EQ is a little framework to queue and perform background tasks within a single-process ruby application. It uses the Celluloid actor framework to do the work in the background. Its queue backends persist your jobs. So your jobs will survive application stop/restart.

Install it yourself using Rubygems.

$ gem install eq

Or use something like Bundler.

If you want to execute a simple example you can just run examples/simple_usage.rb from your commandline.

1. Define a Job class with a perform method.

class MyJob
  def self.perform *some_args
    # do some long running stuff here
  end
end

2. Start the EQ system.

EQ.boot

3. Enqueue some jobs in the EQ queue.

EQ.push MyJob, 'foo'
EQ.push MyJob, 'bar'
…	

5. Let EQ do your work.

# EQ will spawn and maintain worker threads that execute the following for you:
MyJob.perform 'foo'
MyJob.perform 'bar'

6. Shutdown EQ gracefully when you're application is done.*

EQ.shutdown

module Clockwork
  every(5.seconds, MyJob)
  every(1.day, MyJob, :at => '00:00')
end

Right now there are two queueing backends available, one that is based on the Sequel gem and one based on LevelDB. With Sequel basically any SQL database might be used. Just make sure that you install the Backend before running the application.

Gemfile

gem 'sequel'
gem 'sqlite3'

Configuration

EQ.config.queue = 'sequel'

# With SQLite3 in-memory (default) using String syntax
# Caution: This won't persist your jobs!
EQ.config.sequel = 'sqlite:/' 

# With SQLite3 file using Hash syntax
EQ.config.sequel = {adapter: 'sqlite', database: 'my_db.sqlite3'}

# With Postgres
EQ.config.sequel = 'postgres://user:password@host:port/my_db'

# Mysql, Oracle, etc.
# ...

Gemfile

gem 'leveldb-ruby'

Configuration

EQ.config.queue = 'leveldb'
EQ.config.leveldb = 'path/to/my/queue.leveldb'

EQ uses the logging mechanism of the underlying Celluloid (Celluloid.logger) framework. Basically you can just bind it to your application logger or re-configure it (see the Documentation of the Logger class from Ruby Standard Library).

Changing the Logger:

# Use the logger of your Rails application.
Celluloid.logger = Rails.logger

# No logging at all.
Celluloid.logger = Logger.new('/dev/null')

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Copyright (c) 2012 Jens Bissinger. See LICENSE.