Winever

Winever is a gem that adds features to the whenever gem, making it also compatible with Windows, without breaking anything when using Whenever only.

Winever creates and removes tasks in the Windows task scheduler using win32-taskscheduler.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'winever'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install

Winever adds the command winever which behaves similarly to whenever.

You can use winever without parameters to list a "cron file" using an internal syntax. It will tell you which of the jobs of your schedule are supported and which ones aren't. Just like with Whenever, you can use winever -i to install/update the jobs on your Windows machine and winever -c to remove them.

Winever creates tasks in Windows' task scheduler. In order for a job to be compatible with Winever, it needs to have an additional option: task_name. Note that this task_name will have an identifier (similar to Whenever's comment in the crontab) added as suffix to enable Winever to remove old tasks when needed.

every 1.day, at: '00:30 am' do
  rake 'my_backup_task', :task_name => 'MyAppBackup'
end

If you define new job_types in your schedule. Then you will need to define them differently for Winever. To do so, first add require 'winever' to the top of your schedule file. This will add the function winever? to your schedule, which you can use to define some tasks only for Windows or for Linux, and to define a job_type differently for Whenever and for Winever. This is the basic line for create a job_type for Winever.

if winever?
  job_type :something, ":task_folder|:task_name|:path|command_you_want_executed_here :output"
else
  job_type :something, "cd :path && command_you_want_executed_here :output"
end

The pipes (|) are important, so make sure not to remove any. If your job_type doesn't need to be run in the folder of your application (like the existing job_type "command" of Whenever), then remove the :path (leaving the pipes around it intact).

As of right now the only type of schedule that is supported are the daily ones (run once per day, at a specific time, every day). Pull requests welcomed to add more, cron_time.rb and test_cron_time.rb should be the only files needing edit for that.

• As mentioned previously, only once-per-day-everyday tasks are supported.
• Since RVM doesn't support windows, the tasks will call the global executables. Meaning if you have multiple Ruby installed, the first executable found on the PATH will be used.
• Windows may not deal with single and double quotes in the same way as Linux. This is especially apparent when using bundle exec before the actual command, which happens automatically for rake and script job_types. Make sure to test on both environment that the behavior is as expected. Also, see the section Ruby-Windows bug.
• See the section Ruby-Windows bug.

There is currently a bug in Ruby (#10128) related to argument passing through functions such as Kernel.exec, Kernel.system, which makes arguments be split around metacharacters by Windows when they shouldn't. This can be a problem when using bundle exec, which happens for the rake and script job_types.

As an example, in your console on Windows, the following will all fail because bundle exec relies on Kernel.exec. It will try to call the command world]:

    bundle exec rake my_task[hello&world]
    bundle exec rake my_task["hello&world"]
    bundle exec rake "my_task[hello&world]"

The problematic metacharacters are the following:

• <>&|;
• the ^ gets removed
• the " is not escaped correctly, most likely breaking things. (no workaround)

The workaround is to have a space somewhere in the argument that contains those characters, Ruby will then wrap those parameters in quote and things will got correctly. For rake tasks, this can usually be handled easily by adding an empty parameter, which won't even be considered by rake. (no need to change your task). The above would work as bundle exec rake "my_task[hello&world, ]".

In your schedule, your line for the rake task should therefore include the double quotes:

rake '"my_task[hello&world, ]"'

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Run test (bundle install followed by rake).
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create new Pull Request