backgroundrb by hostname

I love backgroundrb - the way to run scheduled tasks and async workers. BUT on my setup I wanted to run certain backgroundrb tasks on one machine and certain ones on another (for memory reasons and also for testing).

I couldn't find something that did that so I forked backgroundrb into my own repository on GitHub. You can find it here.

You can now have a config file like this:

# A Sample YAML configuration file
---
:backgroundrb:
  :ip: 0.0.0.0 #ip on which backgroundrb server is running
  :port: 11006 #port on which backgroundrb server is running
  :environment: production # rails environment loaded, defaults to development
  :debug_log: true # whether to print debug logs to a seperate worker, defaults to true
  :log: foreground # will print log messages to STDOUT, defaults to seperate log worker
  # :result_storage: memcache # store results in a mecache cluster, you also need to specify location of your memcache clusters in next section
  :persistent_disabled: true # turn this off if your application doesn't use backgroundrb's persistent/enqueued tasks system
  :persistent_delay: 10 # the time (seconds) between each time backgroundrb checks the database for enqueued tasks
  :per_environment: true

# You specify your worker schedules here
:whatever.local:
    :backgroundrb: 
        :environment: test
    :schedules:
      :test_worker: # worker name
        :test: #worker method
          :trigger_args: */5 * * * * * * #worker schedule
          :data: whatever

:phils-mac-pro.local:
    :backgroundrb: 
        :environment: development
    :schedules:
      :test_worker: # worker name
        :test: #worker method
          :trigger_args: */5 * * * * * * #worker schedule
          :data: phil

You can launch backgroundrb with a specific hostname like this:

./script/backgroundrb --hostname=whatever.local

I've created Capistrano tasks that fire up an instance on 2 servers and now they act differently based on hostname.

Sweet!