dotenv VS Whenever

This is the second part of my Test Driving a Rails API series. In Part 1 we set up our development environment, generated a Rails API-only application, installed dotenv to easily store configuration values in the environment, and installed and configured PostgreSQL version 16 as our database.

Storing environment variables for a Rails app can be problematic. The dotenv gem will automatically, when Rails boots, load environment variables from .env files into the Rails ENV. This is a great way to store private information that varies per developer or deployment environment, such as your development database configuration. Rails Encrypted Credentials is a great way to store private information, like API keys, etc, but I wouldn’t use it for storing my local development environment’s database information. The Encrypted Credentials file is checked into the git repository and would, therefore, be shared by all developers on the project. dotenv allows each developer or deployment environment to store their own information in .env files that are ignored by git.

dotenv

Install the dotenv gem.

dotenv-rails

Yeah, now that I think of it, it does require a gem. I have used this in most projects https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv

Learn about Unix cron and use the whenever gem.

there are cronjob gems available, i believe https://github.com/javan/whenever or so seems to be used frequently

- Use them on a specific schedule as needed by your application, such as taking backups, sending periodic reminders or notifications for users, cleaning the database tables, etc. You can use a gem such as Whenever for managing scheduled cron jobs.

whenever gem is used in Rails applications to schedule cron jobs e.g. send email notification about monthly expenditure on the 1st of each month.

Then you can use the whenever gem to schedule stuff.

- [whenever](https://github.com/javan/whenever)

whenever

There are multiple ways to achieve this. Probably the simplest and most reliable is to rely on cron to run your process every minute. Cron keeps track of time and executes your script each minute. This has the added benefit of avoiding a long running process (which can have its own issues). You can even have your script install it’s own cron job using the Whenever gem.

Rake tasks can be called from Cron, so we'll use the Whenever Gem to automatically add our job to our Crontab during deployment, and keep our schedule in change control.