Whenever gem on aws opsworks

Question

Does anyone have experience/success using the whenever gem on aws opsworks? Is there a good recipe? Can I put that recipe on a separate layer and associate one instance with that additional layer? Or is there a better way to do it? Thanks!!!

EDIT:

We ended up doing it a bit differently...

Code:

Can’t really post the real code, but it’s like this:

in deploy/before_migrate.rb:

[:schedule].each do |config_name|
  Chef::Log.info("Processing config for #{config_name}")
  begin
    template "#{release_path}/config/#{config_name}.rb" do |_config_file|
      variables(
        config_name => node[:deploy][:APP_NAME][:config_files][config_name]
      )
      local true
      source "#{release_path}/config/#{config_name}.rb.erb"
    end
  rescue => e
    Chef::Log.error e
    raise "Error processing config for #{config_name}: #{e}"
  end
end

in deploy/after_restart.rb:

execute 'start whenever' do
  cwd release_path
  user node[:deploy][:APP_NAME][:user] || 'deploy'
  command 'bundle exec whenever -i APP_NAME'
end

in config/schedule.rb.erb:

 <% schedule = @schedule || {} %>

set :job_template, "bash -l -c 'export PATH=/usr/local/bin:${PATH} && :job'"
job_type :runner,  'cd :path && bundle exec rails runner -e :environment ":task" :output'
job_type :five_runner, 'cd :path && timeout 300 bundle exec rails runner -e :environment ":task" :output'
set :output, 'log/five_minute_job.log' 
every 5.minutes, at: <%= schedule[:five_minute_job_minute] || 0 %> do
  five_runner 'Model.method'
end

Answer 1

We have a whenever cookbook in our repo we use that you would be more than welcome to use here: https://github.com/freerunningtech/frt-opsworks-cookbooks. I assume you're familiar with adding custom cookbooks to your opsworks stacks.

We generally run it on its own layer that also includes the rails cookbooks required for application deployment (while not the app server):

• Configure: rails::configure
• Deploy: deploy::rails whenever
• Undeploy: deploy::rails-undeploy

However, we usually also deploy this instance as an application server, meaning we do end up serving requests from the box we're using for whenever as well.

There is one "gotcha", in that you must set your path in the env at the top of the schedule.rb like this:

env :PATH, ENV['PATH']