Schedule Cron Jobs in Node.js

I am familiar with cron jobs from working with Unix, the other day I was presented to away to schedule cron-jobs via a Node-server.

The implementation is based on node-cron. It even uses the same syntax as the Unix cron jobs.

First you install the package:

npm install node-cron@3.0.0

Then you can create a script like this:

const cron = require('node-cron');

// Schedule tasks to be run on the server.
cron.schedule('* * * * *', function() {
  console.log('running a task every minute');
});

Run the script and you will see the output every minute.

node cron-ping.js

This is pretty awesome for pretty basic stuff, I can feel that the approach requires some getting used to since I am used to the old school Unix approach and would prefer to have this separated from the Node.js application - but I can also see the benefits of having it all in one place.

For more tips on cron jobs, see my scheduling with cron TIL.

Resources and References

• DigitalOcean tutorial: “How To Use node-cron to Run Scheduled Jobs in Node.js”
• NPM: node-cron