Cron Jobs

Cron jobs allow you to schedule tasks at specific intervals. Since the Vercel platform is event-driven, therefore not maintaining a running server, we recommend using a third-party service to schedule these tasks.

For example, let's say you want to hit a Serverless Function every 15 minutes. You can use any of the providers below to periodically hit your endpoint. If you need to execute a long job (greater than 30 seconds), you might consider breaking down the function into smaller pieces and using a queue (e.g. AWS SQS). This will allow you to track the state of the background job and potentially parallelize your task.

For example, with GitHub Actions you can define a new workflow .github/workflows/cron.yaml to run a cron every 15 minutes.

name: 15-minute-cron
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/15 * * * *'
jobs:
  cron:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Call our API route
        run: |
          curl --request POST \
          --url 'https://yoursite.com/api/cron' \
          --header 'Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.YOUR_API_KEY }}'

An example GitHub Actions workflow for a cron job.

Providers

• GitHub Actions
• EasyCron
• Quirrel
• Google Cloud Scheduler
• Amazon ECS
• Pipedream

Related

For more information on what to do next, we recommend the following articles: