Cron comes from the 1970s but is still used in Rails apps to schedule jobs on VPS.
There are two ways in Rails to set the crontab from your config/schedule file which has a handy DSL for scheduled tasks.
After your project has been wheneverized then you can run e.g.
bundle exec whenever –update-crontab –set ‘environment=staging’ staging
on the server which sets the crontab.
You can check this with crontab -e.
If you deploy with Capistrano you won’t need to do this and you can require ‘whenever/capistrano’ which will add a task to update the crontab on deploy.
You can list the crontab with crontab -l
and clear the crontab with crontab -r