Schedule Jobs

There are many situations in which you want to schedule some code to run at a specific recurring interval. In Velo, you can create jobs and schedule them to run on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis using the Job Scheduler.

Some common uses of the Job Scheduler are to:

Import or export data once a day.
Delete collection data that is no longer relevant once a week.
Send a status report to relevant parties once a month.

Scheduled Jobs run with Admin permissions.

Creating a Scheduled Job

To configure scheduled jobs, start by creating file in the backend root named jobs.config. The file must contain a JSON object that defines the jobs you want to schedule. You can configure up to twenty jobs.

A job's configuration defines when the job runs and what code it runs. A job can run any backend function defined in your site. Each job is represented by an object in the jobs array.

// In backend/jobs.config

{
    "jobs": [
        {
            "functionLocation": "/someBackendFile.js", 
            "functionName": "someBackendFunction",
            "description": "Some job description",
            "executionConfig": {
                "dayOfWeek": "Monday",
                "time": "08:00"
            }
        }
    ]
}

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Each job definition contains the following information:

functionLocation: Path to the backend file in which the job function resides.
functionName: Name of the function to run at the scheduled time.
description: Optional job description.
executionConfig: Configuration that defines when the job runs.

There are two mutually exclusive ways to define when the job runs:

Using the time property and optional dayOfWeek or dateInMonth properties.
Using a CRON expression.

A few more things to keep in mind when scheduling jobs are:

All times in job configurations are UTC time.
If you want to schedule a job to occur more than once a day, you need to use a cron expression.
The shortest interval you can define for a job is one hour. Jobs scheduled more frequently are ignored.
You need to publish your site for any changes to your scheduled jobs to take effect.

Example

Now that you know the rules, let's take a look at some examples of scheduled jobs.

// In backend/jobs.config

{
    "jobs": [
        {
            "functionLocation": "/utils.js", 
            "functionName": "sendStatusReport",
            "description": "Send a morning status report",
            "executionConfig": {
                "cronExpression": "0 8 * * MON"
            }
        },  
        {
            "functionLocation": "/utils.js",
            "functionName": "cleanDb",
            "description": "Delete stale items from the DB",
            "executionConfig": {
                "time": "01:00",
                "dateOfMonth": 1
            }
        }
    ]
}

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Here you can see two scheduled jobs. The first job is scheduled using a cron expression and it sends a status report every Monday morning at 8:00 in the morning UTC time.

"executionConfig": {
    "cronExpression": "0 8 * * MON"
}

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The second job is scheduled using the time and dateOfMonth properties and it deletes stale items from the site's database at one in the morning UTC time on the first day of every month.

"executionConfig": {
    "time": "01:00",
    "dateOfMonth": 1
}

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Schedule Jobs

Creating a Scheduled Job

Example

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