scheduling a job every minute Rails 3.1 on Heroku

Question

I want to run a task every minute on Heroku to check if conditions are met to time-out certain user tasks. I can only run a Heroku cron job every hour, so what's the best way to set up a timed task like this. I am using Rails 3.1 on Heroku.

Answer 1

You could use delayed_job with a self-restarting job with a :run_at. Something sort of like this:

class YourJob
    def do_interesting_things
        #... Do what needs to be done.
        self.delay(:run_at => 1.minute.from_now).do_interesting_things
    end

    def self.start_me_up
        new.do_interesting_things
    end
end

And then somewhere during your application's initialization:

YourJob.start_me_up

Answer 2

As of today, you can the scheduling gem, clockwork. Heroku officially supports this and you can find their documentation here.