Does rails ActiveJob retry_on work with delayed_job gem?

Question

Rails ActiveJob has a retry_on hook that allows you to customize retry behavior. For example:

  retry_on AnotherCustomAppException, wait: ->(executions) { executions * 2 }

Rails also passes the current retry number as executions with the job_data and there's a retry_job method for further customization.

However, if you use the delayed_job_active_record gem as your backend, it looks like there's a separate config called max_attempts that controls the retry behavior.

My question is, if you use the delayed_job_active_record backend, can you still use retry_on without issues?

If you can't use retry_on, then what would be an appropriate strategy for imitating that customization of rescues?

Answer 1

When you're using delayed_job as a backend to ActiveJob, you end up with two retry mechanisms: first from ActiveJob, configurable using the retry_on method, and second from delayed_job, which is controlled by the max_attempts variable.

You can turn off the retry behaviour from delayed_job with the following:

# in config/initializers/delayed_job.rb
Delayed::Worker.max_attempts = 1

Now your retries are controlled entirely by the ActiveJob retry_on call, which should result in predictable behaviour.