# Active Job -- Make work happen later
Active Job is a framework for declaring jobs and making them run on a variety
of queuing backends. These jobs can be everything from regularly scheduled
clean-ups, to billing charges, to mailings. Anything that can be chopped up into
small units of work and run in parallel, really.
It also serves as the backend for Action Mailer's #deliver_later functionality
that makes it easy to turn any mailing into a job for running later. That's
one of the most common jobs in a modern web application: sending emails outside
of the request-response cycle, so the user doesn't have to wait on it.
The main point is to ensure that all Rails apps will have a job infrastructure
in place, even if it's in the form of an "immediate runner". We can then have
framework features and other gems build on top of that, without having to worry
about API differences between Delayed Job and Resque. Picking your queuing
backend becomes more of an operational concern, then. And you'll be able to
switch between them without having to rewrite your jobs.
## Usage
To learn how to use your preferred queuing backend see its adapter
documentation at
[ActiveJob::QueueAdapters](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveJob/QueueAdapters.html).
Declare a job like so:
```ruby
class MyJob < ActiveJob::Base
queue_as :my_jobs
def perform(record)
record.do_work
end
end
```
Enqueue a job like so:
```ruby
MyJob.perform_later record # Enqueue a job to be performed as soon as the queuing system is free.
```
```ruby
MyJob.set(wait_until: Date.tomorrow.noon).perform_later(record) # Enqueue a job to be performed tomorrow at noon.
```
```ruby
MyJob.set(wait: 1.week).perform_later(record) # Enqueue a job to be performed 1 week from now.
```
That's it!
## GlobalID support
Active Job supports [GlobalID serialization](https://github.com/rails/globalid/) for parameters. This makes it possible
to pass live Active Record objects to your job instead of class/id pairs, which
you then have to manually deserialize. Before, jobs would look like this:
```ruby
class TrashableCleanupJob
def perform(trashable_class, trashable_id, depth)
trashable = trashable_class.constantize.find(trashable_id)
trashable.cleanup(depth)
end
end
```
Now you can simply do:
```ruby
class TrashableCleanupJob
def perform(trashable, depth)
trashable.cleanup(depth)
end
end
```
This works with any class that mixes in GlobalID::Identification, which
by default has been mixed into Active Record classes.
## Supported queuing systems
Active Job has built-in adapters for multiple queuing backends (Sidekiq,
Resque, Delayed Job and others). To get an up-to-date list of the adapters
see the API Documentation for [ActiveJob::QueueAdapters](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveJob/QueueAdapters.html).
**Please note:** We are not accepting pull requests for new adapters. We
encourage library authors to provide an ActiveJob adapter as part of
their gem, or as a stand-alone gem. For discussion about this see the
following PRs: [23311](https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/23311#issuecomment-176275718),
[21406](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/21406#issuecomment-138813484), and [#32285](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/32285).
## Auxiliary gems
* [activejob-stats](https://github.com/seuros/activejob-stats)
## Download and installation
The latest version of Active Job can be installed with RubyGems:
```
$ gem install activejob
```
Source code can be downloaded as part of the Rails project on GitHub:
* https://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/activejob
## License
Active Job is released under the MIT license:
* https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
## Support
API documentation is at:
* https://api.rubyonrails.org
Bug reports for the Ruby on Rails project can be filed here:
* https://github.com/rails/rails/issues
Feature requests should be discussed on the rails-core mailing list here:
* https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/rubyonrails-core
