This gem provides a Mutex that is based on ActiveRecord’s database connection. (At the moment this only works for Mysql.) It can be used to synchronise ruby processes (also on different hosts) via the connected database.
You can use rubygems to fetch the gem and install it for you:
# gem install active_record_mutex
You can also put this line into your Rails environment.rb file
config.gem 'active_record_mutex'
and install the gem via
$ rake gems:install
If you want to synchronize method calls to your model’s methods you can easily do this by passing a mutex instance to ActiveRecord’s synchronize class method. This mutex instance will be named Foo like the ActiveRecord was named:
class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base def foo end synchronize :foo, :with => :mutex end
If you want more control over the mutex and/or give it a special name you can create Mutex instance like this:
my_mutex = ActiveRecord::Mutex::Mutex.new(:name => 'my_mutex')
Now you can send all messages directly to the Mutex instance.