The FeedUpdater is a simple daemon for handling the automatic updating of FeedTools feed objects.

USAGE: feed_updater <subcommand>

Subcommands:
  start
  stop
  restart
  install

The FeedUpdater daemon is very easy to use, especially if you’re using it with a Rails application. If you’re going to be using it with a Rails app, simply install the feedupdater gem, navigate to your Rails app, and run the ‘feed_updater install’ command. This will install FeedUpdater. Then edit the feed_updater.yml config file as necessary. You will probably need to define a custom updater class, which should probably go in your lib directory. It’s recommended that you use the example/custom_updater.rb file as a starting point. You should using the updater events to copy any required fields to feed subscription tables or item tables as necessary so that a full feed parse isn’t required every time the feed is displayed.

The config file also has a start delay option. This should almost always be set to true. You should only turn it off when you are debugging a custom updater class, and it should probably never be turned off in production. Keeping it on prevents FeedUpdater from hitting the CPU too hard immediately after a server reboot, and also prevents hundreds of update processes from kicking off simultaneously on a shared server.

If you chose to use FeedUpdater outside a Rails application, you should try to use a similar directory structure to what would be found in a Rails setup. FeedUpdater will usually look in the current directory if it cannot find a file its looking for though, so if FeedUpdater can’t find a file it needs, changing directories will probably fix the problem.