Cron jobs in Node.js

Cron Jobs in node.js is used for scheduling scripts to run, They’re most commonly used for automating doing a task like scraping data from another website, deleting some data from the database, etc. However, there are many situations when a web application may need specific tasks to run periodically.

In this article, the points to cover are:

• Best module for creating a cron job in Node.js
• Review cron job patterns
• Essential points a Node.js project with cron job

Best modules for creating a cron job in Node.js

There are three popular modules that are sorted based on GitHub starts

• node-schedule
• cron
• node-cron

But the number of downloads cron is more than other modules currently.

All three modules do a similar thing, but it’s preferred to use the cron module because there are more examples available in this repository examples

Review cron job patterns

There are multiple tutorials for cron job patterns

Note that the cron job modules have 6 values but the crontab website has 5 values because the first start (second) is optional

The cron format consists of:
```
*    *    *    *    *    *
┬    ┬    ┬    ┬    ┬    ┬
│    │    │    │    │    │
│    │    │    │    │    └ day of week (0 - 7) (0 or 7 is Sun)
│    │    │    │    └───── month (1 - 12)
│    │    │    └────────── day of month (1 - 31)
│    │    └─────────────── hour (0 - 23)
│    └──────────────────── minute (0 - 59)
└───────────────────────── second (0 - 59, OPTIONAL)

1- At 04:05

2- At every 10th minute.

3- Every odd minute

4- At every minute from 10 through 20 on Sunday and Monday.

Essential points a Node.js project with cron job

You know that Node.js is a single thread so using clustering in production, and running Node.js projects on multiple CPUs, to do this you can PM2.

If you use Cron job in Nest.js Framework or Express.js and use clustering so the cron job starts on multiple CPUs. Let’s review an example that shows you the problem.

Cronjob In Cluster Mode

>>> Problem

npm install cron

Run the project based on cluster mode with PM2, the cluster mode allows networked Node.js applications (HTTP(s)/TCP/UDP server) to be scaled across all CPUs available

• Start cron job example

pm2 start index.js -i max

• Show logs in pm2

pm2 logs

As you can see after 20 seconds the cron job has executed the desired function 8 times instead of 2 times, because the project clusters on 4 CPUs

>>> Solution

For solving this problem you should use NODE_APP_INSTANCE environment variable to run a cronjob only on one process,

The result

As you see, cronjob is running just on one process.

If you want to run in different environments with cluster mode and none cluster mode, with the NODE_ENV variable, handle this problem

NODE_ENV=local node index

With these conditions, the cron job runs in the local environment and runs in the prod environment with cluster mode.

Cronjob In Different Timezone

When you start a cron job on the server, It runs based on the time server and timezone of the server. the best approach is using the timezone ‘Etc/UTC’ instead of the local timezone server.

>>> Problem

Imagine there is a website and this website publishes new data every day at 8:00 AM o’clock. Your script is running on the server, the problem is that some timezone clocks change (daylight saving time) so when the time of the server changes, The execution time of your script is also affected

>>> Solution

Check the local time from the UTC time

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Content Source:

1. medium.com