Rails Solid Queue in Production

I first encountered the "solid queue" gem when it was announced to be shipped with Rails 8 as the default active job backend.

It is DB-based and compatible with Rails multi-threading. The debugging of active job issues is simpler with its enhanced logging and queue data persisted in the database.

Since Rails 8 is currently under development, I decided to try it with a Rails 7 application.

Setup

It is plug-and-play, with 3 simple steps below.

1. Install the gem

   gem "solid_queue"
   

2. Install and run its migration

   $ rails solid_queue:install:migrations
   $ rails db:migrate
   

3. Update queue adapter in configuration

   config.active_job.queue_adapter = :solid_queue
   

4. To test it, you can run this command

   $ bundle exec rake solid_queue:start
   

Using it in Production

1. There are many ways to manage the solid queue processes. I choose to use supervisor on a Ubuntu server.

   $ sudo apt update && sudo apt install supervisor
   

2. This can be done by creating a configuration file

   $ sudo pico /etc/supervisor/conf.d/rails-solid-queue.conf
   

   [program:rails-solid-queue]
   process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
   directory=/path/to/app
   command=/path/to/bundle exec rake solid_queue:start
   environment=RAILS_ENV=production
   autostart=true
   autorestart=true
   stopasgroup=true
   killasgroup=true
   user=user
   numprocs=1
   redirect_stderr=true
   stdout_logfile=/path/to/log
   stopwaitsecs=3600
   

3. Then load and start the configuration

   $ sudo supervisorctl reread
   $ sudo supervisorctl update
   

Integrate it with the Capistrano deployment

1. I use Capistrano to deploy the demo app. So the supervisor-monitored processes must be restarted when I deploy new codes.

2. The following codes are added in my deploy.rb to perform the restart after the deployment.

   # etc
   
   # restart supervisor
   namespace :deploy do
     desc 'Restart supervisor rails-solid-queue'
     task :restart_application do
       on roles(:app) do
         execute :sudo, 'supervisorctl restart rails-solid-queue:*'
       end
     end
   
     after :finished, :restart_application
   end
   

3. That is all the setup needed to deploy Solid Queue in production.