Question

This question will probably only make sense if you know about the whenever gem for creating cron jobs.

For my app, I want to use whenever in all the environments, including testing and development.
My schedule.rb looks like this:

set :output, {
    :error    => "#{path}/log/error.log",
    :standard => "#{path}/log/cron.log"
}

set :environment, Rails.env.to_sym
every 5.minutes do
  rake 'db:activity:synchronize'
end

but it fails on Rails.env.to_sym (and the same stands for RAILS_ENV):

/home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/gems/whenever-0.6.8/lib/whenever/job_list.rb:21:in `eval': uninitialized constant Whenever::JobList::Rails (NameError)
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/gems/whenever-0.6.8/lib/whenever/job_list.rb:21:in `eval'
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/gems/whenever-0.6.8/lib/whenever/job_list.rb:21:in `initialize'
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/gems/whenever-0.6.8/lib/whenever.rb:15:in `new'
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/gems/whenever-0.6.8/lib/whenever.rb:15:in `cron'
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/gems/whenever-0.6.8/lib/whenever/command_line.rb:41:in `run'
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/gems/whenever-0.6.8/lib/whenever/command_line.rb:8:in `execute'
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/gems/whenever-0.6.8/bin/whenever:38:in `<top (required)>'
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/bin/whenever:19:in `load'
    from /home/marius/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@uxolo/bin/whenever:19:in `<main>'

So, my question basically boils down to:

1. How do I access the current environment, or
2. What should I do to use whenever in all the environments?

Answer 1

The error message suggests that Rails isn’t defined. i.e the framework isn’t loaded when you’re asking the question what environment is rails running with.

In fact from looking at the code for Whenever it looks like rails isn’t a requirement for it (i.e. You can install and run Whenever without rails even being installed on your system). Hence there’s no way for Whenever to look at your rails environment (as far as i can tell)