Whenever: rbenv support

Se also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8434922/ruby-script-using-rbenv-in-cron

Here's how I got cron jobs working for my Capistrano/rbenv/rails setup:

# Set the path to include rbenv
PATH=$PATH:/home/deploy/.rbenv/shims/:/home/deploy/.rbenv/bin/:/bin:/usr/bin/

# Begin Whenever generated tasks for: /home/deploy/grunndata/current/config/schedule.rb
0 * * * * /bin/bash -l -c '.eval "$(rbenv init -)"; cd /home/deploy/grunndata/current && bundle exec rails runner -e production '\''CacheWorker.perform_async'\'''

I commented out whenever in the Capfile, so I have to add new whenever cron jobs myself, after listing them in my development environment and modifying them to fit the pattern above.

The -l bash option runs an interactive shell, which should execute your startup files. Do you have eval "$(rbenv init -)" in your .bash_profile?

I have the eval string in my .bashrc and it works fine otherwise.

.bash_profile is executed for login shells and .bashrc is executed for interactive non-login shells. So, you'll need to either add rbenv init to your .bash_profile or modify the job_template in your schedule.rb. The easiest option is to source your .bashrc in your .bash_profile.

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
   source ~/.bashrc
fi

this post works for me for Ubuntu, on AWS:
http://benscheirman.com/2013/12/using-rbenv-in-cron-jobs.

Eg for a periodical task each 15 minutes:

0,15,30,45 * * * * export PATH=/home/ubuntu/.rbenv/shims:/home/ubuntu/.rbenv/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH; eval "$(rbenv init -)"; cd /var/www/app/current && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake my_task

you can find your rbenv path to replace with 'which rake' command:
eg.

$ which rake
/home/ubuntu/.rbenv/shims/rake

Ubuntu 16.04, rbenv, Capistrano, whenever, Rails 5

$ which rake
/home/deploy/.rbenv/shims/rake

schedule.rb

job_type :rbenv_rake, %Q{export PATH=/home/deploy/.rbenv/shims:/home/deploy/.rbenv/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH; eval "$(rbenv init -)"; \
                         cd :path && :environment_variable=:environment :bundle_command rake :task --silent :output }

job_type :rbenv_runner, %Q{export PATH=/home/deploy/.rbenv/shims:/home/deploy/.rbenv/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH; eval "$(rbenv init -)"; \
                         cd :path && :bundle_command :runner_command -e :environment ':task' :output }
#... and so on


# example of use
every 60.minutes do
  rbenv_rake "ts:index"
end

It took me hours to finally find this solution. @askrynnikov's solution did not work for me. I'm also on Ubuntu, rebenv, Capistrano, whenever, and Rails 5.

All I needed to do was add env :PATH, ENV['PATH'] to the top of my schedule.rb.

@austinarchibald's comment worked for me, finally. There should really be a mention of this in the readme for RBENV users.

Add to this the confusion of not really knowing about cron outputs, and it just failing silently...quite the fun 2 hours debugging this.

It took me hours to finally find this solution. @askrynnikov's solution did not work for me. I'm also on Ubuntu, rebenv, Capistrano, whenever, and Rails 5.

All I needed to do was add env :PATH, ENV['PATH'] to the top of my schedule.rb.

This worked for me as well. And just like gregblass, it was quite an experience debugging this! I am not sure if I it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the capistrano rbenv gem or some issue with the gem itself, but I had similar issue with delayed_job, where the bin/delayed_job file just would not get the executable permission when copied to the server by capistrano. So I wrote a task which I had run before invoking the delayed_job:restart task.

Actually, @javan gave an excellent explanation(https://github.com/javan/whenever/issues/486#issuecomment-58009257) of what is going on. However, in 2021, on Ubuntu 20.04 I had some mileage variation.

1. If you do not have .bash_profile it is ok to modify .profile instead.
2. Sourcing .bashrc for some reason didn't work for me, so I ended up adding those lines from .bashrc:

export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/shims:$PATH"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin:$PATH"

into .profile
But once again - your export path may varies - see your .bashrc.

On Ubuntu 20.04 this is at the top of ~/.bashrc:

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
case $- in
    *i*) ;;
      *) return;;
esac

You could put eval "$(rbenv init -)" before that part and it'll run in non-interactive mode I'm guessing. I'm trying this now and will report back.

Just reporting back RE https://github.com/javan/whenever/issues/486#issuecomment-850666094

It worked well and now the commands run with the correct ruby environment. I'm not sure if it's an ideal setup since I don't like configurations that are order dependent but the default structure of this file gives us no choice.