Stefano Bernardi

How to send mail asynchronously with Sorcery and Delayed Job in Rails 3

I’m developing a Rails 3.2 app and being fed up with devise, I decided I’d be switching to the awesome sorcery gem for user authentication. Sorcery has a ton of features while staying minimal (you still have to write all your models, controllers and views) and that is just what I need. Those devise controllers where driving me mad.

Anyways, after implementing it and testing the app, I noticed that every transaction was taking forever (5000-1000ms). That is because of the email delivery which is enclosed in a transaction (I have emails for activation, confirmation, reseting password and inviting other users).

The solution is obviously to handle asynchronously the email sending with a queue and workers. I decided to go with Delayed Job to keep everything on Active Record (Redis and the Resque gem rock quite a lot too).

To use Delayed Job you usually have to call:

Object.delay.method(args)

You can also call

handle_asynchronously :method_name

at the end of your controllers.

This is all very cool, but with Rails 3 mailers DJ breaks and usually can’t pick up parameters when using the handle_asynchronously method. Bummer.

With Sorcery, the code to send the emails is actually in the gem so the only solution is to override the gem’s methods to send the emails.

There are two ways to do that:

1. Override the generic_send_mail method
2. Override the single email sending methods

I went for option number 2 for the activation emails. In my user model:

  def send_activation_needed_email!

    UserMailer.delay.activation_needed_email(self.id)

  end

  def send_activation_success_email!

    UserMailer.delay.activation_success_email(self.id)

  end

This works fine but is not a viable approach for the password reset email, since its method initializes a bunch of stuff you shouldn’t mess with.

Then I realized that I overlooked the most clever way, and the simplest one.:

Edit your config/initializers/sorcery.rb file with the following:

config.user_config do |user|

  user.user_activation_mailer = YourMailerName.delay

  user.reset_password_mailer = YourMailerName.delay

end

In this way we make sure that every email is sent to the delay method via DJ, and we don’t have to worry about overriding Sorcery methods.
The simplest solution is always right under our eyes, yet still difficult to see.

Hope this helps.

A great idea executed awesomely - Newsle

When I see certain products I think that making a startup is not that hard at all. Newsle makes it look really easy. Smart idea + great execution. How hard can it be, right?

Wrong. Then I start watching all the hard decisions that have been made in order for the product to be where it is now and I go: “wow”.

The idea is a very smart one: keep track of news that mention your friends. With the clutter and noise on Facebook and Twitter, this makes sure that you see the real news about each of your contacts so you can know what they’re up to, congratulate them or just place it in the back of your head for future reference.

The execution is awesome. In one month a lot has changed and now the product looks pretty sweet.

They have a challenging time ahead, but kudos to them for being on the right track and solving a problem.

The Joy of Sinatra

Sunday morning I woke up with a weird API idea, and decided to spend the morning building it.

I unconsciously headed to http://www.sinatrarb.com and 20 minutes later I had a complete API returning awesome JSON and performing a few operations in the backend.

It’s just amazing what you can achieve with Sinatra and the power of Rubygems:

The joy is in the simplicity, control, flexibility and power that Sinatra gives you, particularly coming from Rails where all the really cool stuff happens in the backend without you ever knowing nor understanding it. Next step: plug in MongoDB, which stores all your data in JSON anyways. Next next step: get to understand Node.js and Express.js