Scheduled Tasks with Cron in a Rails app
One of my apps requires a daily task to run. It uses WWW::Mechanize (the gem) to log onto a website, insert a username and password, and save that information, come back to my app, and insert & save that into a form on my site.
I’m pretty impressed I was able to pull it off. It’s a great deal of detail to go into, but I used Recipe 75 in Advanced Rails Recipes and adjusted some of my old hpricot & mechanize scripts.
Best of all, it keeps me out of the crontab on the server. No hand editing. The capistrano cron rake task takes care of that.