When I need to run something periodically on production, I always implement it as a rake tasks and install it as a cron job. Nevertheless there’s some setup to do in the task to have proper logging and error reporting.

This is the template I use for creating those tasks:

namespace :projectx do
  desc "Do something"
  task :something => :environment do
    if Rails.env.development?
      # Log to stdout.
      logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
      logger.level = Logger::INFO # DEBUG to see queries
      ActiveRecord::Base.logger = logger
      ActionMailer::Base.logger = logger
      ActionController::Base.logger = logger
    else
      logger = ActiveRecord::Base.logger
    end

    begin
      logger.info "Doing something"
    rescue Exception => e
      HoptoadNotifier.notify(e)
      raise e
    end
  end
end

While in development mode, it outputs to the console for convenience.