Contentful Scheduler

Scheduling Server for Contentful entries.

Contentful

Contentful provides a content infrastructure for digital teams to power content in websites, apps, and devices. Unlike a CMS, Contentful was built to integrate with the modern software stack. It offers a central hub for structured content, powerful management and delivery APIs, and a customizable web app that enable developers and content creators to ship digital products faster.

What does contentful-scheduler do?

The aim of contentful-scheduler is to have developers setting up their Contentful entries for scheduled publishing.

How does it work

contentful-scheduler provides a web endpoint to receive webhook calls from Contentful.

Every time the endpoint recieves a call it looks for the value of the field defined in the configuration. If the value is a time in the future -- and if the entry has not already been published -- it will schedule the entry for publishing at the specified time.

A background worker based on the popular resque gem will then proceed to actually make the publish call against the Content Management API at the due time. For this the Entries you wish to publish require a customizable Date field, which we advice to call publishDate, this field can be configured inside your Rakefile and is specific per-space.

You can add multiple spaces to your configuration, making it useful if you have a milti-space setup.

Requirements

• Redis

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'contentful-scheduler'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install contentful-scheduler

Usage

The best way to use Scheduler is as a stand-alone application that wraps Scheduler and Resque on an execution pipe using Foreman.

You can get the template for this setup in the /example directory.

If you want to roll out your own, you need to follow the next steps:

• Create a new folder
• Create a Gemfile with the following:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'contentful-scheduler', '~> 0.1'
gem 'contentful-management', '~> 1.0'
gem 'resque', '~> 1.0'
gem 'resque-scheduler', '~> 4.0'
gem 'rake'

• Create a Procfile with the following:

web: env bundle exec rake contentful:scheduler
monitor: env bundle exec rackup
resque: env bundle exec rake resque:work
resque_scheduler: env bundle exec rake resque:scheduler

• Create a Rakefile with the following:

require 'contentful/scheduler'

$stdout.sync = true

config = {
  logger: Logger.new(STDOUT), # Defaults to NullLogger
  port: 32123, # Defaults to 32123
  endpoint: '/scheduler', # Defaults to /scheduler
  redis: {
    host: 'YOUR_REDIS_HOST',
    port: 'YOUR_REDIS_PORT',
    password: 'YOUR_REDIS_PASSWORD'
  },
  spaces: {
    'YOUR_SPACE_ID' => {
      publish_field: 'publishDate', # It specifies the field ID for your Publish Date in your Content Type
      management_token: 'YOUR_TOKEN'
    }
  },
}

namespace :contentful do
  task :setup do
    Contentful::Scheduler.config = config
  end

  task :scheduler => :setup do
    Contentful::Scheduler.start
  end
end

require 'resque/tasks'
require 'resque/scheduler/tasks'

namespace :resque do
  task :setup => 'contentful:setup' do
    ENV['QUEUE'] = '*'
  end

  task :setup_schedule => :setup do
    require 'resque-scheduler'
  end

  task :scheduler => :setup_schedule
end

• Create a config.ru with the following for the Resque monitoring server:

require 'resque'
require 'resque/server'
require 'resque/scheduler/server'

config = {
  host: 'YOUR_REDIS_HOST',
  port: 'YOUR_REDIS_PORT',
  password: 'YOUR_REDIS_PASSWORD'
}
Resque.redis = config

run Rack::URLMap.new \
  "/" => Resque::Server.new

• Run the Application:

$ foreman start

• Configure the webhook in Contentful:

Under the space settings menu choose webhook and add a new webhook pointing to http://YOUR_SERVER:32123/scheduler.

Keep in mind that if you modify the defaults, the URL should be changed to the values specified in the configuration.

Running in Heroku

Heroku offers various Redis plugins, select the one of your liking, add the credentials into your configuration, and proceed to git heroku push master.

This will get your application set up and running. It will require 4 dynos, so a free plan isn't enough for it to run.

To run the monitor process, you'll require to run it from a different application pointing to the same Redis instance.

Make sure to change the Procfile's web process to the following:

web: PORT=$PORT bundle exec env rake contentful:scheduler

That will allow Heroku to set it's own Port according to their policy.

The URL for the webhook then will be on port 80, so you should change it to: http://YOUR_APPLICATION/scheduler.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/contentful/contentful-scheduler.rb. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.