for the current user. To do that we should type from the application root:

bundle exec whenever -w

4) You can check that it worked by typing crontab -l and you should the something like the following:

# Begin Whenever generated tasks for: /tmp/whene/config/schedule.rb
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /tmp/whene && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake app:cleanup --silent

As a side note, if you want the operation to write some log output, please check this page on the whenever github wiki.

Hope it helps.