Sharing a build between services

Hi all,

Is there a way to share a single build across multiple services (which are all defined in a single render.yaml file)?

I have a Rails app that has both a web process and a worker process, plus two cron jobs. The build script for the web process is a little different (compiling front-end assets), but the other three are identical. It’d be neat if I could combine those three (or indeed, all four) into a single build. I realise the builds are parallel, so it’s not really going to save much time - it’s more the elegance of such a solution, and the energy it could save as well. Especially if/when I need to add more cron jobs.

Thanks,


Pat

2 Likes

Hi @pat,

If I understand what you are trying to do correctly, one way to achieve this would be to use Deploy Hooks | Render · Cloud Hosting for Developers in a build script that would trigger the other services to build when one of them is built.

Thanks for the response Tyler. I can see how deploy hooks could let me order builds one after the other (though there are no deploy hooks yet for cron jobs) - but how can I specify that Service A’s build is the same as Service B? Or at least inherits from A, to avoid doubling up on build effort?

1 Like

We have the same need for our Elixir app.

As we don’t want to build 21 times the same app (1 web app + 20 cron jobs) we ended up running all cron jobs from within our webapp (so we don’t use anymore the render cron job feature)

@cblavier it’s good to hear you’ve found a way around this! Are your cron jobs within your web app process (while it’s also serving web requests) or as stand-alone jobs tied to the service?

within the same process (so we scaled up our worker to a 4gb process so that we don’t hit memory limits).

But it’s far from an ideal situation and I really would like to spin different processes for cron jobs (in my opinion, Heroku scheduler was doing great)