How do you call a method every hour in Rails?

You should use a cron job for this kind of task.

I suggest you use the Whenever gem.

See railscast here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/164-cron-in-ruby


Since you are already using Resque, I would recommend to use one of the many available Resque plugins: resque-scheduler. Plugs into the Resque UI very nicely as well. Simple setup as explained in the README. Also adds a lot of the missing DelayedJob stuff (delayed execution).

Why I switched from whenever to resque-scheduler:

  • Stays in the app-folder and doesn't mess with your cron file.
  • To stop all 'crons' just disable the Resque workers.
  • Exceptions are logged to the Resque UI.
  • Manual rescheduling via the Resque UI possible.
  • In combination with resque-loner you prevent double-execution should a job take longer than the span between two executions.
  • Still obeys to the priority-system of Resque.
  • No additional boot-time (could take up to 60s if your app gets bigger) since it uses Resque's worker-pool.
  • One less "tech" used.
  • Simple switch: Configuration is done in a cron-like manner.