Cron Jobs

Scheduled functions that run on a cron expression. The platform evaluates schedules every 10 seconds and dispatches executions via the job queue.

Quick Example

import { cron } from "@usepingback/next";

export const dailyReport = cron("daily-report", "0 9 * * *", async (ctx) => {
  ctx.log("Generating daily report");
  const report = await generateReport();
  await emailClient.send({ to: "team@example.com", report });
}, { timeout: "5m" });

Registration

Each SDK provides a way to register cron jobs — see the SDK-specific docs for syntax. All SDKs accept the same parameters:

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
`name`	string	Yes	Unique identifier for this cron job.
`schedule`	string	Yes	Standard 5-field cron expression.
`handler`	function	Yes	Function to execute on each run.
`options`	object	No	Configuration (see below).

Options

Option	Type	Default	Description
`retries`	0–10	0	Retry attempts with exponential backoff (2^attempt seconds, capped at 60s).
`timeout`	string	"30s"	Max execution time. Formats: "30s", "5m", "1h".
`concurrency`	1–10	1	Max concurrent executions. If a run is still active when the next is due, it's skipped.

Schedule Expressions

Standard 5-field cron expressions (minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week):

Expression	Description
`* * * * *`	Every minute
`/15 * * *`	Every 15 minutes
`0 * * * *`	Every hour
`0 3 * * *`	Daily at 3:00 AM UTC
`0 /6 * *`	Every 6 hours
`0 9 * * 1`	Every Monday at 9:00 AM
`0 0 1 * *`	First day of every month

All times are UTC.

Execution Lifecycle

The scheduler checks for due cron jobs every 10 seconds.
A pending execution is created with scheduledAt set to the cron's next run time.
The execution is dispatched to the job queue.
The platform sends an HMAC-signed HTTP POST to your endpoint.
Your handler runs and returns a result.
On failure, the execution is retried with exponential backoff (if retries > 0).
nextRunAt is updated based on the cron expression.