run rake task in the background and log to file

30 Jul 2012

I am working with rake tasks a lot, I love the simplicity of creating one and just running one on the server.

For the real heavy lifting I am using a queue system of course, but when I just want to throw something in the queue for example, I will usually create a rake task for it and run it on one of the servers.

I use quick and dirty puts messages to log the progress.

For example I could have a rake task like this:

User.find_each do |user|
  puts "Going over user: #{user.id}"
  Resque.enqueue(...)
end

To run this on the server, I just ssh into is and then I do screen so when I log out of the server the session will save the process and not kill it.

Then, I run this command:

rake foo:bar  --trace 2>&1 >> log/some_log_file.log

That’s it, you can now leave the server and let it do all the work, periodically, you can log in and check the progress just by tailing the file.