whenever

You typically do it on a schedule, e.g. once per hour, or once every day. In the post the whenever gem (https://github.com/javan/whenever) is used, but you could use anything that is able to run things periodically. If you'd want to stay solely within Postgres, there is also pg_cron (https://github.com/citusdata/pg_cron) which could be used to call REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW from within the database.

If you're using Ruby, whenever is a better solution. https://github.com/javan/whenever Wraps cron so you don't have to. Integrates with Capistrano.

I'm working on a small Rails 4 app to run on Ruby 2.x with Postgres, Redis and some cron job magic with the whenever gem [1]. Every time I look at deploying Rails apps, I end up looking at tools like Capistrano or Rubber [2] but get lost in a mass of conflicting tutorials, jargon and confusion that might give me a very basic setup but doesn't give me much idea of where to go next [3]. For instance, many guides explain how to run a Rails app on Apache and Passenger with Postgres, but give no pointers on where to go next for adding a Resque worker or running post-deploy commands for stuff like whenever. Does HN know of any resources that will help me to get a good grounding in deploying my Rails apps on Unix on the kind of stack I've specified, probably running on EC2 or Digital Ocean? Ideally, they'd start from the beginning to get a basic

I developed Whenever (http://github.com/javan/whenever) to at least make the Cron syntax more reasonable.

Not without a little hacking. After a little digging, it looks like it has an implicit Rails dependency (http://github.com/javan/whenever/blob/f036675e94cd9dd9b21d2c...)