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Recurring tasks (crontab)

You can schedule a job to run in the future using the run_at property; however if you want to have jobs automatically created on a schedule then this is for you.

Recurring schedule​

Graphile Worker supports triggering recurring tasks according to a cron-like schedule. This is designed for recurring tasks such as sending a weekly email, running database maintenance tasks every day, performing data roll-ups hourly, downloading external data every 20 minutes, etc.

Graphile Worker's crontab support:

  • guarantees (thanks to ACID-compliant transactions) that no duplicate task schedules will occur
  • can backfill missed jobs if desired (e.g. if the Worker wasn't running when the job was due to be scheduled)
  • schedules tasks using Graphile Worker's regular job queue, so you get all the regular features such as exponential back-off on failure.
  • works reliably even if you're running multiple workers (see “Distributed crontab” below)
note

It is not intended that you add recurring tasks for each of your individual application users, instead you should have relatively few recurring tasks, and those tasks can create additional jobs for the individual users (or process multiple users) if necessary.

Tasks are by default read from a crontab file next to the tasks/ folder (but this is configurable in library mode). Please note that our syntax is not 100% compatible with cron's, and our task payload differs. We only handle timestamps in UTC.

crontab format​

The following diagram details the parts of a Graphile Worker crontab schedule:

# ┌───────────── UTC minute (0 - 59)
# │ ┌───────────── UTC hour (0 - 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── UTC day of the month (1 - 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── UTC month (1 - 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── UTC day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday)
# │ │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── task (identifier) to schedule
# │ │ │ │ │ │    ┌────────── optional scheduling options
# │ │ │ │ │ │    │     ┌────── optional payload to merge
# │ │ │ │ │ │    │     │
# │ │ │ │ │ │    │     │
# * * * * * task ?opts {payload}

Comment lines start with a #.

For the first 5 fields we support an explicit numeric value, * to represent all valid values, */n (where n is a positive integer) to represent all valid values divisible by n, range syntax such as 1-5, and any combination of these separated by commas.

The task identifier should match the following regexp /^[_a-zA-Z][_a-zA-Z0-9:_-]*$/ (namely it should start with an alphabetic character and it should only contain alphanumeric characters, colon, underscore and hyphen). It should be the name of one of your Graphile Worker tasks.

Crontab opts​

The opts must always be prefixed with a ? if provided and details configuration for the task such as what should be done in the event that the previous event was not scheduled (e.g. because the Worker wasn't running). Options are specified using HTTP query string syntax (with & separator).

Currently we support the following opts:

  • id=UID where UID is a unique alphanumeric case-sensitive identifier starting with a letter — specify an identifier for this crontab entry; by default this will use the task identifier, but if you want more than one schedule for the same task (e.g. with different payload, or different times) then you will need to supply a unique identifier explicitly.
  • fill=t where t is a “time phrase” (see below) — backfill any entries from the last time period t, for example if the worker was not running when they were due to be executed (by default, no backfilling).
  • max=n where n is a small positive integer — override the max_attempts of the job.
  • queue=name where name is an alphanumeric queue name — add the job to a named queue so it executes serially.
  • jobKey=key where key is any valid job key — replace/update the existing job with this key, if present.
  • jobKeyMode=replace|preserve_run_at — if jobKey is specified, affects what it does.
  • priority=n where n is a relatively small integer — override the priority of the job.
danger

Changing the identifier (e.g. via id) can result in duplicate executions, so we recommend that you explicitly set it and never change it.

note

Using fill will not backfill new tasks, only tasks that were previously known.

caution

The higher you set the fill parameter, the longer the worker startup time will be; when used you should set it to be slightly larger than the longest period of downtime you expect for your worker.

