What is the best way of handling background jobs in Rails, (maybe) using sidekiq.

Let’s take step by step look into creating a Rails App and making a request for Background job using sidekiq

System Pre-requisite

• Ruby
• Rails
• Redis
• Sidekiq

Note: The repository of this project.

Create new Rails Project

We will create a new rails project named sidekiq-example

Add sidekiq gem

In Gemfile add gem ‘sidekiq’

gem sidekiq

Now run command bundle install. This will install gem sidekiq in our project.

➜ sidekiq-example: bundle install

Generate Model

Let’s create a model named Team for reference with fields name, rating

Also add this in seeds.rb

Now Run
➜ sidekiq-example: rails db:create && rails db:migrate && rails db:seed
It will create new database sidekiq_example_development for our application and create a table called teams in this database. Running seed data will insert sample 5 records in it.

Generate a controller

Create a controller for our actions under namespace api/v1/

Add routes

Let’s add routes for our actions. Add this in routes.rb.

Add Sidekiq worker

Now let’s work on Sidekiq part. To perform sidekiq jobs, add worker in app/workers. For our demo application it is BuyTimeWorker. And add method named perform in it. When a call to BuyTimeWorker made, it will be a asynchronous call to this method perform.

The logic for background job will be in this method perform. To keep it simple for now, will just add sleep timer in it.

It simply sleeps for number of milliseconds passed to it. This job will run asynchronously when called.

Let’s modify teams controller to make a call to this background job

You can see action show is making call to BuyTimeWorker. What it means is when a url of kind '/api/v1/teams/:id' is hit, the controller action show will get called and background job BuyTimeWorker will be triggered. The action show will not wait for job BuyTimeWorker to complete though it is called from within its definition. This job will be executed asynchronously with method show.

Run

• Start rails server
• Start Redis
• Start Sidekiq

If you hit URL will found out something like this in sidekiq server log

http://localhost:3001/api/v1/teams/2

• ):

Well this is very simple example of running background job in rails. You can write complex logic in Sidekiq workers. You can add multiple workers.

Cheers! 🍻🍻