Cron-Job

Cron Jobs allow you to automate specific commands or scripts on your server to complete repetitive tasks automatically. This can be a very resourceful tool as a Cron Job can be set to run by specific minute or hourly increments, a day of the week or month, or any combination of these.

We also introduced a simple cron job for our project that send request to next.js API and do simple job inside there.

Creating new API endpoint

In pages/api folder create your API endpoint like this.

pages/api/task/example.ts

import type { NextApiRequest, NextApiResponse } from "next";

export default async function handler(
  req: NextApiRequest,
  res: NextApiResponse
) {
  try {
    res.status(200).json({ success: "true" });
  } catch (err) {
    res.status(500).end();
  }
}

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows. So we use github action to run the scheduled cron job automatically. Let's define github action in root folder ./github/workflows/cron.yml like below:

.github/workflows/cron.yml

name: Hourly cron job
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "*/60 * * * *"
jobs:
  cron:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Hourly cron job
        run: |
          curl --request POST \
          --url 'https://demo.staging.cella.cloud/api/task/example' \
          --header 'secret_key: ${{ secrets.SECRET_KEY }}'

Then, once you deploy the application, it will be executed automatically and will execute the cron job every 1 hour and it will send request to the API link what we made above.