Rake Tasks and Cron Jobs on Webmin

Learning all sorts of new stuff lately...

Rake Tasks are great. You can access your database through Rails to do whatever you want. In my case, I wanted to email fans on dazlus.com with any profile changes that may have occurred by their idols (the profile of which they have indicated they are a fan).

IE - If Bob adds a new photo, his fans get an email later in the day letting them know about it with a convenient link to go in and see it.

This is pretty easy - though a little tricky at Joyent to set up the cron job. Joyent is my service provider. To get cron job set up here, you need to do two commands: 1) cd to the app directory and 2) run the rake task.

To do this - a command like this works:

cd /path/to/rails/app && /usr/local/bin/rake RAILS_ENV=production mail:fan_news

You have to cd to the rails app first. If not you will see permission denied errors.

I'm also using Cron + Rake to send me updates about the site - checking regularly to see if there are any broken pages and to send me an email if so. Very handy tool to know about.