Automated running of apps / api access to deployed apps

[tcoopman]

I guess this might be out of scope for livebook, so I'm starting this as a discussion instead of an issue.

I've got the idea to build a report builder based on this great video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSjryA1iFng). But now that I have it, I would love it if I could have it run automatically every X amount of time.

There are 2 things that would be awesome:

1. be able to run an app every X minutes/hours (cron like) and be able to specify the inputs.
2. (this could facilitate 1) make a deployed app available via an api. If you could call your app with an api where you provide inputs, it wouldn't be hard to build 1 myself.

I find it a bit strange that there are no other discussions on this topic (as far as I found) yet, because this seems like a super useful thing to have.

I know how to build and deploy all of this without livebook, but building the app with livebook and deploying it was less than 1 hour of work and less than 50 lines of code. Building and deploying this without livebook would have taken a lot more time.

[jannikbecher]

Have you already tried something like this?

Kino.listen(5000, fn _ ->
  ReportBuilder.build_report(opts)
end)

[tcoopman]

Didn't think about that yet.

Thanks, will experiment with this to see if it gets what I want.

[josevalim]

We want to allow both features, although I am certain that scheduled running will most likely be part of Livebook Teams, because you need persistent storage if you want reports to uniquely run across days without duplicates and so forth.

APIs would be a regular Livebook addition, probably for multi-session apps. We just need to figure out a way to populate inputs from the API request. Maybe we have some Kino.App.params() that are passed to the notebook on boot.