Workers and cron jobs

Run more processes from the same app: workers that run all the time, such as a queue consumer or a bot, and cron jobs that run on a schedule, such as a nightly report.

They use the app's current build and its variables (including DATABASE_URL), each instance in its own microVM, and their output appears in the app's logs, labelled with the process name. A new deploy updates them too.

Add one

In the dashboard, open the app's Workers & cron tab, or use the CLI:

$ deplane processes add emails --command "node emails.js"
$ deplane processes add nightly --command "node report.js" --schedule "0 3 * * *"

The command runs through the image's shell (/bin/sh -c).

Schedules

Five fields in UTC: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week (0 to 6, 0 is Sunday). For example */15 * * * * (every 15 minutes), 0 3 * * * (every day at 03:00), 30 9 * * 1-5 (weekdays at 09:30), or @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly.

A cron job runs one instance at a time (a run that is still going when the next is due is skipped), for at most an hour, and a failed run is not retried.

Limits

Up to 10 workers and cron jobs per app. Workers count against your plan's instances and memory; a cron job counts as one instance of its size. Set a worker to 0 instances to pause it.

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