Running triggered rules actions in the background?

Question

I am using triggered rules to set off potentially lengthy actions on nodes, e.g. automatic node translation using Google Translate. Running those actions during the node creation page request slows down the response and potentially uses up server resources.

Instead, I'd like to enqueue the actions, so that they may be executed during the next cron run, or via the Queue API. Is there a known way to achieve this? Is it possible to do that using Rules Scheduler?

Answer 1

Turns out you can use Rules Scheduler for this. Here's the recipe:

• Create an action set with the actions to run in the background
• Add the action "Schedule component evaluation" to your trigger, choosing the action set you created above
• Set the "Scheduled evaluation date" to now

When your trigger fires, its actions will be called at the next cron run. That was simple!