I avoid running -d in development mode and bother about daemonizing only for production deployment.

There is the handy rails server -d that starts a development Rails as a daemon. The annoying thing is that the scheduler as seen above is started in the main process that then gets forked and daemonized. The rufus-scheduler thread (and any other thread) gets lost, no scheduling happens.

Log to stdout. Shut down on TERM/INT. Reload config on HUP. Provide the necessary config file for your favorite init system to control your daemon.

For years developers have followed the same arcane dozen steps to create a long-lived daemon process on Unix-based systems. These steps were state of the art in 2000 but they are no longer best practice today.