Cron — Rake tasks & Google Drive API

Google Drive API

To setup and use Google Drive API — I used this Ruby gem.

setting up and running with this gem is super simple.

1. Install the gem $ sudo gem install google_drive
2. Head over to google developers console to get your client id and client secret https://console.developers.google.com/apis/credentials

Click on credentials → OAuth client ID → other → save your client ID and client secret

Once you have your client ID and client secret. Create a new file in your project directory, name it config.json and paste your client ID and client secret in there

your config.json will look like this

Usage:

For my task I had to play around with read/write files in Google Drive.

To get yourself familiarize with different options available on how to read/write files in Google Drive — play with these

Explanation:

Save the above file with .rb extension and play with the output in terminal. The first time you run this file — you will be asked to go to a link and verify your google account. It is just a one time thing — any preceding calls using the api won’t need that.

→ lines 9–10 will print all of your google drive files

→ line 17 is creating a var file and capturing a file from your google drive named “hello.txt”

→ line 21 will update contents of your hello.txt(file in your g-drive) with a local file you specify the path.

This is pretty much what I needed to get up and running with my task. If you do explore some nifty tricks with G-Drive API I will appreciate if you do let me know :)

Setting up Cron — Rake tasks:

To accomplish my task, the next thing I had to learn was Cron (Task Scheduler)and how could write good Rake tasks.

The first question I had was what is Cron?

Cron is the name of program that enables unix users to execute commands or
scripts (groups of commands) automatically at a specified time/date. It is
normally used for sys admin commands, like makewhatis, which builds a
search database for the man -k command, or for running a backup script, 
but can be used for anything. A common use for it today is connecting to 
the internet and downloading your email.

Also what the heck Rake does? This stack overflow post was helpful in answering.

Rake is a build language, similar in purpose to make and ant. Like make and ant it’s a Domain Specific Language, unlike those two it’s an internal DSL programmed in the Ruby language. In this article I introduce rake and describe some interesting things that came out of my use of rake to build this web site: dependency models, synthesized tasks, custom build routines and debugging the build script.

Additionally, these resources came in handy to learn a bunch about rake and cron

→ [1] http://www.stuartellis.eu/articles/rake/

→ [2] http://www.sitepoint.com/schedule-cron-jobs-whenever-gem

→ http://edelpero.svbtle.com/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-writing-good-rake-tasks-but-were-afraid-to-ask

→ http://jasonseifer.com/2010/04/06/rake-tutorial

→ http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/topics/systems/automation.html

→ http://jerodsanto.net/2009/08/self-scheduling-ruby-scripts

→ Whenever gem: https://github.com/javan/whenever

You are welcome to spend time learning a bunch about Rake and how Cron works. But after understanding [1] and [2] — you can become a cron — rake ninja in 30 minutes. And with ruby whenever gem you can completely jump the curve of learning Cron at all — but its a good idea to learn a little bit about it before you move on.