Time phrase​

Time phrases are comprised of a sequence of number-letter combinations, where the number represents a quantity and the letter represents a time period, e.g. 5d for five days, or 3h for three hours; e.g. 4w3d2h1m represents 4 weeks, 3 days, 2 hours and 1 minute (i.e. a period of 44761 minutes). The following time periods are supported:

  • s - one second (1000 milliseconds)
  • m - one minute (60 seconds)
  • h - one hour (60 minutes)
  • d - one day (24 hours)
  • w - one week (7 days)

payload​

The payload is a JSON5 object; it must start with a {, must not contain newlines or carriage returns (\n or \r), and must not contain trailing whitespace. It will be merged into the default crontab payload properties.

Each crontab job will have a JSON object payload containing the key _cron with the value being an object with the following entries:

  • ts - ISO8601 timestamp representing when this job was due to execute
  • backfilled - true if the task was "backfilled" (i.e. it wasn't scheduled on time), false otherwise

Distributed crontab​

TL;DR: when running identical crontabs on multiple workers no special action is necessary — it Just Works ™️

When you run multiple workers with the same crontab files then the first worker that attempts to queue a particular cron job will succeed and the other workers will take no action — this is thanks to SQL ACID-compliant transactions and our known_crontabs lock table.

If your workers have different crontabs then you must be careful to ensure that the cron items each have unique identifiers; the easiest way to do this is to specify the identifiers yourself (see the id= option above). Should you forget to do this then for any overlapping timestamps for items that have the same derived identifier one of the cron tasks will schedule but the others will not.

Examples​

The following schedules the send_weekly_email task at 4:30am (UTC) every Monday:

30 4 * * 1 send_weekly_email

The following does similar, but also will backfill any tasks over the last two days (2d), sets max attempts to 10 and merges in {"onboarding": false} into the task payload:

30 4 * * 1 send_weekly_email ?fill=2d&max=10 {onboarding:false}

The following triggers the rollup task every 4 hours on the hour:

0 */4 * * * rollup

Limiting backfill​

When you ask Graphile Worker to backfill jobs, it will do so for all jobs matching that specification that should have been scheduled over the backfill period. Other than the period itself, you cannot place limits on the backfilling (for example, you cannot say “backfill at most one job” or “only backfill if the next job isn't due within the next 3 hours”); this is because we've determined that there's many situations (back-off, overloaded worker, serially executed jobs, etc.) in which the result of this behaviour might result in outcomes that the user did not expect.

If you need these kinds of constraints on backfilled jobs, you should implement them at runtime (rather than at scheduling time) in the task executor itself, which could use the payload._cron.ts property to determine whether execution should continue or not.

Specifying cron items in library mode​

You've three options for specifying cron tasks in library mode:

  1. crontab: a crontab string (like the contents of a crontab file)
  2. crontabFile: the (string) path to a crontab file, from which to read the rules
  3. parsedCronItems: explicit parsed cron items (see below)

parsedCronItems​

The Graphile Worker internal format for cron items lists all the matching minutes/hours/etc uniquely and in numerically ascending order. It also has other requirements and is to be treated as an opaque type, so you must not construct this value manually.

Instead, you may specify the parsedCronItems using one of the helper functions:

  1. parseCrontab: pass a crontab string and it will be converted into a list of ParsedCronItems
  2. parseCronItems: pass a list of CronItems and it will be converted into a list of ParsedCronItems

The CronItem type is designed to be written by humans (and their scripts) and has the following properties:

  • task (required): the string identifier of the task that should be executed (same as the first argument to add_job)
  • pattern (required): a cron pattern (e.g. * * * * *) describing when to run this task
  • options: optional options influencing backfilling, etc
    • backfillPeriod: how long (in milliseconds) to backfill (see above)
    • maxAttempts: the maximum number of attempts we'll give the job
    • queueName: if you want the job to run serially, you can add it to a named queue
    • priority: optionally override the priority of the job
  • payload: an optional payload object to merge into the generated payload for the job
  • identifier: an optional string to give this cron item a permanent identifier; if not given we will use the task. This is particularly useful if you want to schedule the same task multiple times, perhaps on different time patterns or with different payloads or other options (since every cron item must have a unique identifier).
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