Question

UPDATED: I used daemon_generator in a Rails 2.3 app to create a daemon. Per Jeff Perrin’s suggestions below i created the following configuration. I updated this question with the final solution for others that are struggling to get a daemon working.

For debugging purposes I cut my lib/pulse_check_email.rb file down to this:

class PulseCheckEmail
    def self.send_pulse_check_mail
         # removed all conditional statements and other "stuff" to debug
    end
end

My lib/daemons/mailer.rb file:

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../../config/environment"
require 'pulse_check_email'

while($running) do
  PulseCheckEmail.send_pulse_check_mail
  sleep 300 # 5 min
end

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Regardless of whether you can call a controller method from a daemon in your Rails application, this is not something I would recommend. I would suggest that you extract the code that is currently in the send_mail action of the controller into a separate class (that could be put in the /lib directory as well). Then you can call that code from both your daemon and your controller.

class YourController < ApplicationController
  def create
    do_stuff
    send_email
  end

  def send_email
    ExtractedClass.do_stuff(params)
  end
end

#new class in lib/extracted_class.rb
class ExtractedClass
  def self.do_stuff(params)
    #put the code that was previously in the send_email
    #function of your controller
  end
end

#in lib/daemons/mailer.rb
while($running) do
  ExtractedClass.do_stuff(params)
  sleep 300 # 5 min
end

This will do several things:

• You can more easily test the ExtractedClass separately
• Your daemon is just concerned with how often it should run, and what it should be running. There is no other logic necessary. You now have a thin daemon.
• You are moving logic out of the controller, also making it thinner (google “skinny controller fat model”)