Active Job – Make work happen later

Active Job is a framework for declaring jobs and making them run on a variety of queuing backends. These jobs can be everything from regularly scheduled clean-ups, to billing charges, to mailings — anything that can be chopped up into small units of work and run in parallel.

It also serves as the backend for Action Mailer’s deliver_later functionality that makes it easy to turn any mailing into a job for running later. That’s one of the most common jobs in a modern web application: sending emails outside the request-response cycle, so the user doesn’t have to wait on it.

The main point is to ensure that all Rails apps will have a job infrastructure in place, even if it’s in the form of an “immediate runner”. We can then have framework features and other gems build on top of that, without having to worry about API differences between Delayed Job and Resque. Picking your queuing backend becomes more of an operational concern, then. And you’ll be able to switch between them without having to rewrite your jobs.

You can read more about Active Job in the Active Job Basics guide.

Usage

To learn how to use your preferred queuing backend see its adapter documentation at ActiveJob::QueueAdapters.

Declare a job like so:

class MyJob < ActiveJob::Base
  queue_as :my_jobs

  def perform(record)
    record.do_work
  end
end

Enqueue a job like so:

MyJob.perform_later record  # Enqueue a job to be performed as soon as the queuing system is free.

MyJob.set(wait_until: Date.tomorrow.noon).perform_later(record)  # Enqueue a job to be performed tomorrow at noon.

MyJob.set(wait: 1.week).perform_later(record) # Enqueue a job to be performed 1 week from now.

That’s it!

GlobalID support

Active Job supports GlobalID serialization for parameters. This makes it possible to pass live Active Record objects to your job instead of class/id pairs, which you then have to manually deserialize. Before, jobs would look like this:

class TrashableCleanupJob
  def perform(trashable_class, trashable_id, depth)
    trashable = trashable_class.constantize.find(trashable_id)
    trashable.cleanup(depth)
  end
end

Now you can simply do:

class TrashableCleanupJob
  def perform(trashable, depth)
    trashable.cleanup(depth)
  end
end

This works with any class that mixes in GlobalID::Identification, which by default has been mixed into Active Record classes.

Supported queuing systems

Active Job has built-in adapters for multiple queuing backends (Sidekiq, Resque, Delayed Job and others). To get an up-to-date list of the adapters see the API Documentation for ActiveJob::QueueAdapters.

Please note: We are not accepting pull requests for new adapters. We encourage library authors to provide an ActiveJob adapter as part of their gem, or as a stand-alone gem. For discussion about this see the following PRs: 23311, 21406, and #32285.

Download and installation

The latest version of Active Job can be installed with RubyGems:

$ gem install activejob

Source code can be downloaded as part of the Rails project on GitHub:

License

Active Job is released under the MIT license:

Support

API documentation is at:

Bug reports for the Ruby on Rails project can be filed here:

Feature requests should be discussed on the rails-core mailing list here:

Namespace

Module

Class

Methods

Class Public methods

gem_version()

Returns the currently loaded version of Active Job as a Gem::Version.

📝 Source code 
# File activejob/lib/active_job/gem_version.rb, line 5
  def self.gem_version
    Gem::Version.new VERSION::STRING
  end
🔎 See on GitHub

perform_all_later(*jobs)

Push many jobs onto the queue at once without running enqueue callbacks. Queue adapters may communicate the enqueue status of each job by setting successfully_enqueued and/or enqueue_error on the passed-in job instances.

📝 Source code 
# File activejob/lib/active_job/enqueuing.rb, line 14
    def perform_all_later(*jobs)
      jobs.flatten!
      jobs.group_by(&:queue_adapter).each do |queue_adapter, adapter_jobs|
        instrument_enqueue_all(queue_adapter, adapter_jobs) do
          if queue_adapter.respond_to?(:enqueue_all)
            queue_adapter.enqueue_all(adapter_jobs)
          else
            adapter_jobs.each do |job|
              job.successfully_enqueued = false
              if job.scheduled_at
                queue_adapter.enqueue_at(job, job.scheduled_at.to_f)
              else
                queue_adapter.enqueue(job)
              end
              job.successfully_enqueued = true
            rescue EnqueueError => e
              job.enqueue_error = e
            end
            adapter_jobs.count(&:successfully_enqueued?)
          end
        end
      end
      nil
    end
🔎 See on GitHub

verbose_enqueue_logs

Specifies if the methods calling background job enqueue should be logged below their relevant enqueue log lines. Defaults to false.

📝 Source code 
# File activejob/lib/active_job.rb, line 57
  singleton_class.attr_accessor :verbose_enqueue_logs
🔎 See on GitHub

version()

Returns the currently loaded version of Active Job as a Gem::Version.

📝 Source code 
# File activejob/lib/active_job/version.rb, line 7
  def self.version
    gem_version
  end
🔎 See on GitHub