Heroku Rake/Cron - No Namespace

19 Nov 2010

So, if you are making a cron job for Heroku and you have gone ahead and make a cron.rake file in lib/tasks, you also need to remove the “namespace :cron do … end” code from any example code you may have used as a start.

Heroku only executes the “rake cron” command when your task runs, instead of “rake cron:cron”, so if you have the namespace in your rake file, it’ll fail with a “rake aborted! Don’t know how to build task ‘cron’” error.

In short, do this:

namespace :cron do
 desc “cron job description”  
 task **:blah** => :environment do  
 # stuff to do  
 end  
end

Instead of this:

desc “cron job description”  
task **:cron** => :environment do  
 # stuff to do  
end

So there!