Meteor Synced Cron

A simple cron system for Meteor. It supports syncronizing jobs between multiple processes.

Installation

$ meteor add percolatestudio:synced-cron

API

Basics

To write a cron job, give it a unique name, a schedule an a function to run like below. SyncedCron uses the fantastic later.js library behind the scenes. A Later.js parse object is passed into the schedule call that gives you a huge amount of flexibility for scheduling your jobs, see the documentation.

SyncedCron.add({
  name: 'Crunch some important numbers for the marketing department',
  schedule: function(parser) {
    // parser is a later.parse object
    return parser.text('every 2 hours');
  }, 
  job: function() {
    var numbersCrunched = CrushSomeNumbers();
    return numbersCrunched;
  }
});

To start processing your jobs, somewhere in your project add:

Meteor.startup(function() {
  SyncedCron.start();
});

Advanced

SyncedCron uses a collection called cronHistory to syncronize between processes. This also serves as a useful log of when jobs ran along with their output or error. A sample item looks like:

{ _id: 'wdYLPBZp5zzbwdfYj',
  intendedAt: Sun Apr 13 2014 17:34:00 GMT-0700 (MST),
  finishedAt: Sun Apr 13 2014 17:34:01 GMT-0700 (MST),
  name: 'Crunch some important numbers for the marketing department',
  startedAt: Sun Apr 13 2014 17:34:00 GMT-0700 (MST),
  result: '1982 numbers crunched'
}

If you want old entries in the log cleaned out, simply set the purgeLogsAfterDays parameter on an entry to specify the number of days of logs to keep.

Call SyncedCron.nextScheduledAtDate(jobName) to find the date that the job referenced by jobName will run next.

Configuration

SyncedCron.options: {
  log: true, // log debug info to the console
  collectionName: 'cronHistory' // default name of the collection used to store job history,
  utc: false // use UTC for evaluating schedules (default: local time)
}

Contributing

Write some code. Write some tests. To run the tests, do:

$ mrt test-packages synced-cron

License

MIT. (c) Percolate Studio

Synced Cron was developed as part of the Verso project.