My situation was this -
- Rails 2.0 app running on slicehost (ubuntu 8.04) in passenger mod_rails
- The goal was Dynamic PDF generation for a product catalog ( > 100 pages)
- This event had to be triggered from within the rails request / response cycle, but run outside of it
- I needed the simplest, fastest, more reliable way for this to happen
I looked at BackgroundRB, it is the most robust, well documented solution available. But it was overkill since I didn’t need status feedback and my time was very limited (backgroundRB setup seems somewhat involved). And, I wasn’t sure how it would interact with Passenger mod_rails – although FooBarWidget mentioned on IRC that it should work as expected.
I looked at Spawn plugin which supports threading and forking ruby processes. No luck – setting it one way never ran inside mod_rails and setting it the other way tied up the request response cycle.
All the ruby code was in place, except for how to detach this process from the request/response cycle, when severnspoon provided this
Simple, Easy, One-Line Solution:
My_Controller
def generate_pdf_in_background
system " RAILS_ENV=#{RAILS_ENV} ruby #{RAILS_ROOT}/script/runner 'MyModel.create_pdf_in_background' & "
end
end
That ampersand was all I needed. It runs the command as a background process. A new ruby process is kicked off, and the 10 minute task runs perfectly. Something makes the browser hang and wait for a response, but we confirmed that other requests can happen along side this.
Rails background process – simple, fast, easy.
My situation was this -
I looked at BackgroundRB, it is the most robust, well documented solution available. But it was overkill since I didn’t need status feedback and my time was very limited (backgroundRB setup seems somewhat involved). And, I wasn’t sure how it would interact with Passenger mod_rails – although FooBarWidget mentioned on IRC that it should work as expected.
I looked at Spawn plugin which supports threading and forking ruby processes. No luck – setting it one way never ran inside mod_rails and setting it the other way tied up the request response cycle.
All the ruby code was in place, except for how to detach this process from the request/response cycle, when severnspoon provided this
Simple, Easy, One-Line Solution:
system " RAILS_ENV=#{RAILS_ENV} ruby #{RAILS_ROOT}/script/runner 'MyModel.create_pdf_in_background' & "That ampersand was all I needed. It runs the command as a background process. A new ruby process is kicked off, and the 10 minute task runs perfectly. Something makes the browser hang and wait for a response, but we confirmed that other requests can happen along side this.