Run Scheduled Tasks

Running scheduled tasks on Scalingo should be done by yourself. We don’t implement cron or cron-like features in our container system. Most languages have alternatives. We list some of them below:

Ruby

In Ruby you can use clockwork, resque-scheduler or sidekiq-scheduler (Sidekiq Enterprise has cron-like feature built-in) for example.

With clockwork, you would end up with a Procfile similar to this one:

web: bundle exec puma -t 1:3 -p $PORT
clock: bundle exec clockwork clock.rb

Once your application has been deployed, scale your ‘clock’ to 1 to start the task scheduler:

scalingo --app my-app scale clock:1

PHP

With PHP, you can use the package cron/cron, otherwise each framework has its own task scheduler. You may want to use:

Example

A complete example project can be found at the following address: https://github.com/Scalingo/sample-php-cron

It uses the package cron/cron to implement the tasks scheduler. Its initialization is done in the file cron.php and a new kind of container is defined in the Procfile of the project, the container type clock:

clock: php cron.php

The file which implements the cron-like process is defined in cron.php:

<?php
  require(__DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php');

  echo "[CRON] Starting tasks scheduler\n";

  function build_cron() {
    // Increment redis key every minute
    $inc_job = new \Cron\Job\ShellJob();
    $inc_job->setCommand('php inc.php');
    $inc_job->setSchedule(new \Cron\Schedule\CrontabSchedule('*/2 * * * *'));

    $resolver = new \Cron\Resolver\ArrayResolver();
    $resolver->addJob($inc_job);

    $cron = new \Cron\Cron();
    $cron->setExecutor(new \Cron\Executor\Executor());
    $cron->setResolver($resolver);
    return $cron;
  }

  $cron = build_cron();
  
  // Every 60 seconds, run the scheduler which will execute the tasks
  // which have to be started at the given minute.
  while(true) {
    echo "[CRON] Running tasks\n";
    $report = $cron->run();
    while ($cron->isRunning()) { }

    echo "[CRON] " . count($report->getReports()) . " tasks have been executed\n";
    foreach($report->getReports() as $job_report) {
      $output = $job_report->getOutput();
      foreach($output as $line) {
        echo "[CRON] " . $line;
      }
    }
    sleep(60);
  }
?>

Node.js

In Node.js you can use different package such as node-cron or node-schedule.

Example

The following example uses the node-cron package.

Its initialization is done in the file cron.js and a new kind of container must be defined in the Procfile of the project, the container type clock:

clock: node cron.js

The file which implements the cron-like process is defined in cron.js:

var cron = require('cron');

var job1 = new cron.CronJob({
	cronTime: '*/2 * * * *',
	onTick: function() {
		now = new Date();
		console.log(now + ': job 1 ticked');
	},
	start: true,
	timeZone: 'Europe/Paris'
});

var job2 = new cron.CronJob({
	cronTime: '* * * * *',
	onTick: function() {
		now = new Date();
		console.log(now + ': job 2 ticked');
	},
	start: true,
	timeZone: 'Europe/Paris'
});

console.log('Started 2 cron jobs')

With this example, the job1 ticks every 2 minutes and the job2 ticks every minute. Each job display a message in the log of the application.

The code is available in sample-node-express.

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