Deploy a Sidekiq Worker

In the course of processing web requests, you might want to offload tasks to an asynchronous, background process (typically called a worker). Render makes this easy to do via the background worker service type.

For this quick start, we’ll use Sidekiq, a popular task processing framework for Ruby, and the Sinatra example in Sidekiq’s official repo.

Sidekiq uses Redis for its processing backend, so we’ll set up a Redis service first.

Deploy to Render

There are two ways to deploy your application on Render, either by declaring your services within your repository in a render.yaml file, or by manually setting up your services using the dashboard. In the following steps, we will walk you through both options.

Use render.yaml to Deploy

1. You can fork our render-examples/sidekiq on GitHub which contains a render.yaml file that sets up a background worker alongside a Redis instance and a web service.
2. On the Render Dashboard, go to the Blueprint page and click the New Blueprint Instance button. Select your repository (after giving Render the permission to access it, if you haven’t already). Or alternatively, you can click the Deploy To Render button in the Readme of the forked repo.
3. In the deploy window, click Approve.

That’s it! Your app will be live on your .onrender.com URL as soon as the build finishes. Try out the web service using the web service Render URL and play around with the small application.

Deploy manually

1. Create a new Redis instance on Render and copy the internal Redis URL to use below. The internal Redis URL will look like red-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:6379.

2. Fork render-examples/sidekiq on GitHub and create a new Background Worker using your repo and the following values:

   Runtime	Ruby
   Build Command	bundle install
   Start Command	bundle exec sidekiq -r ./main.rb

   Also add the following environment variable to your background worker:

   Key	Value
   REDIS_URL	<redis-connection-string>, where <redis-connection-string> is the string from step 1.

3. Create a new Web Service using the same repo you created in Step 2, and the following values:

   Runtime	Ruby
   Build Command	bundle install
   Start Command	bundle exec ruby main.rb

   Also add the following environment variable to your web service:

   Key	Value
   REDIS_URL	<redis-connection-string>, where <redis-connection-string> is the string from step 1.

   This will spin up a new Sinatra web service which you can use to test background message sending. The code uses Sidekiq’s API to send the message to your Redis instance, which is the same instance your background worker is listening on. As a result, the worker picks up and processes any messages you send from the frontend.

You can also use a Sidekiq background worker from Rails. See Sidekiq’s getting started page for more information.