--- title: Running Rails background jobs on Heroku with Resque and Redis slug: running-rails-background-jobs-on-heroku-with-resque-and-redis published_at: 2021-03-22 17:00:39 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:21 +0000 summary: description: Running Rails background jobs on Heroku with Resque and Redis. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6 It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [ruby on rails, rails 6, background processing, heroku, deploy background processing with Ruby on Rails, ActiveJob, Rails ActiveJob heroku, ActiveJob Resque, Resque Rails Heroku, Resque, Resque Ruby on Rails, HerokuRedis, Heroku Redis] views: 3980 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/running-rails-background-jobs-on-heroku-with-resque-and-redis youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seC6MnKvbnI youtube_id: seC6MnKvbnI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/seC6MnKvbnI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/seC6MnKvbnI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Running Rails background jobs on Heroku with Resque and Redis *Published: March 22, 2021* *Views: 3980* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seC6MnKvbnI) [![Running Rails background jobs on Heroku with Resque and Redis](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/seC6MnKvbnI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seC6MnKvbnI) ## Description Running Rails background jobs on Heroku with Resque and Redis. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6 It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript okay welcome back so in the last video we set up a background job for refreshing youtube tokens and we showed how to set up uh rescue and redis as our q adapter for for background jobs using active job with rails and we showed how to like write just a very basic active job called refresh token refresh youtube token that was just simply printing out a string so in this episode what we're going to do is show how to deploy this to heroku and run background jobs in heroku in production so there's a couple of different pieces that we need the first is that we need a heroku add-on called redis or we need one of the heroku add-ons that allows you to use redis and so we can say find more add-ons here and we can search through this and look for redis and we'll find there's like redis to go is a common one heroku redis is common there's several different options that all basically provide the same thing and that is a redis database so today we're just going to use heroku redis and so you can just copy this heroku add-ons create heroku redis and that will add the add-on to our uh heroku instance and once that's done a special environment variable is created so we can say heroku config pipe grep redis and a oh it should have oh you know what it's not done it's not done setting up yet but this is going to set up a redis url for us um and we need to go create an initializer so in config initializers we need to add a rescue.rb and in here we will define which url to use for our our rescue i'm sorry our redis our redis database for our rescue adapter so the way this works is we're going to require the redis server stuff and then if we're in development so rails.environment.development so if we're in development we just want to use like the default the default url so rescue.redis is going to be redis dot new and the host is localhost and the port is six three seven nine six three seven nine okay and then otherwise we're gonna say rescue dot redis is equal to and then we need to initialize a new instance of redis based on the environment variable url that we're given by the add-on so we're gonna we're gonna parse that uri from the environment variable and then configure or initialize a new instance of redis here uri is equal to uri dot parse end and then redis url i just this is so this is going to be the this is going to be the url for the heroku redis add-on other add-ons are going to have different environment variable names and so like maybe one of them is like redis to go url or redis database url or something like that and so then we can once we've parsed that out we can then just call like uri.host and uri.port and in production this is going to have a password also let's say uri dot password when following the guides this actually becomes a constant that that you can use in several other places so that you only have one connection i believe is the purpose of this so okay so now that we have this set up i think this is actually rescue server also all right so if we're in development then we want to use the default otherwise we want to use this production stuff so let's go confirm that the development piece works first so we have our we have redis server running here we've got our queue that's working so let's fire another background job by running refresh youtubetoken.performlater this should enqueue a job in the background and then execute it over here in fact actually let's let's stop the server and let's restart our rails console session so that we have clean a clean slate here okay environment so i must have spelled this wrong or maybe this is just the end okay so we're going to start the worker again and then we're going to perform the or enqueue the task again and we have enqueued it and cool we see that it's coming out so it's still working in development that's great now let's confirm that this is working in production so one of the things we can do is say heroku add-ons colon weight roku add-ons weight and then give it the name of the add-on heroku-redis so that we can see if it's completely set up yet and it looks like it might be so um we can also do heroku add-ons open heroku redis just to see like a little bit more information about the add-on uh just like some settings and some basic information about like how how many clients we have and how many requests we're making in into uh