acts_as_service

Overview

A gem that gives you an easy way to make service-like code and spend all your effort on actually writing the code to get your job done.

Limitations:

• one process at a time

• only been tested while running inside a Rails application (e.g. script/runner MySrv.start). should work if you just specify a pidfile explicitly, but needs a little testing

Allows you to:

• start, stop, restart your process

• ensures that only one of each process is running on a given machine (if this is not desired, you can probably hack it or enhance to allow up to N instances if you want

• implement a method you want called over and over, and when the service is supposed to shut down, it stops calling the method and exits

• see what the PID is of the process by inspecting the pidfile

• explicitly shutdown the process from within the service class (but you’ll still have to return from perform_work_chunk).

• initiate shutdown of service externally by either calling MyService.stop or adding ‘shutdown’ to the PID file.

• hooks to execute methods after start or before stop

What to do

require ‘acts_as_service’ # or add it to your Rails env as a config.gem

class MyService

  acts_as_service

  def self.perform_work_chunk
    # do stuff that returns in a short period (e.g. a few seconds or less)
  end

end

you can get fancier and specify your process identifier and how long to sleep between calls to perform_work_chunk:

class MyService

  acts_as_service

  def self.service_name
    "MyAwesomeService"
  end

  def self.sleep_time
    5 # seconds
  end

  def self.perform_work_chunk
    # do stuff that returns in a short period (e.g. a few seconds or less)
  end

end

Maintaining acts_as_service

Make sure you have jeweler.

To build:

cd .../acts_as_service
rake gemspec
rake build

To test:

Sorry, little lazy here. Create a sample service class and letter rip!