Background - A simple cron app showing Cloud Foundry's standalone or background apps feature

This app runs in the background and simply prints timestamp every minute. This app uses cron and time modules to schedule jobs and print timestamps. To run this on Cloud Foundry, you must use standalone feature/framework (see down below).

//package.json
{
    "name":"background",
    "description":"A simple cron app showing Cloud Foundry's standalone or background apps feature",
    "version":"0.0.1",
    "private":true,
    "scripts":{
        "start":"node app.js"
    },
    "dependencies":{
        "cron": "*",
        "time": "*"
    }
}

//app.js
var cronJob = require('cron').CronJob;
new cronJob('* * * * *', function(){
    console.log('Time now: ' + new Date());
}, null, true, 'America/Los_Angeles');

##Running Standalone / background apps ## Running an app as a standalone / background app is very similar to running regular apps with the following exceptions.

1. The framework should be standalone. Sometimes vmc auto-recognizes the app as node or ruby or java etc. In that case, select other option and then select standalone option.

2. You need to specify how to start the app (Startup command> node app.js)

3. Select none to URL question if your app doesn't run as a web-app like below.

1: background.cloudfoundry.com
2: none
URL> 2  <---  Choose 'none' as we don't have a web-UI

##Running it on Cloud Foundry ##

[~/success/git/background]
> vmc push background  <--- Upload app w/ 'background'-app name
Instances> 4   <--- Push app to run on 4 instances

1: node
2: other
Framework> 2   <--- Choose 'other' framework

1: node
2: lift
3: standalone
4: rack
5: sinatra
6: spring
7: play
8: java_web
9: grails
10: rails3
Framework> 3   <---- Choose 'standalone' framework (for background processing)

Startup command> node app.js  <--- Specify how to start the app

1: node
2: node06
3: node08
4: other
Runtime> 3  <--- Use Node.js 0.8v (current latest)

1: 64M
2: 128M
3: 256M
Memory Limit> 64M

Creating background... OK

1: background.cloudfoundry.com
2: none
URL> 2  <---  Choose 'none' as we don't have a web-UI


Create services for application?> n

Bind other services to application?> n

Save configuration?> n

Uploading background... OK
Starting background... OK
Checking background... OK

####Result:#### If you look into the logs vmc logs <appname> --all, you'll see timestamp being printed every minute by workers running on each app instance.

General Notes

• If you don't have Node.js, download it from here
• If you don't have a Cloud Foundry account, sign up for it here
• Check out Cloud Foundry getting started here & install vmc Ruby command line tool to push apps.
• To install latest alpha or beta vmc tool run: sudo gem install vmc ---pre