Question

I want to have a certain controller’s action to do something at a certain time (for instace, send the user email at New Years day

I want it to be done regardless if the user enters the site or not.

Is there a gem for this for timers in rails?

Answer 1

You can take a look to whenever gem, which writes and deploy cron jobs, so you are able to execute the task that you want at the time you want, for example:

every 3.hours do
  runner "MyModel.some_process"       
  rake "my:rake:task"                 
  command "/usr/bin/my_great_command"
end

every 1.day, :at => '4:30 am' do 
  runner "MyModel.task_to_run_at_four_thirty_in_the_morning"
end

every :hour do # Many shortcuts available: :hour, :day, :month, :year, :reboot
  runner "SomeModel.ladeeda"
end

every :sunday, :at => '12pm' do # Use any day of the week or :weekend, :weekday 
  runner "Task.do_something_great"
end

every '0 0 27-31 * *' do
  command "echo 'you can use raw cron syntax too'"
end

This example was taken from the whenever gem documentation, hope this helps.