Of course my brain is now twitching with the possibilities even with a service provider like Network Solutions. No shell access! How can I schedule jobs? Can I run Ruby as CGI? (no). What if I need to run some regular maintenance? (I know, getting a little ahead of myself, but these are the kind of things that pop into my head, while I’m putting the initial design of something together).

Rails on Network Solutions is a well-guarded affair, you get to deploy, but you’re not getting access to a command line, so make sure it’s all fine and dandy before you deploy, which is fine most of the time, but you’ll definitely trip up somewhere, sometime and then it’s a right, royal pain. Setting up your Rails application is all done through their browser-based interface, after that you either upload a ZIP or handle it through FTP.

So, how about my scheduled tasks? Well, a little poking around reveals a nice little command called “runner“. Runner lives in the script directory of each application, and allows you to run Ruby files from the command line. Now, Network Solutions provides me with the capability of scheduling scripts/commands to run (again through the browser-based interface, no cron here!). So, a little test Ruby script and the creation of a scheduled task later, and “ta-da!”, I have a way of running Ruby scripts on a schedule. This is my little command
/htdocs/rails/test_app1/script/runner /htdocs/rails/test_app1/hello.rb

Where “test_app1 is the rails application name.

As I said, I’m not sure why I’m going to need this, but I bet I will.