Run controller as Ruby script? - ruby

Question

In my application I setup a news controller to handle news feeds using Nokogiri:
class NewsController < InheritedResources::Base
def new
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
doc = Nokogiri::XML(open("http://www.themusicvoid.com/feed"))
#info = doc.xpath('//item').take(5).map do |i|
News.create(:title => i.xpath('title').inner_text,
:description => i.xpath('description').inner_text,
:link => i.xpath('link').inner_text,
:image => i.xpath('image').inner_text)
end
end
end
This functions by running <%= debug #info %> in the new.html.erb file. It searches the RSS feed and automatically saves to my database.
The problem is that it would do this whenever ANYBODY loaded new.html.erb (although I could add that file to my robots.txt so at least bots wouldn't trigger it.)
What I actually want is some sort of a Ruby script or Rake task that would do the exact same thing without loading a page. If I just run the code above as a script, it works, it would output the data if I wanted to echo it, but it does not save the information to the database. Any ideas on how I might do that?

Answer 1

You can create a rake task under lib/tasks directory:
rss_fetcher.rake
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
namespace :rss do
desc "Fetch rss feed"
task :fetch => :environment do
doc = Nokogiri::XML(open("http://www.themusicvoid.com/feed"))
#info = doc.xpath('//item').take(5).map do |i|
News.create(:title => i.xpath('title').inner_text, :description => i.xpath('description').inner_text, :link => i.xpath('link').inner_text, :image => i.xpath('image').inner_text)
end
end
end
then somewhere call rake 'rss:fetch'
I highly recommend the whenever gem to do that kind of job
gem install whenever
config/schedule.rb
every 2.hours do
rake "rss:fetch"
end