Padrino Rake tasks with Whenever

Padrino as a framework is an interesting middle ground between Rails and Sinatra. However, it breaks from the norm in that it doesn’t have a traditional Rakefile, opting instead to pass everything through its padrino command (e.g., padrino rake console). Ordinarily this isn’t a problem, but it slightly conflicts with the excellent whenever gem for managing crontabs on a production server, since whenever’s default rake job type assumes there’s a traditional Rakefile.

Luckily whenever offers a simple solution by defining a custom job_type:

config/schedule.rb

job_type :padrino_rake, 'cd :path && padrino rake :task -e :environment'

every :hour do
  padrino_rake 'crawl'
end

Run after a deploy, my crontab will now look like this:

@hourly /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /path/to/my/project && padrino rake crawl -e production'
Tags: padrino ruby whenever crontab cron