into this database so that's kind of cool but it looks like it is actually set up right now i'm just taking advantage of the fact that like this is a rails app heroku knows that it's a rails app and it knows that there is a default dyno or whatever i actually don't know what the name of this is so like a default thing that it should do right when it's executing or when it's like firing up the server and so because it's rails it knows that it wants to run this this command now that we have several things that we want to do in addition to like the web we also need another worker that can run in the background and so at this point we have to create what's called a proc file so we're going to open up and create a new proc file and i'm just going to keep the web the the command for the web worker to be exactly the same and then we need to create another one called rescue and this one is going to be the the same as our command for executing here so it's going to be q equals star rake rescue work and in production i want to be a little bit more explicit and say bundle exec just in case um and then one thing that's worth talking about is that when you say q star that's saying like cue up any job from any queue and execute that but technically if you wanted to have like some order of priority on your cues you could say something like urgent like high medium low or something like that and this would say like okay if a new task comes in that's urgent execute that before any low tasks and execute any high tasks before medium and medium before low etc so that like your most urgent tasks go out first so for instance your urgent tasks might be things like sending off codes when someone is trying to log in because you want that to go out really quickly a low task might be like chewing through a list of email addresses to send out some marketing email or something that's not super time sensitive uh and it's probably fine if it happens over the course of an hour or something and then maybe medium is like okay i want these to be higher priority than stuff that's in the low queue so this might be like you know maybe highs like uh some web hooks or something some web hook events i don't know so that's kind of the idea but um i have only needed to have like separate cues a couple of times it can be useful but most of the time i just i'm just doing a couple different background jobs and it's not a huge deal to just throw in star and execute all the cues by by creating this proc file now when we deploy to heroku we should see another line show up here in terms of our dinos so let's say let's let's add everything here um like add background jobs push heroku main and i'm going gonna speed this up okay cool so here uh at the end of the output for deploying to heroku we do see that there's um now two different types of processes that have been defined by our proc file and we finished deploying so now if we come back over to the heroku dashboard and refresh this page now we see a new a new like dino type and it's disabled there's a couple way we could we could just like edit this here and say you know enable it or you can say like heroku ps scale rescue dash one or something i think and this i believe should scale it up to just like one free thing um i don't know if we need to enable it oh maybe it's equals no that shouldn't matter oh there we go okay so that totally worked so now now both of our are like these dynos are sort of on so if we were to open up the logs we say heroku add-ons open paper trail and look at the logs um this will give us a little bit of insight into what's happening with the with the different workers so now we have this app web one this is going to be our web interface and we have app heroku-redis which is going to be the redis add-on that's in the background and we have rescue dot one which is our rescue worker and we can see that the state has changed from starting to up so this is up it's running and now we should be able to run from the rails console on heroku we can say heroku run rails console and now we should be able to execute one of our test tasks and confirm that in the logs we are printing out what we expect so i'm just going to copy the same job there and we can run it from heroku so refresh youtubetokenjob.performlater and again we're in queuing the job so that's working as expected and over here in um in the logs we can see this one log statement here that says let's refresh the token so this is actually working we have successfully set up and deployed um a background job system to heroku and we've confirmed that it's actually working so that's cool now the other the only other thing that we have left is to go to um our actual uh app the live app and go to slash jobs which is saying something went wrong so let's see if we can fix that so i think it's likely the migrations so one of the migrations that we wrote added a non-null field and since we already had data in this database up on heroku it's actually like the data that was up there doesn't really matter but in order to to run our migrations we need to reset the database and wipe out any of that old data the demo that we need to confirm is to go to our live app on heroku and go to slash jobs and yeah just to see that we actually do have our our redis web server thing set up here so this is all looking good and that is how you deploy background jobs to heroku hopefully that was helpful if you liked this episode please give me a thumbs up and let me know what you're building in the comments with background jobs i know there was a question earlier about uploading video in a background job in the next episode what we're going to do is actually hit the youtube api to refresh our authentication token in the in the background drop so uh if you are interested in that check out the next video and we'll see you there you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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